Media Access to ENC radios

natedawg1604

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So I have a somewhat random question; I've read some reports over the years suggesting that pretty much every major TV station in big cities get access to ENC radios (i.e. where primary dispatch channels are ENC). I've also read somewhat conflicting reports suggesting it's fairly rare. So for those (likely few) people who have first-hand information about this, how common is it across the country for media outlets to get ENC radios, and how does the media go about getting such access? Do said agencies have a formal request process, or (like I suspect) does someone high up in the news organization make a phone call to the mayor or police chief, perhaps along with a donation to the local non-profit police foundation?

For agencies who do grant media access, do they have a formal access policy? Also is there a fee involved?

EDIT: This article suggests it's apparently not happening in Colorado anytime soon.
 
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W9WSS

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I don't see the media being given access to ANY ENC radios by a public official (Police Chief, Sheriff, Mayor, Village Trustee) at least in Illinois. You cannot possess a radio capable of ENC (programmed and operating) unless you are an official of law enforcement, fire, or EMS entity. Some agencies even ENC their fire, public works, and transportation systems making it impossible to monitor them. Motorola-owned statewide Starcom21 uses AES256 ENC protocol, which has something like six million codes, and they rotate similarly to a trunked system. I could be wrong, but I've been informed that "it can't be cracked." Again, I'm just stated what I have been informed, so there may be other explanations for how ENC operates its AES256 method with Illinois Starcom21 radio systems.
 

paulears

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We’ve been encoded for years in the UK. The Police system is now also used by fire and ambulance, usually as totally separate systems, but they can be interlinked if necessary. What has happened, as my son is a Police Officer tells me, is that they rarely now even let their radios be heard by the public, and use the plastic tube earpieces. The benefits of secure comms and no public are that they don’t have to be cautious so much. Sensitive info previously had to be sanitised if potential criminals might hear. Things like “xxxx has a habit of saying ‘ you know’ over and over again ”. If he does it’s perhaps ID, but if he doesn’t he may not be who he says. The old procedure was for control to ask “are you 10-8?” The code for can you be overheard. Stuff like this being private over just a few feet is a bonus, via the ear pieces. The encoding also allows senior officers to communicate privately from the ordinary officers, and the security that the bad guys are not listening in means the job is safer. Remote stun and kill of stolen radios is also carried out when they’ve just been misplaced, keeping the channels open. Regular reprogramming is also common. A channel gets taken out of use and a new one created. Here, we never had official eavesdropping from the media. It was done of course, but covertly, as we have laws that mean basically, if you overhear something on a radio not meant for you, you have to keep quiet. Nobody ever gets prosecuted, but the law meant the media can’t chase the a police when things happen. Now it’s impossible and media activities carry on. We have never had what the US had, scanners in the newsroom. In general here, certainly since WW2 is the notion things are private until they’re officially not. Of course we always had enthusiasts listening in. I remember hearing a police call to an incident where a local was always popping up as he had a radio, saying “Mr Mansi, if you’re listening, they have your coat at the Police Station fro last night, you left it behind!” He was a known annoyance, but just one guy, not a whole media army. They sort of put up with him.
Then one day, the switch was pressed and the emergency services just vanished. People moaned but as what they were doing was illegal, not a thing they could do.

I don’t think any emergency service think encryption is bad. Funny how tapping a phone line is thought of differently to tapping a radio transmission? On the internet, auditors take pictures and video of the police, and often talk loudly about their rights and shame the police for being angry, when what they’re doing is legal. Then the police turn on radio encryption. I can’t say I blame the .

one of the popular UK auditors made the mistake of annoying a scrap yard this week, just by being there, taking video and then getting his drone out and flying over. Five big fellas appeared, blocked his car in, and had ‘words’ with him. He had to call the police, the people he usually tries to run circles around, to rescue him. He has a broken arm. Perhaps auditing people who don’t actually care about the law was a mistake for somebody not too able to protect himself with anything other than a camera and his mouth.
 

