Streaming w/ delay for first responder safety

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jim202

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I will add one comment on having audio delays on feeds. Having been in the fire service for some 35 years, one of the biggest problem that develops at any call is the local people that just have to come and watch what is going on. With many of the rural roads being narrow, this just adds to the problem of trying to get vehicles into and out of an incident. With an audio delay on the feed, you have some time for law officers to get there and set up road blocks to keep the flow of un needed traffic down so emergency vehicles can function on these roads.

Those that don't feel the need to delay the radio traffic audio obviously have never had to deal with the spectators that always show up. The audio delay also keeps down the interest of watching what is going on in real time and trying to listen to the radio traffic with your cell phone on one of these radio feeds.

I too have a number of radios that I listen to the local radio traffic as I travel around the country. Being a radio tech, engineer for many years and work for a company that supplies radio interoperability gateways, I hear and see this issue on almost a daily basis. There is no simple answer to keep everyone happy. Just be satisfied that all agencies don't encrypt all radio traffic. The more you make this topic an issue, the more you will cause the encryption to migrate through the different agencies radio systems.
 

Jay911

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Well, Jim, I've been working on a fairly busy suburban department for 20 years (May 7th was my 20th anniversary) and only on the really monster calls have we had true bystander issues, i.e. people getting in the way - and at that point, they're finding out about it by word-of-mouth spreading through the town, not by listening to a scanner or an Internet feed.

If you have crowd control issues at a scene, you should be addressing that. If you find people are getting to a scene before your rigs, maybe those people should be on the department. ;) But taking one way of hearing about the call - out of a multitude of methods - and messing with its time of delivery isn't going to make an impact, and isn't the right way to go about it in any case.
 

Firebuff66

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If the bad guy really wants to, they will just get a scanner like some do.

In my neck of the woods 6 police departments have encrypted in the last 4 years because of scanners and streaming apps.
One of them is thinking of allowing streaming at a 2 hour delay of the encrypted traffic so media can still hear if they want but it won’t put officer’s lives in jeopardy
Bottom line should be safety of responders comes first, the media and hobbyist come in a very distant second if at all. I love to listen to the scanner but I can’t make any rational argument why ANY first responder communications have to be in the clear.
The public has a right to know, I have no problems with a CD of the radio traffic available each month for people to review if they see fit
 

radioman2001

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Unfortunately with a CD or very large delay audio can be edited, or in some cases not broadcast at all for what ever reason the agency decides. I don't see the reason for encryption for day to day ops, but the manufacturers are pushing it with their new radio systems. (If an officer is jeopardizing himself by using his radio then he/she needs to l,earn how to use com security to not, and don't think that just because you have encryption that you are safe) In large cities there is little chance of preventing it but with smaller towns and agencies you can prevent it by getting active with your government. Any elected official that says the public can't and shouldn't be able to listen needs to be voted out, this then becomes part of the slippery slope to total blackout of all information related (except what they want you to know)to that governments inner workings. Then you can go on to corruption and on and on.
 

PeterGV

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I like what radioman2001 said... Public safety officials are doing the public's business and we darn well should be able to monitor what's going on. As I've said in other postings, monitoring your local PD can really give you a deeper understanding of your community and the people who "protect and serve" -- and I've gotta tell you, I never much appreciated the police force until I spent time listening to what they dealt with day-in and day-out. Now, they get all my respect.

A 2 hour delay is ridiculous. Seriously. It doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever. How many incidents are 2 hours long (answer, almost none)? We might as well just go back to the days of having to ask for the recordings under the FOIA.

My final comment: I'm not an expert in running an encrypted radio system, but I HAVE read a great deal from people who deal with this stuff on a day-to-day basis. It seems to me that smaller police departments seriously underestimate the overhead and the annoyance of implementing encryption. Dealing with keys (loading them and maintaining them) is a lot of work. The manufacturers make it sound like it's all a cake walk, but when you think through the scenarios, it's a royal PITA and if not done correctly can actually make communications HARDER, less secure, and even put lives at risk. OTAR and mixed clear/encrypted isn't necessarily the answer, either (what happens when you do a re-key and all the radios in the group aren't ON). Or, for safety purposes, you have channels that support mixed encrypted/non-encrypted traffic and a user unintentionally keys-up not encrypted and feels free to discuss sensitive details because "nobody can hear him that shouldn't."

Folks REALLY need to think through their decisions before going either fully or partially encrypted. And they need to talk with peers who run such systems in similarly sized departments, with similar requirements. Not JUST talk to the manufacturers, who make everything sound so great and easy.

Peter
K1PGV
 

SCPD

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Not to revive this forums to continue to conversation of encryption or not, but instead to see if ScannerCast or RadioFeed plans to offer this anytime soon?
 

webstar22

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Not to revive this forums to continue to conversation of encryption or not, but instead to see if ScannerCast or RadioFeed plans to offer this anytime soon?

RadioFeed lets you set TG's that you do not want to broadcast but no delay yet that I have seen.
 

rdale

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If there is an even longer delay than there is now, our marine feed from Holland will be of no use for us anymore and wil be shut down.

There is no delay invoked now, so you might check your system setup.
 

reddingsdienst

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There is a always a small delay, about 25 seconds, sometimes more. The system is OK, it is a standalone laptop, only used for recording (search-and-rescue.nl) with scanrec and uploading that data at the same time.
In scanrec there is a timestamp in a log, there are the times just right. At the same time the data is recorded the audio is uploaded to the internet. I cannot imagine that my system is holding audio in his memory for twenty seconds before uploading it to the internet, but maybe you can explain how...
 

rdale

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A delay in playing? Much of that is due to settings in your player regarding the buffer space and your bandwidth. It's not a delay that is being intentionally added.
 

ProScan

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I'd be interested if you create it...Let me know.

Do you honestly believe he has the capability to pull it off? Will this be a separate program to delay the audio before getting to ScannerCast or my RadioFeed? It has to be low level programming (below the API level) to pull it off. How about the metadata. Will that be delayed to keep in sync?
He doesn't even know what is the server side.
 
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pjtnascar

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It seems to me it would be far easier and more effiecient for a criminal to use a scanner, rather than an internet feed to evade capture. As far as people showing up to a scene-This has little to do with an internet feed and more to do with curiousity. Well before the internet,there was ambulance chasing busy bodies who show up at the scene. Thus the old cop saying "show's over. go home!"

And a delay- who cares? Why would you listen to local traffic on a feed when the signals could be easily received on a scanner?
 

KE7IZL

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I figure if the first responders are in danger from their communications being heard, it would already have been a danger for decades, long before the internet existed. There have been "police scanners" for as long as I've been alive, and I'm 26 years old. If this was a danger, scanners would have been banned by the FCC by now. If they truly have a reason to be afraid of their communications heard, I'm sure that first responders are already aware of the availability of voice encryption technology, such as that offered at EFJohnson Technologies | Encryption Modules
 

NCIC105

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Do you honestly believe he has the capability to pull it off? Will this be a separate program to delay the audio before getting to ScannerCast or my RadioFeed? It has to be low level programming (below the API level) to pull it off. How about the metadata. Will that be delayed to keep in sync?
He doesn't even know what is the server side.

I don't have a clue, but then we do not know the limit of his friends.
 
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