Russ Crynwr writes:
Hey, I went into the local New York State Police station and asked if they had email. The answer is basically "No." They've got something like a telex system. I doubt that they're any encryption on their data services. You'd think that police department RADIOS would at least be encrypted! Thanks, TLAs, for your crime encouraging efforts. [ TLA lurkers should have the grace to wince at that. ]
Actually there is quite a strong school of thought that holds that police should be discouraged from using hard encryption on their radios because that makes it impossible for the media and public to keep an eye on them to make sure that they are on the up and up. Remember that policeman carry guns and have wide discression in what they can do in many situations, especially in short term immediate situations. And quite a few are not well educated or terribly bright. And most members of the general public are inclined to believe the word of police rather than some random citizen. A hard encrypted police radio system restricts public information about police activities largely to what the police chooses to voluntarily reveal to the media - and given the self promoting political games, corruption, fabrication of evidence, brutality, racism and plain stupidity that characterize all too many police departments that often is not enough and very very self serving. Leaving police radio communications at least mostly open allows the media and curious citizens to follow and observe police actions and have enough knowlage of what went on to ask the hard questions and be witnesses to the actual events. Many police radio systems have been deliberately left open in recent years even as digital DES based technology has become practical and somewhat affordable and widely installed. Lots of police departments have agreed or been forced to not encrypt anything but sensitive undercover surveillance related coms, and certain tactical coms in crisis situations such as hostage takings. (It still remains also true, however, that digital voice radios systems have less range, penetrating power and more unpredictable outages and dead spots than good old analog fm systems do so there is an added benefit to not using encryption). And most police officers seem to believe that allowing the public to listen to their communications is a net plus - there are apparently few known instances of criminals making particularly effective use of scanners to thwart the police and lots of instances of citizens spotting suspects and other suspicious activities and informing the police because they knew they were interested from what they overheard listening to a scanner. As for police digital communications (the so called MDT terminals installed in many police cruisers) - the older and larger city systems installed mostly by big companies such as Motorola use feeble or non existant encryption and can be readily intercepted by a slightly modified scanner (using radio shack parts) and a PC with suitable software (though the baud rates are odd, the data format synchronous rather than start-stop async, the messages mostly sent in the form of packed codewords in some BCH or Reed Soloman error correcting code with the data bits strangely distributed in the codeword for best error immunity, and the actual data a hodgepodge mixture of ASCII text and binary screen formating and control characters). The MDT systems installed in smaller towns and more recently by a small company founded by a former colleague of mine (K1EA) that use standard laptops instead of proprietary terminals do use single DES encryption (my pro-crypto rantings on slow afternoons many years ago may have had some effect). I don't know how good the key management is - I keep meaning to ask Ken the next time I see him at a hamfest - but at least the data is not sitting there for the taking by anyone with a PC, a scanner, and some reasonably straightforward DOS software. I have been told that interconnecting non secure digital terminal systems with the various federal and state criminal data base systems such as NCIC and its successors that contain sensitive non public information such as criminal histories and arrest records is supposed to be illegal. It is not clear how completely this rule is observed. Crypto in the real world raises some interesting issues - the nazis or fascists in the evil sense in the future will certainly make very effective use of it to do evil. Dave Emery die@die.com