It's an interesting business to be in these days...
"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...
Another option can be just seeding a few phones around the area and have them report moving (or transient) towers.
"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?
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.
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.
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?
If the mesh was every Digital TV tuner inside a municipality, then maybe the mesh could triangulate position.
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.
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...
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.
I've been thinking about upgrading to an ICOM IC-R30, but its expensive and does way more than just police scanning.
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.
Something like this maybe? https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.zamojski.soft.towercoll...
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.)
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!
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.
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.
But sure, other agencies may generate false positivies.
Been there, done that. The technique is scary-good, even with cheap hardware.
Capture everything, sort by talkgroups, form listen queues ("police", "fire", "police NOT university",) prioritize, and place recordings in queues. Stream queues through ice cast. Drop low-pri messages if you fall too far behind real-time.
Speaking of: if anyone wants nearly two years of uninterrupted Seattle police radio archives (and everything else from KCERS), they should get in touch.
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.
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 :)
Here's my live youtube stream and archives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuCP1ZetSEA
One of the magical things about the SDR approach is being able to synthesize dozens of streams from a single antenna and several SDR devices. The setup I had could capture ~10 simultaneous transmissions before things started to fall apart.
The hack RF definitely supports grabbing an entire 20Mhz swath of bandwidth that covers all the signal and voice frequencies.
Id be super curious to hear more about your setup, both hardware and software.
https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec0810...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Or which of your neighbors the ruling class want to destroy/subjugate, as we have seen recently.
Broadcastify, Unicorn Riot, and some select trusted sources on Twitter have helped me understand much better what is going on as these protests unfold.
Why, what do I have to fear about that in the United States?
Maybe there's something unique about how these low-quality radio transmissions sound that make these ineffective?
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.
Is that really the rationale? I would think risk of accidentally harming humans or property would significantly increase at night.
Are you doing any kind of speaker identification?
> Exemption 7: Information compiled for law enforcement purposes that: (A) Could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings
I'd fully expect other exemptions to apply if you FOIAed the White House's SSL private key or something.
This is definitely a very hard problem to solve.
I can't say that I'm really surprised by anything anymore after all that has happened over the past 3 months :)
https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890
(edit: also, thank you for keeping this service up and running for so long, have been a regular user since the early RR days. Would love to have a comment/live chat option if your backlog is getting bare :))
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.
Repo is here if you need to report (or just fix :D) bugs in the webapp: https://github.com/lunixbochs/feeds
[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.
https://github.com/DSheirer/sdrtrunk
I wrote this parallel scanner. I had tried incorporating DSD, but couldn’t handle more than 2 streams. Though that was several years ago.
I documented my setup here: https://dantler.us/seattle-police-scanner/
My City Encrypts 100% communications including EMS, Fire, Police and Emergency repose, it is a stupid policy but...
https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Encrypted_Agencies
The other options below it seem to correctly default to HTML5, though, so I'm able to listen to RPD's radio chatter.
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.
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.
I’d rather folks help those that have put tons of effort into the voice demodulation of plaintext channels.
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.
What organization do you mean by "Citizen"? Not aware of any major nonprofits that go by just this one word.
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.
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?
There are many effective techniques that are not permitted when hunting game.
You'd need to upgrade at the base station upfront to have both the old and new systems, and add a repeater, but you could then take your time replacing the radios in the field instead of having to replace them all at once.
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.
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.
(trunk-recorder + rdio scanner).
The UI is:
https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz for the live stuff, but, let me know if you're interested in the data -- my email is in my profile
I'm thinking a traffic analysis app https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis might be useful for when encryption becomes more widespread.
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.
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.
https://nadimkobeissi.tumblr.com/page/29
Moxie Marlinspike can't even fly domestically without jumping through hoops and travelling internationally means they try to seize his electronics and demand the passwords.
Few things there, first "victim of a crime", most area's criminal reports are public records as they should be. Allowing the police to operate in secret is a very bad thing
Further outside of location information is a rare that other personal info is transmitted over the air anyway, general descriptions etc sure but...
Finally I think the public value, and transparency we get from having open air dispatch far far far far outweighs the limited privacy concerns. People say the same things when police are mandated to wear body cams, just like in those situations the public right to know what the police are actually doing far outweighs some minor privacy concerns.
We need FULL transparency in policing right now.
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)
1) In the USA there is very little concern for local elections compared to say, the presidency. Most people don't even know who their local elected officials are, and most don't show up to vote in elections that only concern local issues. The only people who participate in local politics are those who have a business interest in influencing local political offices.
