You are in the minority here, both on RR and in the radio hobbies. Your apparently pro-cop stance is actually anti-public safety (small p.s.).
If I were pro-cop I wouldn't be concerned about innocent people getting arrested. In fact, I wouldn't even be posting warnings about this issue at all.
If I were anti-public safety I would be saying that no one should be able to own scanners and listen to police/fire traffic.
There are plenty of police agencies in the USA that encourage the general public to listen in so they can be extra eyes and ears
And plenty that don't, for the same reasons they don't like citizens owning guns and sometimes impose restrictions when it becomes a problem, even though it's a very small minority of people who use them to commit crimes. Handguns were banned in Chicago for 28 years before the SCOTUS recently
overturned it.
I completely understand the
good things and bad things of providing a feed. I understand the argument that police make as I understand the argument that feed providers have. It's only been two and a half years since this audio platform exploded from acquiring ~500 feeds and now there are over 10,000 on this site.
If people want to listen to be an extra set of eyes and ears, go out and buy a real scanner that has zero delay in receiving radio traffic, with no restrictions on what channels they can monitor. It's what everyone did before streaming came around. My opinion is that delayed streams are good public policy for the average listener. Police will have nothing to complain about when it doesn't give criminals an extra edge.
If feed listeners and scanner users all get lumped into the same category and perceived as mostly law breakers, legislators will feel justified to intervene, and municipalities will feel they have more justification to spend ridiculous amounts of money to go to encrypted trunked systems and legally end the hobby of listening in for
everyone including press, scanner hobbyists and ham radio operators. If you dismiss their concerns, they'll ultimately end up dismissing yours when they make the decisions.
Whatever your opinion, publishing frequencies, codes, and other info, and running live radio feeds, are all perfectly legal in the United States.
I have no problems with posting frequencies or police codes. That information belongs in the county's wiki, not on the feed where it only benefits feed listeners. Scanner listeners were around on this site before the feeds popped up.
Whatever your opinion, Supreme Court interpretations (and other appellate decisions left unreviewed) of the Bill of Rights are the law of the land.
While that might ultimately address the issue of warrantless searches of computer devices upon arrest, it's still a risk that a judge, jury or a majority on a panel of judges might not agree with you and it takes literally years of battling before there's a definitive answer.
More importantly, there are no constitutional protections to own a scanner or computer device that can listen in on public safety communications in real time. The only thing you have the privilege to is a FOIA request after the fact, and even that is on
shaky ground.
And most importantly, the NDAA of 2012 has the very real potential of
whisking away any feed provider in aiding the enemy. There's no court of law to challenge anyone's assertions. I don't see why any feed provider isn't crapping bricks right now over wondering whether their actions could be misconstrued as aiding the enemy if that enemy commits an act of "terrorism". I think of stories like the Christmas Tree bomber and wonder, had he been successful with a police scanner feed at his immediate disposal, (he did have a cell phone he used to try to remotely detonate a bomb) what would have happened to the feed provider who provided aid to him?
