Radio users reminded not to use radios in crimes
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Of all the images I have seen of the attempted coup, I have only seen baofeng radios. These are very cheap ($20'ish) radios that work very poorly (they splatter all over the bands) even when equipped with decent antennas. They barely work when equipped with the stock rubber-duck antennas.
It's easy to be a snob about the type of radios that they are using, but that's not even the point.
These people are idiots. Bringing their cellphones, recording video of themselves committing felonies and then posting them online. There is already plenty of rules regarding what can/can not be said using amateur radios. There is however no requirement to provide identification before you purchase an amateur radio.
Anybody can buy them, and it's based on the honour system to use them according to the law. It's already against the law to use them in a manner that is against the law.
Id' like to see this used as a punitive measure against everybody who was using them during the coup. Maximum FCC fine for all of them.
If you can get a baofeng to last out of the box longer than a week, and manage to DX a handheld or a repeater further than a parking space away, you should at least win a QRP award and a discount on your technicians test before you get sent to the klink.
Hah! What a great bit of word-smithing there. I love it. Yes, that's a good description of the Baofeng radios. They're crap, but they're fine crap. Cheap, but workable as a beginner radio. I bought mine right when I got my Technician license, and it's served well for dipping my toes in the water a little. But I'll be buying a higher quality radio soon, if all goes according to plan.
If you have $10,000 and want to chat with people around the world, then you'll want something else. People hear "ham radio" and think "chatting with people all around the world", but that is not what Baofeng radios do :)
I have many baofeng radios which have been in many forms of being thrown into boxes, backpacks, filled with dust, rained on, abused by drunks, dropped, etc. and they ALL are still working fine, albeit some with dest behind the LCD cover.
My baofeng 5 died two hours into a 12 mile backpackign trip across catalina island. It couldn't do a quarter mile line of sight with an airport 2m amateur tower and when turning on the flashlight feature in my tent it died entirely and would not power back on. I was entirely reliant on it for ranger station as well as general comms and phone patch/weather. Packing this plastic trash couldnt have been more dangerous.
Programming is also a byzantine nightmare.
Batteries hold their charge well.
Bonus-- they have FM radios. Weirdly the only thing in my house powered by batteries that does!
> Due to overwhelming demand, we are not able to process any additional orders at this time
Why the warning from the FCC, who knows. I was always told ignorance of the law is no excuse.
It must be cheaper to issue a warning rather than expend resources to prosecute the people involved.
Is it literally making pleading ignorance an option?
I’m sorry that there’s some sort of “eternal September” in the radio community because of baofeng users, but lying won’t bring back the days when only people who could afford very expensive equipment could enjoy radios.
Not a lie. Personal observation. When I first got the radio I tested it at our groups ham shack. I was 150' away from our repeater (open field, no obstructions) and could not get the repeater to acknowledge my signal. I could hear everybody fine, but could not TX. One of my buddies handed me a spare antenna, and presto I was able to use the repeater. I was also able to hear repeaters that were 20+km away that I couldn't tune-in on the rubber duck. Transmit and receive improved with a different antenna. I thought I had a bad radio, bad transmit button, or bad microphone before I swapped out antennas.
My statement is 100% accurate based on my observations. Grumbles from the other members in my group agreed with the sentiment. They ship with bad antennas.
I stopped using mine because I don't have a spectrum analyzer and was told by Reddit that they send a lot of power out of band, which isn't something I care to do.
(I have a VHF module in my KX3 that meets my VHF needs. Mostly. Would like even better frequency stability for meteor scatter, WSPR, etc.)
Baofeng radios work just fine, and many amateurs I know have several as well. I have never tried the $20 UV-5R radios so I can’t comment on how well those work.
But I absolutely don’t buy the argument that all Baofeng are terrible radios and people must be idiots for buying them, even more so when the evidence turns out to be that you had a radio with a bad antenna once.
That alone cemented baofengs into my "good to have" category for life. They're cheap, and that's why I have been able to use them in the places I have.
[1] https://observer.wunderwood.org/2020/02/07/baofeng-hts-and-s...
My second Baofeng was more physically sound but had issues with RF harmonics on UHF so it was useless on the band I wanted it for.
I've since gotten a Radioddity DMR handheld and it's both physically and functionally sound. It cost the same as four Baofengs but it's worth it, not to mention the ability to talk on DMR groups.
You can call 911 on a radio frequency in the US?
"To call ESD, switch your MURS radio to channel 5 (154.600 MHz, CTCSS/PL 97.4) and report your emergency." [1]
[1] https://survival.burningman.org/survival-health-and-safety/g...
