zlacker

>>eloran+(OP)
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...

>>blanto+h7
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.

>>kebman+Rs1
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).

>>shadow+Fu1
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.

>>simcop+5v1
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.

>>RNCTX+bB2
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)