Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkybn8/police-radio-scanner-apps-george-floyd-protests

by elorant • 6 years ago

399 192 6 years ago

blantonl14• 6 years ago

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...

kennxfl• 6 years ago

Is there a way of legitimately detecting Stingrays? I understand this is the kind of situation where they are actively deployed despite all the social awareness.

krageon• 6 years ago

You can look up where the towers are and perform triangulation on the ones that you are connected to given multiple antennae. It'll cost you some hardware and you'll probably be writing some software also.

Another option can be just seeding a few phones around the area and have them report moving (or transient) towers.

swebs2• 6 years ago

I guess if you were to build a map of static cell towers, it would be easy to see if a new one suddenly pops up.

millzlane• 6 years ago

I remember a few apps that you could watch the towers in your area and be alerted or warned when new ones popped up. But one app needed to be trained to remember the towers in your area.

Something like this maybe? https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.zamojski.soft.towercoll...

oasisbob7• 6 years ago

University of Washington researchers are working on this, their technique has used roaming car sharing vehicles and anomaly analysis:

https://seaglass.cs.washington.edu/

LinuxBender3• 6 years ago

Sweet talk a cellular network engineer into giving you the engineering firmware for your phone and a list of all the cell ID's.

bochoh2• 6 years ago

I was investigating starting a small personalized Scanner app with an AI twist but found that you're no longer granting licensees for mobile app developers - basically stopping all innovation in this area.

"The broadcastify audio feed catalog API is only available to approved licensees. We are currently not issuing addtional licenses to mobile device developers at this time. "

Can you explain the rational here?

blantonl14• 6 years ago

Yes, it's pretty simple. There has been a proliferation of apps that all do the same thing - front end our feeds, and so we're protecting the investment that our core partners have made to write apps.

We are extremely plugged in to AI efforts that are occuring around the use of our feeds, and so we have a pulse on what is going to work and not going to work in those area. You are more than welcome to use the feeds to develop AI models and present that back to us so that we could grant an exception, but the simple reality is that 99.9% of developers that want access to our feeds are simply trying to get yet another scanner app in the marketplace. It just dulites the environment, cheapens the brand, and presents a race to the bottom scenario in the app stores.

I'll readily admit that we don't "know it all" and there could be some serious innovation out there, but the app store market has left a serious bad taste in our mouth of nefarious actors who will go to the ends of the earth to make a buck vs innovate.

_curious_2• 6 years ago

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 change their feed? For example one night the Minneapolis police were on a completely different county that was hours away.

Majority of the time, these feeds are relatively low key right...with actual concerning/escalated incidents few and far between. Wondering: is there someway to us ML to identify specific things and provide push notifications to people in a given geography around that? For example it could listen for "shots fired" in a specific area and notify me via sms or whatnot when that occurs.

And AI could be used to show more of an abstract map view if and when "violence" is rising based on action on the scanner, right?

blantonl14• 6 years ago

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 municipalities around the world. When online streaming came to the Internet, I purchased a small business that was putting scanners online and launched it as Broadcastify.

The business is wildly successful. Revenue is a split between paying subscribers, license and royalty revenue, and advertising.

About 90% of the feeds are provided by volunteers who simply connect a radio to their computer and broadcast to us. The other 10% are actually provided by the agencies themselves. We probably turn over 20 feeds a day, so coverage comes and goes all the time. There is a lot of work going on in the ML / AI space around the content, but it is a hard problem to solve because the quality of the content diverges wildly. Vernacular differs. Coverage comes and goes. Organizations like Citizen, which have HUGE funding (60 MM lol!), are trying to solve this, but they still end up just employing armies of workers to sift through the data and audio and normalize it all.

We're doing a lot of innovation in the space on our end, including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and then store call data, which is going to be the next "revolution" in our space. Interesting times...

larrywright3• 6 years ago

Is there a way to report incorrect feeds? I was listening to our local scanner feed last night and growing increasingly alarmed at the amount of activity, until I realized that the scanner audio was actually for a larger city an hour away. I’ve listened before and it’s been correct, but last night it was definitely not.

blantonl14• 6 years ago

You can always open a support ticket with us. Feeds are provided by volunteers so we battle quality issues all the time. It's a tough problem to solve.

z9e• 6 years ago

I don't have any questions but I'd just like to say how much I love what you're doing, thank you.

