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Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

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Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#101

Post by turrican »

primogen wrote: post #68
blantonl wrote: post #2

Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...

Thank you for you this! For the last couple of years, I play Broadcastify combined with one of those downbeat live channels in YouTube while I code. This after I tired of http://youarelistening.to/

You may already be aware of this, but SomaFM has an ad-free version of this idea streamed 24/7. I enjoy it.

https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/sf1033

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#102

Post by thephyber »

simcop2387 wrote: post #82
shadowgovt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the United States, no. Police, emergency, first responder radio transmissions are generally in the clear. I don't know the precise history of it, but I have always assumed it is a combination of legacy (emergency radio in the United States is very old, and predates cheap and convenient electronic encryption standards), compatibility (first responder funding and maintenance in the United States is generally a local…

This is starting to change, but it does take time since it usually requires replacing hundreds of radios at one time and a bunch of additional training on how to use the new radios properly.

Yeah, San Jose just scrambled theirs 6 weeks ago. One article from 2015 claims only 2 departments in California did this for the primary radio communications, so things are changing that way.

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#103

Post by vertex-four »

ISL wrote: post #87
LinuxBender wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can and do, but they and the other cell sites can't up and move around. All cell sites have multiple transceivers that are directional. Each site has a unique cell ID and each transceiver has a unique ID. Your phone has GPS. If you drive around, you can find out who doesn't belong. Be careful about publicly disclosing this information.

The disclosure of facts is protected by the First Amendment.

I dunno if you noticed, but the law doesn't always exactly mean much in terms of what actually happens.

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#105

Post by imjustsaying »

blantonl wrote: post #2

Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...

Your site helps me know what's happening when I'm in Chicago. Robert thanks you for your service and for checking those keys. o7

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#106

Post by jcims »

lunixbochs wrote: post #93
ciarannolan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought there were some open source speech-to-text models already [1]. Maybe there's something unique about how these low-quality radio transmissions sound that make these ineffective? [1] https://voice.mozilla.org/en

I work in the speech recognition space and train my own models already. The existing open-source models aren't very good at noisy radio speech. I will specialize one of my models to this task once I have some data from the site.

As you’re well aware but HN folks may not be, it’s not just that it’s noisy, it’s heavily coded, contextually bankrupt speech between multiple parties that spend all day in contact with each other. Dispatchers in particular seem to have superhuman ability to extract information from completely unintelligible garbage.

Are you doing any kind of speaker identification?

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#107

Post by gruez »

ISL wrote: post #87
LinuxBender wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can and do, but they and the other cell sites can't up and move around. All cell sites have multiple transceivers that are directional. Each site has a unique cell ID and each transceiver has a unique ID. Your phone has GPS. If you drive around, you can find out who doesn't belong. Be careful about publicly disclosing this information.

The disclosure of facts is protected by the First Amendment.

Does that work for DRM encryption keys? I think sony went after a few people who leaked either the blu-ray encryption keys, or the signing keys for one of their consoles.

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#108

Post by callalex »

empath75 wrote: post #7

I'm surprised they didn't mention that someone in Chicago seems to have stolen a police radio and has been trolling them for days.

Interesting, on any radio enthusiast forum there are countless warnings about how if you do something like this the feds will be knocking on your door almost immediately. I guess that’s just urban legend to discourage lazy bad guys?

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#109

Post by ISL »

kebman wrote: post #76
blantonl wrote: post #2

Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...

Isn't police radio usually scrambled? It is where I am in Norway. It was legal to listen to it before it was scrambled though. Not sure if it's legal to de-scramble it, if it's at all possible. AFAIK you can still listen to the ambulance channel, though, but sometimes the details are ... grisly.

It would seem reasonable to be able to FOIA the encryption keys in US locations where it is encrypted.

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#110

Post by dijksterhuis »

oasisbob wrote: post #39
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #8

Anecdotal, but an ex-friend cop told me YEARS ago that they never use their radios for "sensitive" communications anyway, they just call each other on their cell phones so that there are no records of their conversations.

Matt Blaze has a classic talk about crypto failures by LE using radios. In short, the feds still screw it up and accidentally operate in the clear. I've personally heard a Stingray being used for an arrest being broadcast on an open, analog channel. https://youtu.be/re9nG81Vft8 (Can't find the original.)

> Don't mess with the Postal Inspector.
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