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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...
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.
I remember, years ago, that they'd use their Mobile Data Terminals for anything "sensitive", again to get around scanner listeners. Apparently they didn't know about MTDMon software. Which was even cooler than listening on a scanner, because you could set it to beep the PC speaker if your keywords appeared in the feed. I assume all that is encrypted now, but it sure wasn't at the time!
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> or the night they chased a light all over hell and back Please elaborate.
Well, this is a couple decades ago - so the play-by-play is a bit lost, one cop at a locally infamous speed trap after dark started seeing a light in the woods near the road. He reported it over the radio, and speculated it might be someone spotlighting deer. Hunting deer at night is very, very illegal as the deer freeze when the light is shined at them. He didn't hear shots, but was understandably reluctant to pursu…
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...
Oh nice!! I was listening to your platform for NYC Citywide-1 for a couple of hours last night after someone in YT chat of Louis Rossmann's security cam feed (retail store that fixes Macs in Manhattan) dropped some Broadcastify stream links. https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 CW-1 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31439 Manhattan
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Interesting product/service! I've been familiar with it in the past but really used it a lot over this last week - thank you for offering a free n accessible tool. When, Why and how did you get into it? Does it generate meaningful/worthwhile revenue or is to more to cover overhead? (I only noticed the occasional 30 second commercial intro) Maybe you have a lot of premium subs? Why sometimes do certain cities/counties…
My Grandmother had a police scanner that she used to listen to drama going on in her small town in Virginia. Old ladies with police scanners is still quite common. It sparked an interest and my parents got me one as a Christmas present. I spent many years in the IBM ecosystem as an technical SE, but developed an online database (RadioReference.com) in the late 90's that consolidated frequency information for all the…
What organization do you mean by "Citizen"? Not aware of any major nonprofits that go by just this one word.
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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 think once my models are viable enough to do this at scale, the cost will be basically the cost of running a dedicated server per N streams. So $100-300/mo per N streams? Where N could roughly be at least 100 concurrent streams per server. I will know this better in "stage 2" where I'm attempting to scale this up. It's also a fairly distributed problem so I can look into doing it folding@home style, or even have the stream's originator running transcription in some cases to keep costs down.
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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.
Do police really still use unencrypted radios?
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...
Here in San Antonio, there were over 1000 tuned in a few nights ago. Some local news channel management asked reporters on the ground to leave the scene quite early in the night, so this service was really invaluable in helping me understand what was going on in real time. The difference between live local news and reality on the ground was drastic at times.
How did you get into this business?
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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.