When I was a kid I loved geeking out with my scanner I bought at radio shack, your site relights this flame for me and it's awesome to explore all of broadcasts going on in the world through your site.

blantonl14• 6 years ago

Thank you for the kind comments. I started out in the hobby the exact same way, my parents got me a scanner for Christmas and I was hooked ever since.

save_ferris• 6 years ago

Do you have a sense of how many precincts are encrypting their scanner comms these days?

blantonl14• 6 years ago

Every year new technology drives some agencies to remove their routine general dispatch operations from public access. Some agencies really like their communications to be publically available, and some don't.

If I had to back-of-the-napkin it, I would say that 10-15% of all law enforcement general dispatch operations are encrypted full time. The vast majority in this country is still unencrypted.

duskwuff• 6 years ago

Not OP, but: many common voice encryption implementations have serious usability issues which lead to users inadvertently -- or often even intentionally -- disabling encryption

https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec0810...

vidanay• 6 years ago

Is the poor audio quality a function of the participating scanners that feed your service, your infrastructure, or the current workload? My local feed is nearly unintelligible.

blantonl14• 6 years ago

It is solely a function of the participating scanners. There is a report a problem link on each feed's page which allows you to let the provider know there is a problem.

There are a lot of times providers simply don't know that there is a quality problem.

Edit: there are also a lot of problem vectors. Poor reception, failing equipment, old equipment, and even the case of some providers that don't care and just rush a feed online just to get the premium subscription.

Crowdsourcing content isn't always easy :)

PappaPatat• 6 years ago

Thank you so much for the possibility. I grew up with scanners and am truly reminiscing while listening on these intercepts.

Here in Europe there is close to no police still using analog and listening to air traffic control or couriers just does not cut it for me.

Bought the app, hope you'll be able to keep this up.

pmarreck• 6 years ago

Is there a way to listen to the broadcasts in a web browser without Flash Player?

blantonl14• 6 years ago

We’ve abandoned flash as our default player long ago in favor of html5 audio. I’m not sure why you’d be seeing flash as a default unless you previously set flash as your default player.

primogen• 6 years ago

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/

turrican• 6 years ago

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

kebman2• 6 years ago

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.

shadowgovt• 6 years ago

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 and state issue, so practices vary widely; for anybody to successfully come up with an encryption standard would require an unusual top-down standardization that has only been seen in extraordinary circumstances, such as after September 11th), and utility (in a disaster scenario where disparate groups coming from disparate points of the country might need to quickly ad hoc communications with each other, the absolute last thing you want is lives on the line while people are configuring their encryption protocols for their radios... Nor do you want to deny local volunteers the ability to understand where first responders are and how to get to them by having that information communicated in scramble).

filoleg• 6 years ago

Afaik some channels are encrypted and there is no way for normal people to listen in on those. But majority of "normal" police and emergency response channels are not, and those are the ones you can tune in to on those websites.

ISL3• 6 years ago

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

autojoechen• 6 years ago

Is there a text transcript feature for users who may want to search through the communications? I'm curious how well those speech-to-text tools work for the audio feeds.

mstade• 6 years ago

I suppose maybe you can try running it through Otter[1]. We’ve used it with varying degrees of success when interviewing customers, and it’s also what powers Zoom’s transcript feature which is what we use these days.

It’s hit and miss, in my opinion. It’ll give you a good enough base to refine the transcript from, but I’ve yet to come across a transcript that doesn’t need editing. (Which is annoying, since Zoom doesn’t give you that option.) I’d say it’s more valuable having the tool than not, but don’t expect miracles.

(I’m not affiliated with Otter or Zoom in any way.)

[1] https://otter.ai/login

lunixbochs6• 6 years ago

Hi, this is a difficult problem but I've been working hard on it for a couple of days with some help. I have a pipeline and website that automatically transcribes scanner feeds that is working pretty well, and the website allows users to correct and vote on transcriptions.

My goal is to train my own models on the corrected transcriptions (I work in the speech recognition space) so I can transcribe many live feeds inexpensively.

I will respond with a link here (hopefully very soon today) once I've fixed a couple of remaining UX bugs.

panda88888• 6 years ago

Could we run the audio stream through YouTube livestream and enable caption?

lunixbochs6• 6 years ago

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.

kaitai• 6 years ago

Hey, just wanted to say thank you. I'm in the Twin Cities (Mpls/St Paul MN) and I've absolutely been on Broadcastify for hours in the last week. On Friday/Saturday night things were getting pretty wild near my house, and being able to hear where dispatch was reporting incidents was really helpful in being able to calibrate my sense of personal danger, to be frank. Just sitting on the front porch listening to the scanner and watching for cars with no license plates the last few nights... and using what I hear on the scanner to try to convince the guys with their impromptu militia that they ought to at least sit down in f*(&ing lawn chairs to indicate they're local instead of pacing around after curfew looking like the very folks we don't want to see (they had the police dispatched on them 3+ times).