It makes me uneasy to see how much commentary on recent events seems to focus on insulting these people instead of hearing how society has failed them and why they're upset even if we tend to disagree with their suggested fixes. I think their presence in DC and that "colorful" person they elected are all symptoms of this behavior.
Look, I'm just a guy, with no fancy credentials or research to back this up, but the more I read, the more I try to understand this crowd, the more I talk with other people about this crowd, the more I believe these people are making choices. That is to say, there are plenty of educated and monied people running amok here. To believe that this is a crowd of impoverished, under/un-employed people with limited economic means that society has failed is in fact allowing them to behave recklessly and grow their audience. Nope. A lot of these folks know what they are doing or are allowing themselves to give in to their worst selves. That's not being failed, that's making choices.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/07/nikki-haley-critici...
There are real ills in society, but - ignoring that republican voters are significantly uninformed about things like the party's support for healthcare, e.g. Efforts to scrap Obamacare largely hurt poor Trump voters - that doesn't excuse them from the fact that they've swallowed the Trump Koolaid and taken part in a coup.
And besides, if you want to talk about society failing them - were there any black people in the Capitol?
Or taking over downtown city blocks for months...
Quite frankly lumping in all of the protests over the summer, for example the one The Donald had tear gassed, with the looting that largely took place after dark is really saying the quiet part out loud.
If they'd protested outside the Capitol not in it, I'd be more sympathetic, even if they were campaigning for the end of American Democracy.
How many white men were strangled to death on camera, pleading "I can't breathe!"?[0]
How many white women were murdered in their bedrooms after their apartment was stormed on a dubious-at-best, no-knock warrant? [1]
Now, how many violent, white insurrectionists are getting slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanors for breaching our nation's sanctum sanctorum? [2][3][4]
Yeah, there's a double standard. It's white supremacy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Breonna_Taylor
[2] https://www.syracuse.com/crime/2021/01/syracuse-man-arrested...
[3] https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/jenny-cudd-fbi-arres...
[4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/most-of-the-arrests-...
There is no justification for the fact that imprisonment and murder of black people by the police happens, and is encouraged, to a completely disproportionate extent in the US.
It's also well understood that imprisonment in the US is run on a for-profit basis not dissimilar to slavery, and some judges have gone to prison for corrupt sentencing.
These police actions are immoral, unjust, and just plain nasty, and the best way to stop having your cities set on fire is to stop them happening.
This shouldn't be hard to understand, but in a country which has areas which are only just getting over Jim Crow and lynchings the connection between institutionally abusing some people and having them fight back seems to be too much of a reach for some of the population.
So these riots occur predictably after every avoidable trigger event. And they will continue to happen until that lesson is learned.
This is completely different to an entitled middle income mob of COS-playing couch heroes storming the political centre of the US and making credible threats against elected representatives inside it - after a speech by the president which inflamed the mob, and after a campaign of lies by the president which threatened the foundation of electoral integrity.
All very possibly at the behest of a hostile foreign power.
That's simple textbook domestic terrorism. It has no excuse or justification, and it's naive and misleading to suggest the two are somehow equivalent.
That is, by definition, actual terrorism. Attacking a civilian population to achieve a political goal. It doesn't matter how awesome or not your goal is.
You're going to find the same issue with that approach that most violent people do - people resist and fight back. Several rioters have already found out that lesson.
> This is completely different to an entitled middle...
No, not really. Insurrectionists will also discover their nonsense will not be tolerated.
> it's naive and misleading to suggest the two are somehow equivalent.
Stop using violence to achieve political ends. See? Easy.
Economic Anxiety is often bandied around by people trying to justify often beyond-fascist behaviour as if morality is solely determined by money.
“All” probably overstates the case, but it certainly seems that they were disproportionately so. Certainly, those that have been arrested or identified from video (sets that seem to converge over time) seem to be largely employed (prior to the attack, less so after) and not poor.
While your ingroup is unique individuals with good and bad traits, your outgroup is an undifferentiated "them" that is selfish, untrustworthy, stupid, the reason for all these problems we're having, and we really may have to do something about them one of these days!
"These people are idiots. Bringing their cellphones, recording video of themselves committing felonies and then posting them online."
It doesn't seem that the commenter was branding every voter for the opposing candidate an idiot, just the specific group of people who shared evidence of themselves committing crimes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error
"I'm a newbie web developer and I've never heard of EXIF", and
"It didn't occur to me that I shouldn't have recorded video of myself committing crimes and then posted it on the internet."