PD47JD

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We’ve been encoded for years in the UK. The Police system is now also used by fire and ambulance, usually as totally separate systems, but they can be interlinked if necessary. What has happened, as my son is a Police Officer tells me, is that they rarely now even let their radios be heard by the public, and use the plastic tube earpieces. The benefits of secure comms and no public are that they don’t have to be cautious so much. Sensitive info previously had to be sanitised if potential criminals might hear. Things like “xxxx has a habit of saying ‘ you know’ over and over again ”. If he does it’s perhaps ID, but if he doesn’t he may not be who he says. The old procedure was for control to ask “are you 10-8?” The code for can you be overheard. Stuff like this being private over just a few feet is a bonus, via the ear pieces. The encoding also allows senior officers to communicate privately from the ordinary officers, and the security that the bad guys are not listening in means the job is safer. Remote stun and kill of stolen radios is also carried out when they’ve just been misplaced, keeping the channels open. Regular reprogramming is also common. A channel gets taken out of use and a new one created. Here, we never had official eavesdropping from the media. It was done of course, but covertly, as we have laws that mean basically, if you overhear something on a radio not meant for you, you have to keep quiet. Nobody ever gets prosecuted, but the law meant the media can’t chase the a police when things happen. Now it’s impossible and media activities carry on. We have never had what the US had, scanners in the newsroom. In general here, certainly since WW2 is the notion things are private until they’re officially not. Of course we always had enthusiasts listening in. I remember hearing a police call to an incident where a local was always popping up as he had a radio, saying “Mr Mansi, if you’re listening, they have your coat at the Police Station fro last night, you left it behind!” He was a known annoyance, but just one guy, not a whole media army. They sort of put up with him.
Then one day, the switch was pressed and the emergency services just vanished. People moaned but as what they were doing was illegal, not a thing they could do.

I don’t think any emergency service think encryption is bad. Funny how tapping a phone line is thought of differently to tapping a radio transmission? On the internet, auditors take pictures and video of the police, and often talk loudly about their rights and shame the police for being angry, when what they’re doing is legal. Then the police turn on radio encryption. I can’t say I blame the .

one of the popular UK auditors made the mistake of annoying a scrap yard this week, just by being there, taking video and then getting his drone out and flying over. Five big fellas appeared, blocked his car in, and had ‘words’ with him. He had to call the police, the people he usually tries to run circles around, to rescue him. He has a broken arm. Perhaps auditing people who don’t actually care about the law was a mistake for somebody not too able to protect himself with anything other than a camera and his mouth.
Ye Gads!
 

Forts

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I don't see the media being given access to ANY ENC radios by a public official (Police Chief, Sheriff, Mayor, Village Trustee) at least in Illinois. You cannot possess a radio capable of ENC (programmed and operating) unless you are an official of law enforcement, fire, or EMS entity. Some agencies even ENC their fire, public works, and transportation systems making it impossible to monitor them. Motorola-owned statewide Starcom21 uses AES256 ENC protocol, which has something like six million codes, and they rotate similarly to a trunked system. I could be wrong, but I've been informed that "it can't be cracked." Again, I'm just stated what I have been informed, so there may be other explanations for how ENC operates its AES256 method with Illinois Starcom21 radio systems.

I have a few issues with the statement about not being able to possess a radio capable of ENC... almost any modern digital radio is capable of encryption these days.

Also, the number of combinations for an AES256 key is so astronomically large it's almost impossible to comprehend. Here's a little explanation I stole from another site:

"If you were simply brute forcing every possible key, there would be 2^256 keys you need to try. You'd expect to find it after going through (on average) half of the keys, so average expected number of attempts would be 2^255. This is a Really Big Number. If every atom on earth (about 1.3 * 10^50 atoms) was a computer that could try ten billion keys a second, it would still take about 2.84 billion years. Brute-forcing is simply not possible - you'd need to find a weakness in the algorithm that lets you take a short-cut here."

Also, keys don't rotate similar to a trunked system, but they can be updated on a regular schedule if the system is provisioned for it.
 

FD101

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So for those (likely few) people who have first-hand information about this, how common is it across the country for media outlets to get ENC radios, and how does the media go about getting such access? Do said agencies have a formal request process, or (like I suspect) does someone high up in the news organization make a phone call to the mayor or police chief, perhaps along with a donation to the local non-profit police foundation?

For agencies who do grant media access, do they have a formal access policy? Also is there a fee involved?
It's not really a backdoor deal or anything here in Kentucky, it's pretty simple actually for Lexington Area Media. Submit a formal request to the Mayor's office approving said media agency to have access to encrypted public safety radio traffic and authorization to respond to scenes for media coverage. The agreement gets drafted, sent to the Urban City Council for approval, and signed by the Mayor.