Broadcastify, Unicorn Riot, and some select trusted sources on Twitter have helped me understand much better what is going on as these protests unfold.

ISL3• 6 years ago

Any surprises with the uptick in traffic? Do you see increased usage ahead of news-reports of protests?

Also: Thank you! I've been listening to Broadcastify both at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak and yesterday, to track nascent looting <2 km from our home.

blantonl14• 6 years ago

The past few months has resulted in us seeing record traffic and revenue... it turns out that people stranded at home due to stay at home orders are thirsty for entertainment and information.

I can't say that I'm really surprised by anything anymore after all that has happened over the past 3 months :)

imjustsaying• 6 years ago

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

ta0vb0ndsdf• 6 years ago

Same, hope that robert stays safe out there (and remembers to check his keys)

Scoundreller4• 6 years ago

I’m Chicago, this one is much clearer and interesting scanner:

https://crimeisdown.com/audio

rowawey• 6 years ago

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

pwdisswordfish2• 6 years ago

https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/32890

https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/31439

ChuckMcM• 6 years ago

Thank you for your service! FWIW, this was one of the things I wanted to do and learning about SDRs made that possible.

denkmoon• 6 years ago

I used your service to listen to emergency service radios during the recent Australian Bushfires. The fires got really close to my family's home, your service allowed me to keep up with what was going on in real time. It really helped. Thanks.

lerie1982• 6 years ago

I just wanted to weigh in here and say thank you for this service, I have been using it for quite some time now to monitor and follow emergency services in my area to report news. A truly awesome and bad ass service.

mariojv• 6 years ago

Thanks so much for providing this service!

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?

tzs2• 6 years ago

In a few states it is illegal to use a police scanner while operating a motor vehicle unless you have a license from the FCC or permission from local law enforcement.

Do any of those states consider those laws to apply to using one of those apps?

PS: for those who live in one of those states (Indiana, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, and New York) a ham radio license counts, and the entry level ham license (Technician) is not very hard to get.

aviditas• 6 years ago

Have you considered putting the app on f-droid?

Simulacra2• 6 years ago

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...

AlexandrB• 6 years ago

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.

sneak2• 6 years ago

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.

dmkolobov• 6 years ago

Completely outside of my area of expertise, so this may be a silly question, but are police transmissions distinguishable from others in their encrypted form? If so, there could still be a use case for knowing _where_ the cops are. Wonder if some sort of mesh could be used to triangulate the positions of these signals.

alvern• 6 years ago

I think the repeaters would block out any of the mobile radios. So you could see the dispatchers easily, but the individual mobile operators (EMS, Fire, Police) would be hard to distinguish.

If the mesh was every Digital TV tuner inside a municipality, then maybe the mesh could triangulate position.

oasisbob7• 6 years ago

You could look for the repeater uplink, maybe.

Keep in mind that these public radio systems are often used by firefighters and other agencies.

Finding police specifically would probably involve some sort of metadata leak in the radio signaling protocols.

ryanlol• 6 years ago

Often they are, yes. It’s relatively easy to use an USRP to generate alerts when someone is using TETRA nearby.

But sure, other agencies may generate false positivies.

Simulacra2• 6 years ago

Outside of my area as well, but, IIRC Kevin Mitnick wrote about using a radio set to encrypted frequencies. When he was out and about, if he heard traffic on those frequencies, then he knew the FBI etc. must be nearby.

catalogia• 6 years ago

What I heard is many police departments now encrypt their radio communications, with the exception of dispatch which they keep in the clear as a concession to the media and ambulance chasers.

themodelplumber2• 6 years ago

They also refer each other to their MDT or cell when working, which is equally effective at cutting out the public (whether intended or no). In many rural areas, analog FM voice is still in use with no encryption, which I've heard is at least sometimes due to more favorable propagation characteristics for reception at a distance.

cwkoss• 6 years ago

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.

sneak2• 6 years ago

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.

bzb3• 6 years ago

How come LE in 2020 is not using encrypted communication systems such as Tetrapol? Yes I know Tetrapol is European, but you get the idea.

bluedino• 6 years ago

Cost? They tried rolling out Tetra in a few places in the USA.

hkchad• 6 years ago

They are, in my area they have switched to P25 Trunked and added encryption, at least on the PD channels. The US is a big country and it takes a coordinated effort to upgrade the big city and the surrounding areas and is very expensive. The only thing open around me is Fire/Rescue.

blantonl14• 6 years ago

Europe and the United State government are drastically different.