> I'm just sick of being mean!
Fair point. And regardless, "these people are idiots" doesn't really help us make sense of what happened, or figure out how to stop people from even wanting to do things like this in the future.
I think it's an important thing to be aware of, ideally so you can recognize these thought patterns in yourself and others.
But of course I also implied that OP was doing this. A fairer description would note that most capitol invaders did not publish themselves committing felonies. Taking the dumbest/worst behaved members of the outgroup as typical is textbook.
And from inside the other group, the tribal brain thinks those crimes were committed by antifa provocateurs.
So far I assume (not in order): A) the "American dream" and doing better economically than your parents ain't all it used to be, B) non-hispanic whites are loosing their majority status, C) mass media and the internet are more disrupting than the printing press was, D) greed, corruption, and other political inefficiencies, and E) the scale and pace of change are unprecedented.
Everyone agrees that lots of stuff is broke. Politicians don't seem to be helping. We (the people) don't agree on next steps. Some want to turn back the clock. Others want to try something new. Too many want to impose their view on others who disagree.
I assume we'll figure it out eventually. Some cultures/societies will have it easier than others.
It's always "the left" that has to compromise and do the hard work of understanding and placating "the right". The right wing is immune to consequences and allergic to self-reflection. I'll stop calling them idiots when they grow up, actually take responsibility like adults do, and act accordingly.
Quick: let’s implement ID for everything, because that clearly stops criminals.
I don't think it's as simple as "these people were idiots because they recorded themselves committing a crime", to paraphrase this line of thinking. I'm pretty sure these people convinced themselves, and each other, that they were breaking the law to save the country. They thought they were recording a revolution in which they would be the new heroes.
Then they should be shot on sight. The only reason they weren't fired upon is the color of their skin.
In my estimation the Capitol Police were some combination of surprised, unprepared, under-equipped, and under-manned. The police didn't seem to have any plans or preparation. Some police are seen standing aside and letting protesters in to the Capitol (which, I agree is a light touch, but I also saw police kneeling in solidarity with BLM protesters, which is also a light touch). Other police are brawling with protesters (which, I think is probably about the right level of violence, we just needed more police to be there doing it and for all the police there to understand what they were supposed to be doing).
I don't think the police should shoot Capitol protesters or BLM protesters. I do think they should use physical force against both when they do things that are unacceptable - e.g. entering the Capitol or destroying or looting stores. I would say both groups call for a similar medium touch.
The Capitol should have been much better fortified by a much larger force given that the FBI, MPD, and Capitol Police knew or should have known about this plan for months. Had the presence of several hundred officers with multiple layers of fencing and visibly-manned M249 positions not been sufficient to convince their vanguard to run away, they would have been able to escalate to spotlights, LRAD, and less-lethal projectiles before needing to go with the real deal. A suitable amount of publicity for these preparations could very well have resulted in the Q Cucks Klan deciding to find an excuse to either make it a legitimate protest or call the whole thing off.
The deaths would have been at most two or three rioters, and possibly a few who get trampled in the panicked retreat. That would have been a light touch; it accomplishes the objective using a minimum of force, and if they saw reason nobody would even have been scratched. A medium touch would just be shooting anyone who tries to breach the perimeter until they stop trying (which would have been totally legal); a heavy touch would have happened to the BLM protestors if they had escalated to violence.
Kneeling in solidarity with protesters is fine because neither the protestors or the officer are breaking the law or indeed doing anything wrong. Letting an enemy force (and that's absolutely what a crowd of people with unlawfully-possessed guns and Army of Northern Virginia battle flags is) past your position is at a minimum conspiracy to enter and remain in a federal building without authorization.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/26/portland-protest-declared-a-ri...
Using BLM as an example, is it still fair to call them protesters though they sometimes fight with police (violent behavior), graffiti or break windows (vandalism), loot (breaking and entering)?
Here is the link you shared in a sibling comment: https://deadline.com/2020/12/armed-protesters-enter-oregon-s...
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/07/26/portland-protest-declared-a-ri...
When we do that, we still get shot by the police and nothing changes. Maybe if white people face consequences for once, things will change.
Like the Dalai Lama?
Shoot, they really did a bad job of that... Looks like they need to take some notes from the British on how to do it properly! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington#U.S._Cap...
Police:
+ Shoot and kill more unarmed white people than any other race
+ Overall shoot more white people
+ Shoot and kill people by race proportional to the recorded violent crimes stats
+ Shoot less than a hundred unarmed people per year, total
And, none of this is really surprising. White people make up more of the population so of course they're going to be a majority of police encounters, including Use of Force (UoF). Not every UoF encounter is illegal or unethical, even if the other person is unarmed - life is not an action movie where you can vulcan pinch someone unconscious.