The media is required to purchase the radios (Tait, Harris, Kenwood, etc) and the E911 Radio Shop key loads them.

Access to the radio system is available only to media outlets with state and/or local business licenses, who are primarily engaged in media services and meet the following criteria. Television and radio stations must be licensed by the FCC. Print media must publish daily online news content and publish a physical paper or magazine at least once a week; for a period of at least one year, at the time of this agreement.
 

trentbob

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As a retired media type for large 7 day a week city newspaper, formally owned by a very large National Publishing Company with over 55 daily newspapers this is a touchy subject since the city I worked in has now gone encrypted. They had a nxdn system that was in the clear for over 5 years with the unwritten understanding that if a particular thing happened, they would immediately throw the switch, it did, they did. No access for the media or public.

This thread's topic is NOT why, the public and news media are locked out of Police radios, only that in some places they are. Apparently some places allow access to the media.

If somewhere in the country accommodations are made for news agency, there is a good chance that, the news agency may only get the dispatch frequency, car wrecks, events and initial dispatch of an incident. The police always have the option of switching to a channel that the media does not have access to.

For example. My city I worked in and the county I lived in went digital in 2000, we didn't have capable scanners but we could buy Motorola radios, both the county and the city would program them for us and the mayor of my city even gave each of the seven day a week daily newspapers their own police radio. I was the photo editor then and brokered the deal with the mayor. We only had dispatch, if anything got dicey they switched to a secondary channel we could not hear. This was before 9/11 and the police were happy to accommodate us. It still got a reporter or a photographer on the scene.

Transparency and public disclosure is touted as a talking point but in reality, the last thing the police in some places want is the news media knowing what's going on.

They issue press releases. The news media has obviously changed in the last 20 years and we're not going to get into that, other than to say, usually the news source takes the press release as the gospel. The day of the investigative reporter hitting the streets are long over, sometimes the news agency itself doesn't want the truth told, depending on.. LOL.

Funny related story, there was a police involved shooting on a car stop in a municipality near me many years ago and we got photos of the car riddled with bullets and quotes from the nabs about what they saw. No one was hurt.

It was getting later in the evening and close to putting the first edition to bed. We had our side of what happened so I called the OIC and asked for an official police press release or statement. They had ignored us previously on our routine cop checks. He faxed it over, it read like we were talking about two different incidents and the police gave the official quote that no shots were fired, at that point I had not given him what we had LOL.

I called them back and said we're going to press with the first edition. We're going to publish your statement and then show photographs of the car riddled with bullets and all the windows shot out. I can hold the presses for just so long as I've got the trucks lining up with union drivers, so here's your chance.

"No no no, don't do anything, I'll fax over a new press release" LOL. It just shows to go ya.
 

WX4JCW

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A Lot of it depends on Politics, some departments allow access some do not, if an agency has a bad relationship with the media, generally they wont be granted access, plus a lot of agencies feel the need to control information flow
 

Echo4Thirty

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A system I previously managed had all LEO talkgroups encrypted. We had a program that enabled TV/Radio/Newspapers to rent RX only encrypted radios programmed with the main dispatch channels. The radios still affiliated so often I would get a call from the SO asking me to query the system to see what they were listening to. The contract stated that the radios could be inhibited at the whim of the SO at any time. I never had to do that, but we did inhibit them (and charge them for replacement costs) when they would lose the radios from time to time.
 

trentbob

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A Lot of it depends on Politics, some departments allow access some do not, if an agency has a bad relationship with the media, generally they wont be granted access, plus a lot of agencies feel the need to control information flow
+1... I agree with this, a diplomatic way of saying what I'm thinking LOL. A bad relationship between the media and the police can often be as simple as.. what's really the true story. A public government agency controlling the flow of information is just another way of saying.. oh well, we won't go there.

It takes two, government agencies and news agencies both contribute to the problem of lack of transparency, public accountability and the truth.