Local municipalities in the United States are very independent and will settle on a a communications system that they locally want to use. Budgets and planning are allocated at those local levels, and power struggles and turf wars will result in agencies right next door to each other using different systems, just because.

xxpor3• 6 years ago

Some do, but thankfully most don't. There's really no need. It's a matter of keeping the police transparent. News orgs put up a big stink when they do go encrypted in some places.

mindcrime4• 6 years ago

Why would they? Encrypted LE comms is a horrible idea in the first place. How is the public supposed to monitor what their paid servants are doing, and provide any measure of oversight / demand accountability, if they can't listen to the calls???

empath75• 6 years ago

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.

swebs2• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure any $30 Baofeng will let you broadcast on these frequencies.

oasisbob7• 6 years ago

Any trunked radio system hops between frequencies enough that this wouldn't work.

Individual radios get "paged" on a control channel and told where to receive. Eg, "Radios tuned to the police talk group, go to frequency X now." The speaker, when transmitting, gets assigned a frequency on the fly.

A baofeng could stomp on a transmission, but nobody would follow it otherwise.

callalex2• 6 years ago

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?

LgWoodenBadger• 6 years ago

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.

themodelplumber2• 6 years ago

In practice you will still hear sensitive information from time to time. Psychology is so dynamic that emotion easily finds a way to route around these invisible barriers. It's hard work and they're humans...

oasisbob7• 6 years ago

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.)

dijksterhuis• 6 years ago

Don't mess with the Postal Inspector.

myself248• 6 years ago

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!

JshWright• 6 years ago

Most MDTs just use LTE connections these days.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

*no publicly-accessible records

vsareto• 6 years ago

They use Signal too

Press2forEN3• 6 years ago

With the rise of corporate censorship I don't think its wise to rely on app stores for access to police frequencies. Dedicated radios that monitor police frequencies are widely available and you don't need an amateur license to use one (since you're only listening, not transmitting).

My city is on 700MHz P25 which requires a fairly pricey radio, but its been worth every penny over the past week. After listening in last Saturday we cancelled a trip to visit family after hearing about a riot on the local highway.

Make sure to look up the frequency your town uses first before dropping so much coin on a radio. If your local LE is encrypted, you're out of luck. But many aren't.

larrywright3• 6 years ago

Any specific models/manufacturers you can suggest?

Press2forEN3• 6 years ago

I have a Uniden BCD396XT, which is a few years old and I'm not sure they make it anymore. However the second-hand market for radios is very strong and if you have an amateur radio store in your area (Ham Radio Outlet, or the like) you can go there and I've found them to be very helpful. They're likely to know the specifics of the LE frequencies in your area.

I've been thinking about upgrading to an ICOM IC-R30, but its expensive and does way more than just police scanning.

lozaning4• 6 years ago

Get a Hack RF or other SDR and then just run Unitrunker on a computer.

blantonl14• 6 years ago

You don't have to rely on app stores... Broadcastify is the platform that powers all these apps, and they are online at https://www.broadcastify.com

Press2forEN3• 6 years ago

Police scanning channels are a good way of gaining information about local political activity in your area.

I think at some point you'll feel the pressure to censor those feeds as a way to limit information about demonstrations that aren't approved by the ruling class.

vmchale• 6 years ago

Mostly listening in to news about the looters here (Chicago). Obviously I care about the protesters/rioters but they're not who I need to watch out for.

Scoundreller4• 6 years ago

Checkout this service for Chi:

https://crimeisdown.com/audio

protomyth3• 6 years ago

I remember as a young kid my family, and a few others, had police scanners. It was fairly interesting and you got a feel for which of your neighbors were trouble. A lot of my relatives were rural fire department volunteers so the scanners were a useful warning before the actual alarm page was sent out. I do remember one of my relatives drove out to pick up a cop on a back road when his cruiser died, or the night they chased a light all over hell and back. The first reality programming.

bg4• 6 years ago

or the night they chased a light all over hell and back

Please elaborate.