2) Yes, a lot of this can be studied with geo data, from both sides of the coin! From the standpoint of the police, maintaining a presence in multiple areas of a city is a matter of time and distance. How long does it take a police car to go from the dispatch location to the scene of a reported crime? From the standpoint of a criminal who is robbing houses, there's a consideration of "how long is it going to take police to get here" if they see that police have no presence in an area outside of the times when a crime is reported. You can also see disproportionate enforcement of criminal laws based on property location. A lot of people don't want to see house prices negatively affected by crime statistics in wealthy areas. When a kid from an affluent part of a city gets caught with illegal drugs, for example, you won't see a large police presence in the neighborhood showing up to investigate. More police means more reports, and reports become statistics, which then in turn negatively affect property values. On the other hand if a poor kid from an apartment in a poor neighborhood gets caught with illegal drugs, the police will happily go there and harass adjacent residences, cars, neighbors, and for lack of a better word turn it into a fishing trip to try and find more petty crimes to charge more people with.
3) Local tax revenue in the USA is mostly from two sources: retail sales taxes collected at the point of sale in stores, and yearly taxes on real estate. A lot of retail sales tax was lost when people began shopping online more than shopping in stores in the past ten years. Most larger online stores now collect and pay local sales taxes (like Amazon) but they did not do so initially, it has only recently been required of them to do so. Prior to changes in local sales tax laws, the responsibility to pay sales tax ultimately fell on the customer rather than the store. Due to that, the reliance on property taxes was even more prevalent than it is now. (1)
4) There is no profit in jailing criminals. There is profit in releasing criminals after charging them fines instead of sending them to jail. Again, for the purpose of maximizing government revenue, there have been efforts to jail fewer non-violent criminals and instead charge them fines and let them go. This is especially the case when there are quite literally financial services built upon paying bail and fines in the USA. Lets say a burglar is arrested robbing a house. It might take 6 months to a year to give him a trial, so unless he has some sort of demonstrable violent criminal history a local judge will simply charge him a bail fee and let him go. Presumably he can't pay the fee, so there are local bail loan services in the USA that, for typically 10% of the amount of the bail, will assume the risk of the burglar not showing up for his trial for him. So the burglar won't have to pay the 5,000 dollars bail he was assessed, he will only have to pay the bail bond company 500 dollars. (2)
(1) Property taxes are not entirely objective. In most places in the USA, people pay property taxes based on appraised value, not on actual realized gains or losses. For instance, if you buy a house, in the first year after the sale you will be charged property tax based on the price you paid for the house, but in subsequent years the local government will compare your houses to sales of similar houses in your neighborhood. If prices rise, they will charge you more based on the assumption that your house has increased in value.
(2) For the most part local judges are elected, not appointed, so they can be bribed with campaign contributions from bail bond companies who don't want those judges to compel them to pay for accused criminals who don't show up for trials.
And even when its public record, there is a large consensus that some of it should not be published to a larger audience. There was a now old incident where pirate bay had a torrent of a public record covering the investigation of death of several children. It was one of the few torrents that if I recall right, the pirate bay voluntarily took down. A lot of people commented that police should have used more discretion in what they put in the public record.
Body cams has the same issue. It is good that they exist. There is however cases when the record should be kept secret. The default should always be transparency, with exceptions when there is good reason to keep it away from the public. As a obvious example, the body cam recording from a police arriving to a rape scene with the undressed victim should not be public record.
I think that would make the keyholders soil themselves if they had to send the keys over even for a second like that.
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.
I know a fire chief who told me that some stations have switched back to analog. Some firefighters allegedly went silent and their bodies were found later. I guess it's believed that they attempted to radio for help, but the "digital cliff" stopped anything at all from getting through. If they'd heard someone calling for help, they could have gone there -- even if they didn't know exactly what the issue was.
I'm sure pricing is a factor in a lot of areas. $150 will buy a decent analog radio. The same thing, but digital will cost $300-500. Cheap Chinese radios can be had for as low as $30 or so. With just 100 radios saving $200 each, you get 20k to spend on other things. That matters a lot to rural police and even more to EMS (especially volunteer groups).
/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
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/777f36c15564b076bf13af6...
Interestingly, tapping in on mobile phone conversations, and de-scrambling them, is legal in Norway, at least for the state. AFAIK they still don't need a court ruling to do so, like they do when they want to wiretap someone. This is because the radio waves aren't regulated the same way as wired connections in Norway. I suspect this might be similar in the rest of the EU as well (of which Norway is merely a de-facto member). It might also be something to look into if you're an American, to check whether this is also reflected in either federal or state laws.
[1] https://www.michigan.gov/documents/dnr/hunting_and_trapping_...
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-...
In the single city case he had volunteers check the text-to-speech outputs and manually fill in addresses that were missed. His accuracy rate was quite low with 2014 tools so it was a lot of manual work to transcribe the addresses from the recordings. I suppose text-to-speech tools are better since then, but these recordings are still quite dirty. You're talking analog radio recordings of poorly trained personnel who have regional accents, mumbles, inconsistent phrasing, etc.
Try to find tooling to get good text-to-speech accuracy from some sample source like the recordings on liveatc.net (air traffic controllers) and see how accurate your results are, noting the difference between controllers (who are trained in proper phraseology and speaking techniques) and pilots (who are not).