The funny thing about this is that my municipality just recently started encrypting their radios at all. And it was controversial! Residents liked being able to listen in to the scanners.
Along with radicaldreamer suggestions it's also common to be really effective at stonewalling police while on secure wire cameras with audio recording and to have very good criminal lawyers on retainer. Also having patches and wannabes who are prepared to scapegoat themselves.
This isn't so much directly evading law enforcement but it's effective as it can easily cause police take actions that cause evidence and cases to be thrown out, raise reasonable doubt, etc.
Depleting resources and diversions are also relatively common, creating a 'fake' public threat or hate crime to investigate bleeds police resources away from ongoing investigations, etc.
The tango between gang squads and organized criminal groups is an ongoing escalating battle. The EncroPhone transcripts revealed a lot.
I grew up in a college town, our house was the only family on a street full of student rentals. The police were frequently breaking up parties. That gave me an idea for a business that would listen to police scanners and warn the party if an officer was inbound.
In europe when the police comes to a loud party, they come and tell the people to please be more silent. (And if it is just minor kids, ask for a adult) So if the party dispersed in panic before they even arrive .. problem solved fpr them?
Or does the US police busts loud parties gun blazing in general?
> Or does the US police busts loud parties gun blazing in general?
Nah, but lots of these parties have kids below than 21 (or whatever the legal drinking age is). So they get fined or arrested if caught so they leg it.
A friend attended a Chicago-suburb high school for a year (exchange student). Said he had to run from cops at private parties about a handful of times in that year, and that it was pretty normal in his group.
Do you think that the US police force culture mirrors that of Europe? Could there be a need for more oversight, accountability, and transparency for American cops?
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"?
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"?
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.
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.
I'll never forget 8 years ago someone managed to set off every tornado siren in Dallas for an entire Friday night, apparently because they're controlled by radio and the control signal was not encrypted, so the "hacker" just recorded it during a real alert and then played it back to attack the system.
Yeah, it's complicated! Europe goes the other way on this, apparently, so much so that it's headline news when someone comes up with cryptographic attacks on their police radios. Here, on the other hand, people committing crimes can (or could, a few months ago) just listen on their iPhones to see if anybody is on to them.
The City of Chicago makes decrypted audio available, just on a 30 minute delay. That's a sane compromise, I think.
> The City of Chicago makes decrypted audio available, just on a 30 minute delay. That's a sane compromise, I think.
It sounds sane! Though I wonder if like body cams the decrypted channel will have mysterious malfunctions every so often when anything interesting happens?
Seems reasonable on the surface. Has anyone ever audited this? Are there gaps in the recordings? If the PD fails to reproduce the recordings what are the consequences?
At some point, this needs to turn a corner into real-time resistance, and massive community presence to assist regular people in asserting their rights.
Most communities are far more victimized by property crime than they are by the police. Anti-police activists tend to premise their arguments on the idea that everybody opposes police intervention, but read transcripts of neighborhood meetings in Black neighborhoods: the more common complaint is that the police aren't responding and aren't taking their complaints seriously.
It's interesting phrasing, here - property doesn't really make a community, but people do.
Anti-police activists rightly recognize that property is typically insured and easily replaceable, whereas people's lives are not. There is a deluge of evidence to support the notion that random encounters with police can be fatal for black men with no provocation. There is also overwhelming evidence to support the assertion that a disproportionate percentage of cops have abusive and / or racist tendencies.
I'll leave with a poignant quote from the author Jermaine Lamarr Cole -
"I came fast like 9-1-1 in White neighborhoods".
Oh? Well, you’re welcome to provide your own literary analysis of rap lyrics. ‘Neighbors’ by the same author is another great work if you’d like some contextual material.
> read transcripts of neighborhood meetings in Black neighborhoods: the more common complaint is that the police aren't responding and aren't taking their complaints seriously.
I'm not sure there are aggregated data available on this very specific piece of the puzzle, but my anecdata are different than yours (and FWIW, I'm a resident of a historically and currently Black neighborhood).
Why not actually champion the voices of black organizations and highlight the issues they recognize as most problematic, instead of assuming you know best?
> is people committing crimes with the scanner playing waiting to see if the police are on to them
That's ridiculous. I've seen one police chief give this testimony but I've seen no evidence anywhere or charges levied anywhere showing it has actually occurred and I can't actually parse out the criminal model.
You have to assume that they _absolutely will always_ broadcast the location of burglaries on the radio. They could just not do that. Perhaps they coordinate the arrest using cellphones which is something that happens all the time already. Then your listening in has cost you a person who could otherwise be stealing things and may end up being a highly unreliable indicator of imminent capture. Then you have to be sure you leave early enough and carefully enough that no one, not even a neighbors ring camera, sees you leave the scene or tracks your travel after the crime.
That's not to say I haven't seen "criminals" use them. Street takeovers will monitor traffic to frustrate responding officers. Cannonball run players will monitor traffic to avoid speed traps. I've also used them for skip tracing when trying to find an officer who is also a debtor, ironically, they often think themselves above civil law enforcement and are notoriously hard to collect on.
Anyways, it really seems like a weak dodge from police departments that would rather not be accountable to the public. Chicago is no exception. Delays of communications put control solely in their hands. I can't imagine a worse outcome. It should be a third party non-aligned agency that performs that task and it should take a call from the governor to prevent them from doing it.