protomyth3• 6 years ago

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 pursue the light by himself as people committing illegal acts that are obviously armed might be unsocial. Another two patrol cars showed up and they decided to surround the area where the light was. The "light", when flushed by the officers, took off down the road. The officers only saw the light and not what is was attached to nor did they hear an engine. This pursuit went from road, to another field, down the side of a river, and back into the wooded area. The light would turn on and off traveled at high speed about four feet off the ground. They finally lost sight of it outside town, last seen headed down the road. Apparently some folks called in sightings (land line days to the dispatcher), but the latency made these a bit unhelpful and the officers did comment that some of the callers might not be trusted observers and some might be ..uhm.. less than perceptive having their head inappropriately situated. The officers did say some words that were not strictly professional and threatened all manner of violence on whoever was behind this. It probably cost them some revenue as they were not available to assure the public's safe speed particularly after the bars closed. They did not catch the light nor did it happen again.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

which of your neighbors were trouble

Or which of your neighbors the ruling class want to destroy/subjugate, as we have seen recently.

kortilla2• 6 years ago

Not usually. I grew up in a generally lower middle class town and most of the police scanner activity of “repeat problem people” were for domestic disturbances or drunken/high fights. Responding to wife beaters isn’t really subjugating anything.

mring33621• 6 years ago

These digitized scanner feeds are interesting, but I worry that they can/will be used for propaganda/misinformation. What's to keep a feed supplier from injecting fake content?

kasey_junk• 6 years ago

You can inject misinformation directly into the radio waves in many jurisdictions.

In Chicago this weekend someone was spreading a rumor that a caravan of protesters were coming from Indiana such that the police diverted resources to check it out.

sonthonax3• 6 years ago

Do police really still use unencrypted radios?

Cobord• 6 years ago

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

sonthonax3• 6 years ago

That has nothing to do with it. Your mobile phone voice comms are encrypted. Push to talk over cellular is another solution which British police use.

Police are increasingly militarised, pretty much any military uses encrypted radios. It's a cheap technology now.

https://www.harris.com/solution-grouping/tactical-multiband-...

mindcrime4• 6 years ago

In many (probably "most") jurisdictions, yes. Certainly there are some that are encrypted, and that trend has accelerated at least a little bit over the last few years. But from what I've seen, plenty of LE agencies (in the US anyway) are still in the clear.

Now, as others have noted, a lot of them have now gone to digital trunked systems (P25, and suchlike) that are more difficult to receive/decode. But that's not "encryption", it's just an annoyance.

sonthonax3• 6 years ago

Wow, I’m really shocked that police still used unencrypted radios.

twox2• 6 years ago

A while back I bought a baofeng handheld on amazon - it's not ideal as a scanner, but good enough. I've been finding plenty of crazy shit during these protests.

jules-jules• 6 years ago

Can you share some examples?

sterwill3• 6 years ago

I haven't done the work to sign up at Broadcastify, but if you're in Durham NC and want to listen hit http://home.tinfig.com:9999 with VLC (or mplayer or whatever you like).

It's an HTTP+Ogg+Opus stream from my BCD536HP. It's scanning the local P25 trunked radio system (Durham police, fire, EMS, ops, etc.).

P.S. As I write this I'm hearing chatter about responding to an airplane crash... no more details yet.

voltagex_• 6 years ago

Will you have a chance to write up anything further about your setup?

sterwill3• 6 years ago

It's just an old HP Proliant home server with a USB sound dongle, and VLC transcoding from ALSA PCM to Opus and serving HTTP. VLC does it all!

My radio has a WiFi interface, but it's weird and unreliable (only supports RTSP, 401s if the requested host isn't its internal IP, crashes after 12 hours, etc). So I just use a short analog audio cable instead.

mindcrime4• 6 years ago

tinfig.com, huh? Hmm... this sounds familiar.

VectorLock2• 6 years ago

Although I think a lot of police radios don't use encryption I think the majority are using trunked/digital radios which your garden variety scanner isn't going to be able to decode.

hmmmmm70006• 6 years ago

Anybody else having issues downloading one these scanner apps from the Apple App Store? I seem to be encountering an error I’ve never seen before...

dvno42• 6 years ago

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.

jcims4• 6 years ago

Is anyone actually encrypting it?

I’d rather folks help those that have put tons of effort into the voice demodulation of plaintext channels.

jlgaddis• 6 years ago

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

totorovirus• 6 years ago

Now US doesn't have right to slander china's public surveilance

haram_masala• 6 years ago

Huh? These are private citizens monitoring the police, which is pretty much the opposite of the Chinese surveillance you’re referring to. In fact it’s pretty much an antimetabole (“In the United States, people spy on cops!”).

Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

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