Whenever somebody brings up that UoF incidents by race match the violent crimes committed by race, usually it ends in a shouting match of who can claim racism the loudest. Yet we can recognize over-representation in violent crimes by any race is probably due to lack of resources - and we know the things that reduce violence in any population (marriage, having kids, being meaningfully employed[1]) are less accessible to many minority populations.
We'd make a bigger dent in UoF incidents and crime in 5 years by just making pre-K childcare free and widely accessible than any amount of angry protests will ever accomplish.
[1]: This doesn't mean low paying temporary or part time work, but either a trade or profession with longterm gain
It's just racism, being rich doesn't insulate you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_contr...
Every major police force has a systemic racism problem and everything else is just window dressing. It's like the Civil War. In middle school you learn it's about slavery. In high school you learn it was about states rights and the balance between federal power and state power. In college you learn it's about slavery. There are always small factors worthy of study but sometimes the core reason really is that simple.
>We'd make a bigger dent in UoF incidents and crime in 5 years by just making pre-K childcare free and widely accessible
Good luck getting any Republican to vote for this. Republicans only care about people who are old enough to vote.
Yeah, usually when you see people forcing a door open, you should let the police know.
> It's just racism
It's just the results of spiritual decline. Obviously anyone who has deeply found religion would know that spiritual decline is the cause of human suffering, and that you only need a belief in <deity> to reverse these problems. If only we still taught the bible/koran/whatever in schools!
Single cause claims for complex phenomenon are almost always nonsense, especially ones without actionable solutions that fail scrutiny. They make great headlines, but they don't really hold up. They're used to attack the outgroup, not fix the problem.
> In college you learn it's about slavery.
If that's all you learned in college about the civil war, you should ask for a refund. Slavery was absolutely one of reasons several southern states entered the war, but it was by far not the only. Most southerners would not have fought purely for slavery because most of the soldiers were too poor to have owned slaves.
> Good luck getting any Republican...
Ah yes, we all know <purple team> is to blame! If only it wasn't for purple team, us green team would have solved every woe and problem. After all, every place where green team is in control is a bastion of prosperity, equality and liberty - and everyplace where that isn't true is due to purple team somehow, for some reason!
Culture wars are useful for pushing narratives and keeping both sides locked in a relative stalemate. Coke and Pepsi both benefit from these antics (Are you a coke drinker or a pepsi drinker?), but it's not an appropriate framework for political decision making where you often need to find compromise and pressure points to move the conversation forward.
It was still about slavery: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/why-non-slavehol...
>What concerned Southerners most about Lincoln’s election was his opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories; Southern politicians were clear about that. If new states could not be slave states, went the argument, then it was only a matter of time before the South’s clout in Congress would fade, abolitionists would be ascendant, and the South’s “peculiar institution” – the right to own human beings as property – would be in peril.
As I said before, while there are other factors and while they are interesting and worthy of study, sometimes the core reason really is that simple. It's not "enlightened" to pretend that simple things are complex.
>Culture wars are useful for pushing narratives and keeping both sides locked in a relative stalemate. Coke and Pepsi both benefit from these antics (Are you a coke drinker or a pepsi drinker?), but it's not an appropriate framework for political decision making where you often need to find compromise and pressure points to move the conversation forward.
It's worked great for the Republicans for the last 40 years (Ronald was the original Donald) and there is no sign it will stop working any time soon. It's only ever the left who have to compromise. Name a time in the last 40 years where a Republican has compromised and been rewarded for it.
I think 'these people are idiots' is an easy thing to think but almost always the wrong thing. Few people are idiots. Most people are just as smart as you are.
More likely, these people fundamentally aren't looking at the situation like you are. Probably, they don't care what you, or the police, or the FBI, or anyone else, think about what they're doing and don't care how they're being tracked.
They don't feel the need to hide.
It's comforting to think 'nah they must be idiots' for not hiding... but maybe more concerning to realise they could be right about not needing to hide.
These people don't believe in objective reality (Biden won the election and there was no meaningful voter or election fraud) and I'm having trouble thinking of a definition of "idiot" where something like that doesn't qualify.
Again... maybe they don't care instead of they don't believe? They may tell you they don't believe but what's not necessarily what they really think.
