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.