It is a proposed bill from a United States senator. There is no guarantee it will pass.
He's a State Senator, not a US Senator.
A similar bill was proposed in California, as mentioned on his statement, but it failed. It's been proposed again with a few modifications, and it's been shelved for another year with no action. No one expects it to pass because like many things politicians propose, it's not well thought out. It makes some assumptions that may look good to a senator, but to those that work in the field, it doesn't work and never will.
Even if it does pass, there are so many loopholes that it's never going to accomplish what it is trying to.
One issue that these proposals ignore is that there are federal rules regarding the handling of CJI/PII, and a state cannot just decide to ignore those. 10 minute delay doesn't fix the issue. Press does not get a free pass to have access to CJI/PII, no matter what they claim/think. Vetting is expensive, time consuming, and only applies to individuals. Once that individual leaves the TV station/newspaper, it all has to happen again for each individual. It also doesn't address what happens if the issued radio gets lost/stolen. Feeds are great, but who controls who has access, and who is listening in? Vetting sounds like a great solution to those that don't have to deal with the realities of it.
What the bill can propose is that for an agency with many channels/talkgroups, like NYC, that officers simply switch to an encrypted resource when they need to handle this sort of info.
That doesn't work for small agencies that only have one channel.
The other big challenge is that the federal rules regarding PII/CJI do not have a "whoops, sorry, we forgot" clause. For these sorts of proposals to work and still meet the federal rules, it has to work 100% of the time without failure. That means it needs to be made "officer/dispatcher proof" and the way to do that is to encrypt 100% of the traffic 100% of the time.
Based on what I've read about radios and NYPD ability to control their equipment and officers, that's not likely to happen. And I bet the department brass know that.
So, if the bill passes, if the law gets made, everyone rejoices.
Then the PD's, knowing their butts will be held accountable for CJI/PII, as mandated by the feds, just switch to using cell phones for all the important stuff. Then the scanner listeners/press/feed listeners get to hear nothing.
So, good luck with the senate bill. Seriously, I'm not being snarky. It's just not the slam dunk solution that people think it will be.
As for the "scanner listener hears radio traffic and saves the day" thing, that really isn't a good argument that will get far outside of the scanner listener websites. Agencies know that they have better ways of reaching a much larger section of the population with more targeted information. That ship sailed with the invention of the internet. Scanner listeners are not a big enough slice of the population to be much of a resource.