'They're just an idiot' is lazy analysis and dangerous. Very few people are idiots. Most people are lucid. It's dangerous because you're giving yourself a reason to be less cautious (how dangerous can they be - they're idiots, right?) rather than thinking these people aren't playing by the rules I'm playing by, what should I do about that?
Whenever you think someone’s an idiot stop and think if it’s their modus operandi to make you think that.
> Very few people are idiots. Most people are lucid.
I would question this. The average IQ is by definition 100. But that's not much at all! And there are 50% even below this line.
If one has a look at for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States it get's even more worrisome. A large part of the US population is actually illiterate. In other parts of the world it looks even worse!
We as a species would have solved most of our issues thousands of years ago if the average dude out there wouldn't be so incredibly dumb. And if you think about it a little bit, and judge form "normal" behavior around you, it's frightening how stupid people are actually. (Just put on the TV for a quick recap).
If you're here on this site chances are high that you're smarter than the average. Looking form this position it may be hard to acknowledge all that stupidity around you because "No, they can't be such dumb, nobody can be such dumb". But in fact they are even dumber than you could imagine...
These people aren't fifth dimensional chess masters. They're angry, and much of their anger is based on legitimate economic grievances. Instead of actually addressing that though, they fall back on the much easier conclusion that people with dark skin are to blame. The media plays a part in all this, but individuals need to take responsibility and these particular individuals never will. They don't trust anyone who seems "intellectual", so there's literally nothing I could say that would get through to them. Calling them idiots and moving on has the same end result for the target, but will convince a bystander more readily. If instead I engage with them in a debate, that automatically validates their (frankly insane) point of view, which confuses bystanders into thinking that maybe there is something to this "election fraud" nonsense. Deep down most of these folks are just terrible people who need to feel superior to others. Trump and the rest of the Republican party give that to them. They don’t want economic security, they want superiority over others. Until they change from within, they're going to continue to be "idiots".
In conclusion, why is it always "the left" that has to do the actual hard work in situations like these?
Misunderstood comment
[...] also misunderstood
Desperate people mislead by skilled con-artists. You can focus on the fact they got conned, and judge them harshly for it; or, you can focus on the fact that they're that desperate in the first place.
I think we only stand a chance at solving the latter problem, so sorting the "idiots" from the enlightened doesn't seem like a meaningful activity.
They got conned, but only because they really wanted to believe in the kind of supremacy that Trump radiates.
Look at the number of nurses refusing the vaccine. There aren't the only people having trouble discerning truth from fiction.
Recording yourself committing sedition is pretty dumb though...
Don't record yourself breaking the law.
It doesn't matter which side of history you end-up on. It doesn't matter if in 10, 50, or 400 years, history decides that you were right. Right now, the authorities will find you guilty.
There is a long history of police and intelligence services surveilling and infiltrating peaceful protest movements. Authorities of the day definitely will imprison people.
The big difference is that the QAnon/Trump/etc crazies are planning violent criminal action. Those people end up grouped with IRA/UVF, Nazis, ISIS, Hezbollah, mafiosos etc.
Writing them all off as idiots is dangerous
That's a pretty bold assertion on a site filled with engineers.
Exactly; a good portion of them probably really believe that somehow #45 could order, and authorize, the things that happened. The rest were probably just looking for a strong opportunity to go full anarchy and guns equal power moment.
For this to be true, you would have to be below average. That's just half of everyone.
But intelligence (like a lot of natural phenomena) is closer to a normal distribution.
You're introducing fuzzy language/approximations, which I was avoiding: one can say - in absolute terms - that any person above the median is smarter than most of the population.
An IQ band of 85 to 115 has 68% of the population, but are those at the lower end "as smart" as the upper end? The accuracy of your statement depends entirely on how wide your histogram bands are.
In a normal distribution, "average" must always also refer to median; they are always the same value.
...and mode too! I am well aware of the characteristics of a normal distribution (this is HN after all). I was contrasting parents insinuation that gp's assertion on halving only works with uniform distributions
> But intelligence (like a lot of natural phenomena) is closer to a normal distribution.
This is a baffling comment - uniform distributions and normal distributions do not differ in any way that is relevant to this topic. What were you trying to say? Why did you leave this comment?
> Most people are just as smart as you are.
Well which is it?
Well said.
A person in one of the videos taking photos of random documents says "Ted Cruz would want us to do this".
I think they expected to have no consequences...
“Stop discussing plans for a revolution on amateur radio bands like if we aren’t listening to them, we are, stop believing everything they say on Facebook. I mean, we do encourage civil discussions, but if you’re going to collude on terrorism over the radio we will hold you responsible for that”
Every single person here uses high powered encrypted communication without a license, it's a cell phone.
