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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If the police can't keep informants protected, nobody will inform on violent criminals. There are obviously plenty of reasons why law enforcement secure comms need to be actually secure, not just "Motorola says it honored the secure comms standard" secure.

The stuff that police organizations want to be obscurantist about are almost invariably not encrypted; dash cam videos, disciplinary reports, things like that. Yes, once upon a time some geeky reporters were able to get interesting stories out of radio scanners. That's because we were living in the dark ages, not because police tactical radio traffic should be open to anyone.

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Walk into the city desk of any major newspaper and a police scanner is on in the background. It isn't a "geeky" thing at all.

Informants have nothing to do with secure comms... the examples of reasons why secure comms are needed usually center around surveillance of organized crime for since 2001, the terrorists.

Is there a need for secure transmission of limited types of communication? Sure. But 95% of the radio traffic is not secret at all.

It's not geeky. In some small towns, everyone listens to the scanner. Occasionally someone will lean on the "talk" button and the town will get some gossip broadcast to all the neighbors :)

You guys are missing the modifier "once upon a time". It's true: once upon a time, some (at the then once-upon-a-time time) geeky reporters got some interesting stories out of radio scanners. And now, it's not geeky to own a computer. But once-upon-a-time (as in when some of us, yer elders, were kids), it was only geeky people what had them. Anyway, agreed with tptacek, completely.

That's just not true!

Remember CB radios? They were hot in the seventies with consumers -- and many of the bigger units had scanner functions as well. Any decent newspaper has had a scanner running in the newsroom since the 1960's, although the older models required you to set 5-10 frequencies using crystals.

Police radios are mostly used to dispatch and provide baseline information about incidents. There's no chatter about confidential informants, etc. Take 10 minutes, go to any of the scanner webcast sites on the internet and listen to the traffic for a few minutes.

Duff, I don't think police dispatch radio is what the original article was talking about with regard to encryption. It seemed to be about tactical radios used by the FBI, etc.

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