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Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
- blantonl 6y agoHi 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 6y agoIs 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.
- millzlane 6y agoI 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.towercollector/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.zamojski.soft.towercoll...
- oasisbob 6y agoUniversity of Washington researchers are working on this, their technique has used roaming car sharing vehicles and anomaly analysis: https://seaglass.cs.washington.edu/ https://seaglass.cs.washington.edu/
- krageon 6y agoYou 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.
- swebs 6y agoI 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.
- jackhack 6y agoadditional temporary "towers" are sometimes added when very high but transient network loads are anticipated (such as a music festival, or county fair, etc.). not all new towers are sniffers.
- g_p 6y agoIf anyone is interested in trying to work around this, I have a few ideas for how to try distinguish a real and fake cell. Temporary event "pop-up" networks should announce valid neighbouring cells. Your baseband (radio) might expose neighbour cell data - iPhone field test menu shows the announced neighbour data. Hypothesis is that a rogue tower will not have valid neighbour cells announced. They could try listen in for valid ones and advertise those. A lot of the ways to detect will depend on the generation of network being spoofed - 4G networks will also advertise signalling for legacy 2G and 3G circuit switched networks. Rogue sites might not.
- LinuxBender 6y agoSweet talk a cellular network engineer into giving you the engineering firmware for your phone and a list of all the cell ID's.
- gruez 6y agostingrays can't spoof cell ids?
- LinuxBender 6y agoThey 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.
- ISL 6y agoThe disclosure of facts is protected by the First Amendment.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoThere are sometimes non-legal reasons to be careful.
- elihu 6y agoThat isn't universally true.
- vertex-four 6y agoI dunno if you noticed, but the law doesn't always exactly mean much in terms of what actually happens.
- gruez 6y agoDoes 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.
- bochoh 6y agoI 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?
- blantonl 6y agoYes, 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.
- bochoh 6y agoReally appreciate the feedback here. That makes good sense on the low quality money grabs.
- VectorLock 6y agoJust wanted to say I appreciate how candid and direct your answer is, even though it might be displeasing to some people to hear.
- dvsfish 6y agoThorough and satisfying explanation.
- _curious_ 6y agoInteresting 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?
- blantonl 6y agoMy 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...
- larrywright 6y agoIs 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.
- blantonl 6y agoYou 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 6y agoI 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.
- blantonl 6y agoThank 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 6y agoDo you have a sense of how many precincts are encrypting their scanner comms these days?
- blantonl 6y agoEvery 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 6y agoNot 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/p25sec08102011.pdf https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec0810...
- parliament32 6y agoThat was actually a great read, thanks!
- vidanay 6y agoIs 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.
- blantonl 6y agoIt 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 6y agoThank 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 6y agoIs there a way to listen to the broadcasts in a web browser without Flash Player?
- blantonl 6y agoWe’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.
- yellowapple 6y agoWhen navigating via the map to Nevada, then Washoe County, the big button for "Launch County Web Player" defaults to the Flash version with no apparent option to change it. The other options below it seem to correctly default to HTML5, though, so I'm able to listen to RPD's radio chatter.
- primogen 6y agoThank 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/ http://youarelistening.to/
- turrican 6y agoYou 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 https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/sf1033
- kebman 6y agoIsn'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 6y agoIn 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).
- simcop2387 6y agoThis 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.
- thephyber 6y agoYeah, 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.
- 6y ago
- autojoechen 6y agoIs 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 6y agoI 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 https://otter.ai/login
- lunixbochs 6y agoHi, 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.
- ciarannolan 6y agoI 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 https://voice.mozilla.org/en
- lunixbochs 6y agoI 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.
- kaitai 6y agoHey, 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.
- ISL 6y agoAny 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.
- blantonl 6y agoThe 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 6y agoYour 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 6y agoSame, hope that robert stays safe out there (and remembers to check his keys)
- Scoundreller 6y agoIn Chicago, try this one. Much. Nicer because you can put different channels on each headphone and manage multiple feeds more easily: https://crimeisdown.com/audio https://crimeisdown.com/audio
- Scoundreller 6y agoI’m Chicago, this one is much clearer and interesting scanner: https://crimeisdown.com/audio https://crimeisdown.com/audio
- rowawey 6y agoOh 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 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 CW-1 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31439 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31439 Manhattan
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agohttps://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/32890 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/32890 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/31439 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/31439
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThank you for your service! FWIW, this was one of the things I wanted to do and learning about SDRs made that possible.
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- denkmoon 6y agoI 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 6y agoI 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.
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- mariojv 6y agoThanks 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?
- tzs 6y agoIn 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 6y agoHave you considered putting the app on f-droid?
- Simulacra 6y agoMost 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-the-scanners-are-police-security-measures-killing-an-american-obsession/2018/12/28/4e344a62-09f5-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/last-of-t...
- AlexandrB 6y agoI 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.
- sneak 6y agoThe 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 6y agoCompletely 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.
- 6y ago
- bzb3 6y agoHow 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 6y agoCost? They tried rolling out Tetra in a few places in the USA.
