Corny N8TQJ writes on Ham packet:
I would love to know what the Feds are up to, as cellular phones will be digitally encrypted shortly. Is this cell phone "ban" a legal prec- ident to ban further frequencies from citizen's monitoring access?
Not the feds, but Congress under intense pressure from cellular lobbiests. Most of the working federal types such as the FCC and DOJ have admitted the whole anti-radio-listening ban is uneforceable - and as far as I am aware there have been only two prosecutions for violating it, both flagrant examples of people disclosing the contents of radio communications in very inappropriate ways. The cellular scanner ban was an attempt by the lobbiests to do something more practical than foisting unenforceable laws with draconian penalties (10 years in jail and $250,000 fine) on the rest of us. Essentially the justice department and FCC have stated that they cannot enforce the listening ban and will not except in flagrant and abusive cases with clear malicious intent. So cell listening went on to become popular and the lobbiests found a new tactic, banning the reluctant FCC from type approving any scanner that could tune cellular frequencies or be modified to do so by some simple act. Unfortunately Congress again failed to realize that one cannot legislate the laws of physics and of course modifying a radio to tune these bands by such simple strategies as downconversion or simple modifications to the synthesizer or control microprocessor or even just reception via images on an unmodified radio is still possible and just about as hard to prevent as any other private radio listening. Many of us who dabble with radios as a hobby fear that the next step in this game will be to outlaw possession of, modification or construction of, buying or selling of, and even perhaps simple non-criminal use of radios capable of receiving forbidden frequencies or non-standard modulations. This will no doubt be justified on the grounds that the present bans on listening are too hard to enforce and prosecute and therefore an easier to enforce ban such as one on simple possession is needed to rid the country of this awful scourge. This, of course, would criminalize tens of millions of radios and make millions of radio owners outlaws, but given the the fact that Congress has passed the two present absurd laws in the face of fairly widespread objections from knowlagable members of the technical community that such laws make no sense and that such radios have many legitimate uses, such a possiblity seems all too real. And given that the cell lobby has established the precedant of requiring protection of it's frequencies, what is to stop the police chief lobbies from demanding equivalent protection of police frequencies, or other groups demanding that radio gear capable of picking up their transmissions be banned ? Many of us in the radio hobby fully expect that this strategy will eventually result in the attainment of the goals of some of the rabidly anti-monitoring types who tried to have the 1986 ECPA severely criminalize listening to any radio transmission whatsoever except the public part of AM, FM and TV broadcasts (no auxiliary or subsidiary signal listening allowed) and ham radio and CB transmissions which have never been considered private. As for digital cellular, the NSA has successfully quietly pressured the standards bodies with threats of export bans and neither of the two major digital systems will incorperate hard encryption of voice traffic as a normal option. Digital cellular traffic will be significantly harder to intercept than the simple fm analog kind for a number of technical reasons however, and of course present day analog scanners won't pick it up at all. A ban on type approval of any radio capable of receiving digital cellular (other than a cellphone) is already part of the present cell scanner ban, so such radios even if not technically scanners will never be sold to the public at large (you can be sure that the law enforcement and spook community will still buy them by the truckload, however, just as they have bought many many thousands of high end (such as ICOM) scanners capable of intercepting analog cellular). > Noah's flood began with one raindrop. Sure did. Dave Emery, N1PRE