I'm retired now but if I was still working, being an old time street reporter, I would really miss the police radio, trying to do my job and find the true facts wherever or whoever they lead to. I think truth plays less and less of a factor anymore and has become irrelevant.
 

dmh77yy

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A local govt doing this for one media outlet and then denying access to another media outlet is a situation likely to end up in court. The govt cannot suppress the news or give info to one outlet as they are defacto exerting control over the content of the news and giving an unfair advantage to one "friendly" news outlet and suppressing another. There is nothing in the constitution that says to be "press" or "media" the outlet must be a TV news station or publish a paper. (this is why agencies stopped with the press passes/badges) Such agreements shut out smaller outlets and alternative media. It takes the 1st amendment and says "hey unless you are really big and have a lot of $ to be on TV we will treat you differently". If an agency is going to encrypt LE traffic thats fine, but giving access to only a select group of media outlets is no bueno. What if one reports negatively on the actions of police? Can the cops turn off their radio as punishment? This is a bad idea for agencies to do. Either everyone has access or no one. Or a better option is for the agent to provide their own online feed for all to hear and just delay it 5 or 10 mins.
 

WX4JCW

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A local govt doing this for one media outlet and then denying access to another media outlet is a situation likely to end up in court. The govt cannot suppress the news or give info to one outlet as they are defacto exerting control over the content of the news and giving an unfair advantage to one "friendly" news outlet and suppressing another. There is nothing in the constitution that says to be "press" or "media" the outlet must be a TV news station or publish a paper. (this is why agencies stopped with the press passes/badges) Such agreements shut out smaller outlets and alternative media. It takes the 1st amendment and says "hey unless you are really big and have a lot of $ to be on TV we will treat you differently". If an agency is going to encrypt LE traffic thats fine, but giving access to only a select group of media outlets is no bueno. What if one reports negatively on the actions of police? Can the cops turn off their radio as punishment? This is a bad idea for agencies to do. Either everyone has access or no one. Or a better option is for the agent to provide their own online feed for all to hear and just delay it 5 or 10 mins.

Generally what i have seen happen is usually they will just shut off everyone equally as punishment, however if an agency does that they had better expect no favorable coverage from the media at all, that happens and everyone suffers because of egos
 

trentbob

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Generally what i have seen happen is usually they will just shut off everyone equally as punishment, however if an agency does that they had better expect no favorable coverage from the media at all, that happens and everyone suffers because of egos
Back in the day, and I'm talking about way back. Homicide detectives would show up at a row home, the location of the murder suspect, they would see me there parked down the street with a long lens. I would get a call on the bag phone or the shoe phone and the cops would want to know why I'm there and what do I have. We had two daily newspapers in my city at that time, a tabloid format which was my paper, very popular and could be found in every toilet and Diner seat in the city and we had a broadsheet, similar to like the New York Times.

We got tips constantly. Nobody read or cooperated with the other paper and they're out of business now.

If it was a friendly Detective who helped me in my career and who I always got along with, who allowed me personal access and gave me inside information.. I'd give him everything I had... if he was a pri*k who broke my stones for years, I would tell him to spend the 25 cents tomorrow morning and he'll know what I know.

This was a long long time ago LOL.
 

ladn

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Like @trentbob , I am also a former newspaper photographer and editor, but I worked in Los Angeles. There are numerous small cities, many of which now subscribe to ICI system. Encryption is at the subscriber's option. I'm not aware of any of these agencies providing subscriber radios to the media. The major players are the Los Angeles PD and FD, LA Co. Sheriff and FD, and CHP plus various 3-letter federal agencies.

LAPD switched to unencrypted P25 in the 1980's and initially, there were no scanners available that would decode P25. Many news outlets purchased or rented compatible Motorola radios and had them programmed, RX only, with the LAPD frequencies. This worked reasonably well until the Uniden BC-250 D became widely available with the optional P25 card. LA City FD was and is conventional 800 MHz, Sheriff and Co. FD were and are conventional UHF (with some V-Fire interop). CHP was and is conventional low band. The 3-letter federal agencies have mostly gone big E. Most of our agencies now rely on MTD's or cell phones for confidential information.

The Sheriff's Department is rolling out its RICS system which will be fully encrypted end to end. I haven't heard if they will provide subscriber radios to the media.

Also, like @trentbob , developing professional relationships with news sources was important.

The news business has become more complicated today because of the decline of traditional media and the proliferation of "new media". Unfortunately, many new media outlets lack the unbiased professionalism that @trentbob, I and others like us grew up with, and their sheer numbers can make news gathering awkward.
 
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