- hkchad 6y agoThey 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.
- blantonl 6y agoEurope 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.
- xxpor 6y agoSome 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.
- mindcrime 6y agoWhy 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 6y agoI'm surprised they didn't mention that someone in Chicago seems to have stolen a police radio and has been trolling them for days.
- swebs 6y agoI'm pretty sure any $30 Baofeng will let you broadcast on these frequencies.
- oasisbob 6y agoAny 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.
- blantonl 6y agoChicago uses a straight analog repeater system
- oasisbob 6y agoAnalog repeaters still use trunking protocols. Edit: Whoops, I didn't realize CPD still had so many assigned frequencies in-use with just a code to activate. That could be done with a Baofeng.
- mindcrime 6y agoTrue, but not everybody is on trunked systems with channel-hopping. Especially in rural areas, you'll find plenty of systems that are just straight up analog on some VHF or UHF frequency. Generally, if you know the repeater offset and PL tone, you could - in principle - transmit on their system. Now doing so is a pretty Bad Idea for many reasons, but it's definitely technically possible in those places.
- 6y ago
- LgWoodenBadger 6y agoAnecdotal, 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.
- themodelplumber 6y agoIn 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...
- oasisbob 6y agoMatt 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 https://youtu.be/re9nG81Vft8 (Can't find the original.)
- dijksterhuis 6y ago> Don't mess with the Postal Inspector.
- myself248 6y agoI 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 6y agoMost MDTs just use LTE connections these days.
- Lammy 6y ago
- Press2forEN 6y agoWith 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.
- larrywright 6y agoAny specific models/manufacturers you can suggest?
- Press2forEN 6y agoI 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.
- lozaning 6y agoGet a Hack RF or other SDR and then just run Unitrunker on a computer.
- larrywright 6y agoI have a couple of those, but unitrunker only runs in Windows, and I’d hate to run Windows just for that.
- xxpor 6y agoDon't you need at least 2 to track trunked systems?
- vmchale 6y agoMostly 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.
- Scoundreller 6y agoCheckout this service for Chi: https://crimeisdown.com/audio https://crimeisdown.com/audio
- protomyth 6y agoI 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 6y ago> or the night they chased a light all over hell and back Please elaborate.
- protomyth 6y agoWell, 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.
- trumpoline 6y agoThe US is now worse than belarus or russia, you are going to need a lot more tools than radio scanners to regain freedom from your government! Not long until the army will shoot at you as they did at civilians in pretty every country they went to. Press reporters abducted by the police live? Innocent people gassed? Police ramming protesters? Entire races oppressed? Not thats not the soviet union, it’s The United States of America folks.
- mring33621 6y agoThese 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 6y agoYou 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.
- sonthonax 6y agoDo police really still use unencrypted radios?
- Cobord 6y agohttps://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836 https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
- sonthonax 6y agoThat 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-radios https://www.harris.com/solution-grouping/tactical-multiband-...
- mindcrime 6y agoIn 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.
- sonthonax 6y agoWow, I’m really shocked that police still used unencrypted radios.
- twox2 6y agoA 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 6y agoCan you share some examples?
- sterwill 6y agoI 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 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_ 6y agoWill you have a chance to write up anything further about your setup?
- sterwill 6y agoIt'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.
- sterwill 6y agoMore technical details in case anyone needs to quickly pipe out some audio to the Internet: /usr/bin/vlc -I dummy -vv --no-alsa-stereo alsa://default:CARD=Device -L --sout-keep \ --sout #transcode{acodec=opus,channels=1,ab=24000,afilter=equalizer}:standard{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=:9999} \ --equalizer-2pass --equalizer-bands 0 0 0 0 0 0 -20 -20 -20 -20 --no-alsa-stereo because my input source is mono. --sout-keep probably isn't necessary now, but it was when I was streaming from the radio's crashy RTSP service. The #transcode block sets up a simple pipeline: first transcode to Opus at the specified output bitrate (24 Kbps is plenty for recorded voice), then mux it up and serve it via HTTP. I added a low-pass filter at ~6 KHz because there's some of high frequency noise from either my radio's analog output stage or the cabling. I had to look through the VLC source code[1] to find the preset frequency bands since I couldn't find them in VLC docs. [1] https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/777f36c15564b076bf13af6641493d97cd5ee224/modules/audio_filter/equalizer_presets.h#L36 https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/777f36c15564b076bf13af6...
- VectorLock 6y agoAlthough 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hmmmmm70006 6y agoAnybody 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...
- olliej 6y agoHere's NYPD telling each other to run over and/or shoot the motherfuckers: https://twitter.com/balleralert/status/1267928451287220224 https://twitter.com/balleralert/status/1267928451287220224
- dvno42 6y agoLook 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.
- tamaharbor 6y agoI recall being able to listen to cell phone calls on my scanner (a long time ago). One thing that it taught me was that people are generally very boring.
- totorovirus 6y agoNow US doesn't have right to slander china's public surveilance
- haram_masala 6y agoHuh? 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!”).