If your signal is strong enough to interfere with common uses of the band, well, then that's why people care.
My experience in the amateur radio community is that hate is exceedingly rare, although disagreement is common.
> Every single person here uses high powered encrypted communication without a license, it's a cell phone.
So let's have a discussion: do we really want these kickass bands to become another cell phone band? I think it's useful to have a part of the spectrum on which deafening corporate rent-seeking cannot hide.
I work full-time on cryptology, so I'm no stranger to the benefits of developing network protocols with cryptographic primitives in mind.
However, the radio spectrum is a great place to let many flowers bloom, and the amatuer bands appear to be experiencing a lovely, overdue bloom right now.
I bought an Icom-7100 last year, and the rapid growth of linux support for hacking on low-signal modes is wonderful to see, and I think it's happening because this band is the way that it is.
> FCC regulation of ham radio is at best antiquated cold war bullshit
Listen: I'm all for completely abolishing the FCC. However, I also recognize that the amateur radio licensing program plays a very important role in society: it allows us to stand and be counted in favor of tinkering and experimentation in the mainstream of some of the best bands on the spectrum. It prevents the government and its cronies from claiming that these bands are fallow and better utilized as even more centralized, profiteering, plastic bullshit.
I don't disagree with your thinking, I just ask that we apply different thinking to different parts of the spectrum so that we can have a more robust and diverse experimental reckoning of the airwaves with which we're blessed.
It's like asking why a car driver needs to understand when to turn off high-beams, when not to honk, and how to safely open their door after parking on a busy street.
i.e. we live in a society, other people are affected by your actions.
Your cell service provider holds the license.
Ham radio exam is not hard, and does not require special training, just some basic knowledge of how radios work and what the regulations are. I don't see what the issue is.
Not only that, but every exam question comes from a published pool of questions [0]. If you can memorize the answers to those questions, then you don’t need to learn anything about how radio works at all.
There's a lot of fundamental infrastructure decentralization that can happen once some of the HAM frequencies allow encrypted use.
What you really want instead is something like the HAM license allowing the use of point to point equipment at higher power and on frequencies reserved for operators that respect the communications medium.
I find it more believable that the government is scared of such technology than that encryption would be such a detriment to the HAM radio community.
That's the problem - hn regularly has threads talking about how decentralized infrastructure is so important. Having a (dialup speed) p2p network that is built on long range connections would be insanely reliable and would probably revolutionize what we think of as the Internet.
- ISPs would be optional
- access to the internet would be the one-time cost of the hardware
- a totalitarian government trying to shutdown the internet would have to hunt down portable repeaters over hundreds of square miles
- the infrastructure would be in the hands of the people, not megacorps like verizon and comcast.
But that requires encryption, and spectrum allocations that can cover the distance.
1: For stupid legacy reasons, I can't use crypto
2: In order to get and hold a license, I have to provide my full name and address, which is then PUBLICLY AVAILABLE
No, I don't care about ham, I care about the many other things you need a ham license for, such as flying drones in some configurations. I never said any of this was an accident, and the cryto stuff is absolutely cold war legacy bs.
I wonder if the executive order signed the other day might be relevant to this (preventative in its effect rather than complementary)? https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
This reminds me of a question on the US immigration card for non-citizens - it asks if the traveler intends to rob a bank. If you want to be let in, you have to check "no" of course, but anyone who then robs a bank while on vacay will face an additional perjury charge.
I'm not sure if this accomplishes anything other than the usual "tough on crime" stuff.
Aah got it, that makes sense now. So it's not just political posturing for the extra-tough- on crime stuff.
Until you go to a US court, you probably think it's that simple. This is very wrong.
There are plenty of US laws that are so broad (or narrow) that nothing or everything fits or are so badly written as to be ineffectual. There are also silly laws in place, which are not enforced. The act is likely going to be adjudicated based on current prevailing influence holders, of the time and area. This is why moving jurisdiction is typically the simplest way to indemnify a defendant.
Take the levels of scrutiny applied to laws and regulations in equal protection lawsuits, for example. Why is judicial review for racial discrimination covered under strict scrutiny, but sex discrimination only covered under intermediate scrutiny? There's no statute prescribing this—American courts invented it.
To put it another way, you probably won't be charged just for selling drugs over a radio frequency. You'll be charged for the regular crime of selling drugs and an additional charge of using radio to commit that crime.
This case isn't really so bad because there's no prior restraint, no tools being taken away, or new tools for the government.
