The public and news reporters will no longer be able to listen in.
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.
New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance (pictured above) has been an outspoken critic of Apple's end-to-end encryption policy, saying 'they have taken away one of our best sources of information. Just because they say so.'
tbf, cops 'doxx' people over the radio all the time. not just suspects, either, but potential witnesses, and normal folks caught-up in 'stop and frisk' or 'papers, please' stops. full legal names, birth dates, genders, government id numbers, addresses, and so forth are broadcast for all to hear. that data should be encrypted, and is in many jurisdictions already.
That's a really good point I hadn't considered. However, I'm still concerned that evidence of police misconduct or things that might support an arrestee/defendants innocence is going to be contained in these broadcasts and that we could lose access to that. If this encryption does go forward, recordings of the broadcasts should be kept and their should be a process where defense attorneys and journalists and the like can ask a court for access to them.
use of different channels (encrypted and not) depending upon the expected contents of the communication would be about as reliable as officer-operated body cams.
Not just that data should be encrypted, ALL data should be encrypted, with very few exceptions. It’s scary how much privacy we lose through unencrypted communication.
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.
And it's easily decoded when you have the keys which, based on every other department that uses them, won't take long to leak or be cracked.Lot of folks use SDR setups on a PC to decrypt and stream police and fire radio to a service like Broadcastify