EMS dispatch during protests

medium.com

10 points·rikeanimer··6 comments

Did you know that many doctors and hospitals use pagers to send/receive texts with sensitive patient information in a plain text and in a clear violation of HIPAA?

Many radio things are surprisingly vulnerable and insecure. Just think of the age of the infrastructure of paging, SMS, etc. . .

Broadcastify took down all Philly LE feeds early this afternoon

> Status: FEED OFFLINE DUE TO RIOTERS USING FEED AGAINST POLICE.

https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/ctid/2291

I can't see many impacted cities feeds lasting much longer

Did this author think that protesters would see this, but LE wouldn't?

Security through obscurity is never a good strategy. If the public starts listening it is good.

If the services that stream online there are other ways to monitor those frequencies such as rtl-sdr [realtek software defined radio] that folks will start to use to monitor this.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com

Listening to police radio should be as available, recorded, and easy as bodycamera footage should be.

It will never be until we actually start to monitor and complain when it is made unavailable.

I am kind of surprised that police would use unencrypted radio. Wouldn't this help criminals time and predict their escape route to give them the best chance of success?

Many police departments still use unencrypted radio to be interoperable with other police / agencies who may not have received funding for fancy radios.

Australia invested $22 mill in a nationwide encryption for their law folks and it was cracked rather quickly. . .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com