There is still concern that charges could be heaped on someone to the point they feel the need to plea bargain for something that is either a very minor offense or protected speech.
Not always. Not saying it is here, but I think it depends on the context. Arab Spring, for instance.
Fast forward a decade later, and now the attitude is the complete opposite.
People do what it takes to survive. Trump usurping power and ending 230 years of US democracy represents an existential threat. Don't be shocked that a lot of people and companies are not on-board with that idea and are willing to take extreme measures to prevent it.
I'm saying there is no reason to be surprised when you're asking platforms to ignore Trump's attempt to end democracy and they decline.
To give a hypothetical: if Trump's followers were harassing Matt Prince's family every day at home, work, and school there wouldn't be any hand-wringing about "free speech" or "censorship" from Cloudflare. Anyone related to Trump would find themselves banned in short order. That would be purely a move of self-preservation.
Similarly a lot of platforms (and donors) realize these people are no longer useful idiots but deluded to the point of ransacking the house of Congress in an attempt to overturn the election. That's really dangerous and could destabilize the country and even the world. When faced with an existential threat don't be shocked when people are unwilling to sit down and debate on behalf of MAGAs/Fox News acting in bad faith.
1: https://newrepublic.com/article/160922/capitol-riot-revealed...
1776?
There is that little affair from 1765 to 1783 that gets generally good press, though. "Context is for kings" is tinged with irony on that one.
> This case isn't really so bad because there's no prior restraint, no tools being taken away, or new tools for the government.
Jokes aside, any sentence which contains "no tools being taken away" around messages such as this one are is assuming too much about the future - it is entirely within the power of both executive (FCC) and legislative (Congress) to curtail the use of specific tools, including radios. It shows that someone in the agency has thought that this particular case warrants making a public statement, which is an escalation.
Gets good press, but, compared to the Commonwealth countries, it's not clear it was really necessary or beneficial.
When you say countries inspired by the revolutionary war, you probably don't mean "North Vietnam."
“Freedom of speech”, much like “freedom of religion”, is an empty statement. — no man wants true freedom in either, so one is only free so long as it not thread over the bounds of the law, and it can thus be surmised as “One has the right to commit legal actions.”.
It's entirely different from such matters as “right to a criminal defence attorney when charged with a crime”, which many do feel should be absolute, and that all other laws must bend and give way to accommodate it.
One already has the freedom to do whatever one wish, so long as it not thread over the bounds of the law.
Are you appealing to the desires of the crowd (bandwagon fallacy), or to a moral principle? I'm talking about moral principles, which the laws and the government ought to uphold.
If they don't, the law and/or government is in the wrong. The right to speak your mind is a moral right; arguably, the right to defend yourself with an attourney is a subset of this. The law is not the arbiter of what is right, or what rights humans possess "inalienably". The law only enforces and protects those rights (since it's inefficient for each person to defend their own rights against everyone else: "I will have my attourney at my trial, I challenge you to duel if you disagree").
If freedom of speech is impinged, then a human right has been trampled upon. If a private individual forces someone else to be silent, they are morally in the wrong, even though there's no law against it. If the US government did it, then the US acted against its constitution and broke a moral principle, if not the laws on the books.
If not, then you do not believe in absolute freedom of speech, but only freedom of speech within the confines of the law.
It's a cute 'gotcha', but you're not actually saying anything that relates to what I said. I said 'moral principle', not 'absolute', and you continue to refer to 'the law'. You're not distinguishing between the laws the government decides upon, and the moral principles we use to evaluate good laws and bad ones.
From the outset, I said that there is a difference between saying that freedom of speech is something the government allocates to us, and something which the government ought to allow. Do you think the government gets to decide what we are, and are not, allowed to say?
I simply said that the claim of believing in “freedom of speech, except where one not” is an empty, useless, and trivial statement.
Everyone believes in “freedom of speech, except where he draw the line”.
I'm arguing that the government is not who gets to determine what that hierarchy is, and thereby determine what gets to superceed freedom of speech.
I really don't want anyone - liberal, conservative, Christian or radical Islam - enforcing their determiniation of moral hierarchy on me. Do you?
To be clear, are you taking the position of the anarchist here? I mean no disrespect, I only wish to understand your position. I think most people would say, with various exemplars, that the government can legitimately have a blacklist maintained over certain speech, very much in the same way it can have one over certain actions.
This is not an appeal to popularity, it is a statement of the non-anarchist position. You may think it is invalid, but by the same token, I think that consistently you'd have to see laws against murder or child rape to be invalid.
