- cross-posted to:
- thepoliceproblem
- cross-posted to:
- thepoliceproblem
The NYPD is spending $390 million on a new radio system that will encrypt officers’ communications — reversing a near-century-old practice of allowing the public and the press to listen to police dispatches.
Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/eqTTk?wr=true
Don’t you see a problem with that? Surely the answer is to communicate sensitive information via a different method, and not over the air where civilians are supposed to have transparency with emergency services. Transparency meaning checks and balances ensuring less corruption. Protect people’s identities by using the new encrypted channel. I don’t care if the officer has to press a different button to make the call.
they do often use other devices (laptops in cruisers, for instance) but away from their vehicles, the radio is usually what gets used.
Sorry, that’s laziness. Also, for literally no cost they could use a phone they already have, or even have an app on the phone that both encrypts any data they want to send and encodes it in soundwaves that can go out the radio. Whoever’s listening at the police station could have an app running to automatically decode and display the sensitive data. This stuff isn’t hard. It’s only hard when you don’t care about people and you don’t get consequences for it.
Cops are lazy bro
You want to know how I know you’ve never built anything of this scale before?
Amateur radio operators, like myself, do this stuff all the time. There are already open source apps that do exactly what I mentioned, with the exception of encrypting the data, because that’s not allowed in the amateur radio service.
How exactly is any of what I said too hard for a 350 million dollar budget? Or do I have to personally design and implement a perfect solution for an.entire municipality to be able to even comment on a subject I know a good deal about? But yeah, go ahead thinking it’s level of difficulty standing in the way of a reasonable solution instead of a desire for even less accountability.
No they don’t. Unless you want to tell me how amateur radio operations routinely operate a large scale critical system with inventory management, tech support , redundancy, and a myriad of other shit that hobbyists don’t have to care about.
Which doesn’t come close to implementing the same capabilities as the system in question, nor does it operate within the same constraints. All you saw was the word “radio” and assumed your hobby makes you an expert.
It’s not, they’re doing aren’t they?
You can comment on anything you want with any level of knowledge you want and I can comment on that comment which is whats happening. Thinking you know how to do this because you mess with amateur radio is like thinking you can implement a web portal for national healthcare services just because you learned some JavaScript and Python.