Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 202 posts

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

#171

Post by RNCTX »

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.

A friend of mine in Little Rock connected the dots on how police were ignoring burglary reports en masse to rig the stats in favor of businesses and realtors with a vested interest in lower perception of crime than there really was.

The radios were encrypted to stop him from doing so within the next calendar quarter. He was plotting dispatch calls versus FOIA reports of burglaries to find the variances.

I’d expect this to be a growing trend. Local political corruption is ubiquitous in USA, that’s why they accuse every other country of it.

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

#172

Post by addHocker »

dillondoyle wrote: post #157
simcop2387 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Denver's is gone too. i've wondered if the solution might just be a 'lost' scanner - but I don't know the technical details. Are keys rotated? Are the 'hard wired' into devices?

Could the content be derived from meta. Lenght of conversation, time of conversation?

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

#173

Post by imroot »

dspoka wrote: post #149
lunixbochs wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hard problem. I'm prototyping this here [1]. Any user can tweak or vote on transcriptions, so my goal is to use the user annotations to help train models and make it better. [1] https://feeds.talonvoice.com Repo is here if you need to report (or fix) bugs in the webapp: https://github.com/lunixbochs/feeds If you want to help with development, reach out and I can onboard + give some test data.

Great to see you working on this! I was wondering if you could estimate what it would cost to have always on recording of all these radio conversations, cost of running this speech2text ML and cost of labeling this data. I think having these rough estimates will make donations easier for people.

I've got a year+ of the Ohio MARCS-IP site in Hamilton County Ohio recorded. Let me know if you need some data -- I'd be more than happy to get you the dump.

(trunk-recorder + rdio scanner).

The UI is:

https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz for the live stuff, but, let me know if you're interested in the data -- my email is in my profile

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

#174

Post by bryanrasmussen »

shadowgovt wrote: post #81
kebman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

there are channels of police and other agencies that can be encrypted, generally of course for the police to be encrypted the local municipality needs to decide to do that and pay the bills, hence it doesn't happen - which is a good thing.

I'm thinking a traffic analysis app https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis might be useful for when encryption becomes more widespread.

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

#175

Post by sneak »

AlexandrB wrote: post #5
Simulacra wrote: post #3

Most of our local departments use encrypted radios. "Over the past few years, an increasing number of municipalities and police departments, including the District’s, have begun encrypting their radioed communications.."[1.] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/last-of-t...

I don't think this is a positive development. It's already too easy to blackhole information that could be used to hold police accountable (body cams, arrest reports, etc.). This removes yet another avenue for citizens/journalists.

The people who set the laws around radio communication regulation, those who implement that regulation, as well as the people who set police policy and budgets, prefer it that way, as they are part of the ownership class that the police actually do protect (and not the ones they murder or oppress indiscriminately).

To them, the general public having visibility into the things done by the police or the military in their name is a bad thing, and the public’s money should be spent on systems to conceal those activities from public view. Transparency is something to be avoided, in the view of secrecy-heavy, military-inspired DHS (which is the driver, both policy and funding, behind much of the local domestic COMSEC upgrades).

If you want it to change, you need to bark up a different tree.

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

#176

Post by sneak »

cwkoss wrote: post #170
Simulacra wrote: post #3

Most of our local departments use encrypted radios. "Over the past few years, an increasing number of municipalities and police departments, including the District’s, have begun encrypting their radioed communications.."[1.] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/last-of-t...

Does anyone have information about how frequently keys are rotated or exchanged? Seems like keeping 100 radios on the same channel could be hard to do without the potential for human error to leak some data - cops aren't typically very tech savvy.

The radios are re-keyed periodically over the air, or at least they can be. Not sure how often it happens in practice.

There’s also a capability, mandated by the federal interoperability standards (compliance with which federal free money to upgrade local PD radios hinges upon) to zeroize (erase/disable) encryption keys in a radio remotely, for example if one is lost or stolen, to prevent rogue network access.

Misuse of the rekeying admin keys to remotely disable police radios in bulk is a very interesting DoS, and one that should be noted well by (usually civilian outsourced) police radio maintenance admins presently reading this comment if cops or other users of these encrypted radio systems start being deployed to mass murder civilians.

As I understand it, the same interoperability protocols also can interrogate the radios for their locations if GPS equipped. (I have not personally read the spec docs yet.) I’d love to see the mashup made of that data, or an oversight organization using it to track criminal cops and parallel construction efforts.

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

#177

Post by MertsA »

callalex wrote: post #91
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.

>Be careful about publicly disclosing this information. Why, what do I have to fear about that in the United States?

The creator of CryptoCat was targeted by the FBI. Not because he was suspected of committing a crime, just because they didn't like him creating open source encryption software. They actually had Hector Monsegur (Sabu) try to entrap him multiple times to try and come up with some trumped up reason to convict him.

https://nadimkobeissi.tumblr.com/page/29

Moxie Marlinspike can't even fly domestically without jumping through hoops and travelling internationally means they try to seize his electronics and demand the passwords.

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

#178

Post by jlgaddis »

dvno42 wrote: post #145

Look into the p25 standard. I wouldn't know but I wouldn't be surprised it many agencies use it for digital/analog data and can probably be brute forced with cheap hardware. Search for p25 DES-OFB. Now would be a great time for a rainbow table.

The same radios often/usually support AES as well, although at an additional cost. That's what one nearby PD uses.

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

#179

Post by syshum »

belorn wrote: post #148
syshum wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more Encrypted than you think, though most Responsible Dept will leave the general dispatch channel open and only encrypt tactical talk groups My City Encrypts 100% communications including EMS, Fire, Police and Emergency repose, it is a stupid policy but... https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Encrypted_Agencies

I understand the desire to be able to listen in/oversight during riots and conflicts between demonstrators and police. It make less sense in cases where someone is a victim of a crime or a patient being transported as such individuals are protected from the public prying eye. When recording devices and storage is so cheap as it is now it should be assumed that any communication traveling in clear is captured and stor…

>>It make less sense in cases where someone is a victim of a crime or a patient being transported as such individuals are protected from the public prying eye

Few things there, first "victim of a crime", most area's criminal reports are public records as they should be. Allowing the police to operate in secret is a very bad thing

Further outside of location information is a rare that other personal info is transmitted over the air anyway, general descriptions etc sure but...

Finally I think the public value, and transparency we get from having open air dispatch far far far far outweighs the limited privacy concerns. People say the same things when police are mandated to wear body cams, just like in those situations the public right to know what the police are actually doing far outweighs some minor privacy concerns.

We need FULL transparency in policing right now.

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

#180

Post by HenryBemis »

RNCTX wrote: post #171
simcop2387 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A friend of mine in Little Rock connected the dots on how police were ignoring burglary reports en masse to rig the stats in favor of businesses and realtors with a vested interest in lower perception of crime than there really was. The radios were encrypted to stop him from doing so within the next calendar quarter. He was plotting dispatch calls versus FOIA reports of burglaries to find the variances. I’d expect th…

I do not live in the USA, and I do not want to politicize my question. I am clearly asking out of curiousity:

Would that be something related with the way that voting areas (whatever they are called in the USA)/Gerrymandering is causing?

Area-X on the map (that doesn't have any straight/simple lines in its perimeter!!!) has data hidden, while Area-Z seems to have "all the problems"?

Apart from real-estate fraud, I am trying to imagine what other areas of life may this impact.

(again I am NOT using -alphabetically- Dem-Rem notation)

Post reply on HN