It's a fairly rare thing for me, but I agree with tptacek on this piece:
Some criminals will (and have, and do), use whatever technology they can to stay ahead of the police. It seems that every time a chop shop is uncovered, regardless of the laundered items, the press feigns amazement at how sophisticated it was.
Sure, plenty of street crime is committed by desperate addicts, but they are often only one link away from a dealer who has access to all the necessary tools to get all the advantage possible.
But...
Is that even really the question?
At some point, the deeper topic for deliberation needs to be:
* Is any society likely to significant stem property (and other!) crime when it has deputized a tiny sliver of itself as being the portion responsible for public safety and law enforcement?
Given the ubiquity of cameras, comms devices, and (at least in the USA), firearms, it seems more practical to conceive a future where we all share this responsibility instead of delegating to a SPOF, and then acting surprised when the Chicago cops are running liquor or the LAPD are dealing crack, and are not at all focused on actual crimes occurring in the community.
So the bad guys scope out a Hyundai or whatever and then listen to the scanner for a while until they're confident there are no cops in the area and then steal the car? Is it feasible to call in a distraction and listen for that?
I'm not saying there's no concern. I'm just not sure if this 30 min delay is as effective as it sounds at first glance. My gut reaction has been wrong enough times in my life that I have gotten in the habit of challenging my own assumptions.
So tell me. What car thief is going to be doing any of this, instead of chucking a piece of broken spark plug through a window and driving off with the car 30 seconds later?
Notably, when I did a ride along once, the burglary call we responded too, the officer got a call from his Sergeant and they didn’t put anything over the radio until they already cleared the place.
As to if the perps had cleared out already due to some SDR MAC address magic (good call!) I guess we’ll never know. Everyone just assumed it was a false alarm. /s
No, this story is about TETRA radios, which are used in Europe; I'm in Chicago, on Motorola's STARCOM (P25), which is ostensibly AES (it wouldn't be shocking to find vulnerabilities; in fact shocking not to, but it won't be as crazy as TETRA, which freelanced its entire encryption stack).
I listened to your great podcast and the remark along the lines of "unencrypted police comms let the robbers know when the police are getting close" made me wonder if anyone has built a simple signal intensity detector for the encrypted radios. You don't need to hear the contents to know that the radios are closing in on you. I can't imagine police forces practice RF silence like special forces do.
It really would be better to hide in the noise of 5G.
> the remark along the lines of "unencrypted police comms let the robbers know when the police are getting close"
Criminals sophisticated enough to do that are usually not going to get caught regardless, encryption or no and are generally savvy enough to not make themselves a serious threat to public comfort and order.
I don't think its a long reach to say that the public may be better off with more ability to monitor police activity at a cost of being weaker against that kind of criminal.
I think that was truer 15 years ago, but every criminal now carries a police scanner with them (in the form a phone), and the residents in my area who most avidly follow police scanners are not the most technical people in the area.
(Having said all that, our muni voted against encrypting radios; we lost 2-1 in a vote with the 2 other munis we share dispatch with).
Unless you're talking about criminals doing traffic analytic RF attacks, in which case, I agree, who cares?
For about $700, you can get some pre-made kit to use SDR to do Radio direction finding. IIRC this device uses the same chips as a RTL-SDR, but it uses 4-5 of them, all synchronized and has a signal emitter for calibration, and a nice web ui to report the data.
(I have not used it, but I've been learning about all sorts of neat radio products as I'm dabling and learning about SDR)
No current ability to track trunked radio units, though arguably thats 'just a software problem'.
I have one and have found it to be quite easy to hunt down ham repeaters that you can get to transmit more or less non-stop... but relatively hard to use for intermittent transmitters.
I need to see if I can figure out how to plub in my GNSS compass output because inferring orientation from motion requires an awful lot of moving around and is less reliable than I'd like.
also the "kraken" may be $700, but there was kerberosdr/hydrasdr which was much cheaper. Furthermore, trunking is usually done within the bandwidth of a typical SDR so it doesn't really obfuscate it as much as one would think. Also i bought one; not to find repeaters, but to find trolls who were using repeaters. I'd monitor the input frequency to the repeater, apparently the same as mitnick would.
there were trunking scanners in the late 90s / early 2000s, as well. my neighbor had one.
Some transmitters have such a distinct sound that you can identify them with just your unassisted human hearing. Back in my firefighting days, I remember that certain trucks or stations had transmitters where you could identify them from the half second or so of "hum" between the time somebody keyed up the mic and the time they started talking. Using ML / signal processing stuff on a computer, yeah, you can probably get pretty fine grained at discriminating these things.
"which is ostensibly AES" in the 5% or less of deployments that turn that on
Both of the systems are crap, when we were evaluating them for nationwide purchase we chose TETRA because of systemic safety features (like local DMO handover modes for public safety use in noisy environments), but when I read their crypto choices I made screwy faces constantly, I wasn't in the slightest bit surprised when this research came out.
I remember at the time some ex signals military folks trying to tell me that the encryption barely matters as the channel selection rate is so high you'd need multi-site intercepts to even make heads of tails of it, sadly they didn't really seem to understand how far SDR and compute has come. The whole experience to this day flavors a lot how I think about military and telco thinking around the whole space, everything touching that boundary feels infected with oldthink.
> everything touching that boundary feels infected with oldthink.
I'd guess that's due to the expense of the equipment and all the regulations coupled with the lack of immediate usefulness to a casual hobbyist. Without the sort of vibrant wild west ecosystem that FOSS provides innovation happens much more slowly and most of the participants will be entrenched.
