4 ms·

Oversight & accountability are different from operational security. Leaving the radios unencrypted merely lends advantage to more-sophisticated bad actors.

LeoPanthera 1y ago
But in the USA there is ample evidence that the police are often bad actors.
jMyles 1y ago
...I'd like to see evidence for that claim. Much more likely is that the opacity of encryption lends advantage to the unsophisticated bad actors (ie, the 'official' ones). I think most of us, at least in the USA, are far more ready to take our chances with these hypothetical sophisticated bad actors than to reduce the real-time transparency of verified ones.
protocolture 1y ago
Its literally opsec for the bad actors, the cops, to more effectively terrorise the civilian population.
mulmen 1y ago
How does one perform oversight of a police department if the comms are encrypted? Do I FOIA all the communications? How specific does that request have to be? Are the comms even recorded? How long are they retained? What happens when the recordings are "lost"?
- netsharc 1y ago
  Geez, this is a crazy take... as much as I hate corrupt police, monitoring their communication means disabling their ability to communicate with each other in secret. During the Munich 1972 olympics(1), terrorists took some Israeli athletes hostage, and then this happened: > Meanwhile, the terrorists learned from radio and television broadcasts that the police were approaching and had planned a rescue operation. The authorities had failed to cut off the terrorists' electricity and remove the press from the Olympic Village. If they did all that and the terrorists were able to listen to their radio, what's next? Is encryption allowed then? If they could enable it then, why not enable it all the time, "just in case"? 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre
  - mulmen 1y ago
    In my city the cops are most likely to be the ones terrorizing people. In the last 5 years they: Teargassed a neighborhood, escalating a protest to violence. Hit and killed a woman with their car then laughed about it. > "Yeah, just write a check," Auderer says, chuckling. "$11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value." Threatened to close the precinct in the largest residential neighborhood in the country if their scope of responsibility was reduced. Committed voter fraud in an attempt to defeat police reformers. Participated in an insurrection. Covered up officer involvement in the January 6th insurrection by refusing to name the officers involved. They’re not a trustworthy bunch.
    - netsharc 1y ago
      Sorry you live in a fascist area... but with that amount of lawlessness would being able to listen to their ops help with accountability? I think police having encryption is not the biggest worry when living in a corrupt regime...
      - mulmen 1y ago
        > would being able to listen to their ops help with accountability? Yes.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      If your city is a major US urban area, it seems very unlikely to me that "the cops are most likely to be the ones terrorizing people". They may very well be abusive; they may very well terrorize people. Those are real problems. But people are more terrorized by crime, and, if you pay attention to what people in lower-income neighborhoods --- especially Black neighborhoods --- are actually saying in neighborhood meetings, it's that the police don't respond enough, not that there's too much of them. There's a really pernicious tendency among well-off white collar activists to instrumentalize residents of lower-income neighborhoods, activists who themselves rarely experience crime (because they tend not to live in places where it's a major problem), and project onto those residents a preference for property crime over police intervention. In the main, working class people hate crime.

LeoPanthera 1y ago

But in the USA there is ample evidence that the police are often bad actors.

jMyles 1y ago

...I'd like to see evidence for that claim. Much more likely is that the opacity of encryption lends advantage to the unsophisticated bad actors (ie, the 'official' ones). I think most of us, at least in the USA, are far more ready to take our chances with these hypothetical sophisticated bad actors than to reduce the real-time transparency of verified ones.

protocolture 1y ago

Its literally opsec for the bad actors, the cops, to more effectively terrorise the civilian population.

mulmen 1y ago

How does one perform oversight of a police department if the comms are encrypted? Do I FOIA all the communications? How specific does that request have to be? Are the comms even recorded? How long are they retained? What happens when the recordings are "lost"?

netsharc 1y ago
Geez, this is a crazy take... as much as I hate corrupt police, monitoring their communication means disabling their ability to communicate with each other in secret. During the Munich 1972 olympics(1), terrorists took some Israeli athletes hostage, and then this happened: > Meanwhile, the terrorists learned from radio and television broadcasts that the police were approaching and had planned a rescue operation. The authorities had failed to cut off the terrorists' electricity and remove the press from the Olympic Village. If they did all that and the terrorists were able to listen to their radio, what's next? Is encryption allowed then? If they could enable it then, why not enable it all the time, "just in case"? 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre
- mulmen 1y ago
  In my city the cops are most likely to be the ones terrorizing people. In the last 5 years they: Teargassed a neighborhood, escalating a protest to violence. Hit and killed a woman with their car then laughed about it. > "Yeah, just write a check," Auderer says, chuckling. "$11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value." Threatened to close the precinct in the largest residential neighborhood in the country if their scope of responsibility was reduced. Committed voter fraud in an attempt to defeat police reformers. Participated in an insurrection. Covered up officer involvement in the January 6th insurrection by refusing to name the officers involved. They’re not a trustworthy bunch.
  - netsharc 1y ago
    Sorry you live in a fascist area... but with that amount of lawlessness would being able to listen to their ops help with accountability? I think police having encryption is not the biggest worry when living in a corrupt regime...
    - mulmen 1y ago
      > would being able to listen to their ops help with accountability? Yes.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    If your city is a major US urban area, it seems very unlikely to me that "the cops are most likely to be the ones terrorizing people". They may very well be abusive; they may very well terrorize people. Those are real problems. But people are more terrorized by crime, and, if you pay attention to what people in lower-income neighborhoods --- especially Black neighborhoods --- are actually saying in neighborhood meetings, it's that the police don't respond enough, not that there's too much of them. There's a really pernicious tendency among well-off white collar activists to instrumentalize residents of lower-income neighborhoods, activists who themselves rarely experience crime (because they tend not to live in places where it's a major problem), and project onto those residents a preference for property crime over police intervention. In the main, working class people hate crime.