Each does whatever they like, so long as they do no harm to anyone else. Where the least common ground exists, interactions are polite and restrained (to the mathematical extreme of minimizing any information transfer at all, if zero common ground exists); where greater common ground exists, speech and action can be more unrestrained.
If harm is done, then the harm itself is the issue. Hyperbolic example, to make it super clear: it's perfectly fine to shout 'fire' in a crowded building; however, if you cause harm you're on the hook. Not because you shouted "fire", but because you (one way or another, the means is irrelevant) caused people to be trampled.
The difference between that and the similiar position stated earlier is small, but I think there's a bright line: whether the speech is restricted, or the doing of harm is restricted. It's a trivial difference at face value, but the logical derivations are very different.
If one of the desert island castaways attempts to do harm to another, the rest of them might naturally band together to prevent and reconcile it. That's where I see government involved: the banding together, to prevent and reconcile harm done.
In that way, morality is untouched. No one inflicts their views on anyone else. Total ignorance of all moral hierarchies is preserved. Government says nothing about what may or may not be said. The only view inflicted on anyone is the minimum precept, 'do no harm to others'.
The whole point of the constitution is to put a limit on the law. The government cannot pass a law forbidding a certain kind of speech as it would be unconstitutional.
> One already has the freedom to do whatever one wish, so long as it not thread over the bounds of the law.
You have it backwards. The law can dictate whatever it wants so long as it does not thread over the bounds of the constitution.
The language is troubling, but the laws on the books in US are already ridiculously broad and overbearing. Usually, the question is more along the lines of what stick you want to use. Just in case you never had a chance, "Three felonies a day" gives will give you an idea where US is now.
You can’t do ‘anonymous code talk’ even if you do happen to have a licence. You can’t broadcast music, or do one-to-many messages except to setup one-to-one conversations (ie CQ or during club “nets”) - it’s not free, in fact it’s quite regulated.
When you reach six, USA will qualify as a dystopian wonderland: https://aliceinwonderland.fandom.com/wiki/Six_Impossible_Thi...
The sequitur between "social media platforms" and "commit or facilitate crimes" is quite interesting.
> The Bureau recognizes that these services can be used for a wide range of permitted purposes, including speech that is protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
They didn't jump straight to illegal speech as it sounds like you're inferring. They mentioned legal speech first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21109605
A lot of that is probably to reach areas the cartels need to operate that don't have other reliable communication, or have little enough that it would be easily surveiled. Not sure if it applies to urban criminal activity, which is what the ARRL is worried about.
Key distribution.
Encrypted radios are useless if no one knows what key to use, and equally useless if everyone knows what key to use. Sharing encryption keys with people you've never met on an open forum is equivalent to giving everyone the keys, just like sharing encryption keys with random people you've never met at public riot is equally equivalent to giving everyone the keys. One of those people you share with will be on the other side, at which point it's game over for your encryption. That said, given the brain trust that invaded the capitol building, I guess you're right, it is surprising they didn't have that added layer of security theater in the form of useless encryption everyone in DC could have been listening to.
I'm sure they saw the paramilitary LARPers at the Capitol carrying radios capable of the frequencies in question. I'm sure some of them are on video using the radios and are about to be charged.
If you go through the notices of apparent liability issued by the FCC, which are all public, the individual persons getting fined are egregiously dumb, such as the guy who operated a multi band cellular jammer on his daily commute north/south on the interstate freeway in Florida. Or you have to do something like operate a pirate FM radio station for many months at a time always from the same fixed location.
The FCC's enforcement bureau does not have a great number of staff or resources to go chasing down everything.
"Music using a phone emission except as specifically provided elsewhere in this section; communications intended to facilitate a criminal act; messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals or identification."
In the Capitol area, it's highly likely multiple agencies are capturing all RF for later analysis. This is also not used for FCC rule enforcement.
The FCC has the ability to locate signals using directionfinding equipment, but as mentioned elsewhere, usually that's left to Amateurs themselves on their bands.
But in a cost cutting move they handed over most of the monitoring of the ham bands over to volunteers organized by the ARRL. Testing was also turned over to volunteers and you no longer had to go to the local FCC offices.
As a result the FCC personnel lost contact with hams. This in my mind is the only reason that this letter could have been sent. If they have proof that these communications are taking place they should say so. Hams do a lot of volunteer work in their communities and it's like the federal government all of a sudden feels they are untrustworthy. This did not sit well at all with the hams I know in our local community.
CB'ers used to buy ham radio amplifiers and use them illegally. The ham band of 10 meters was close enough to the CB 11 meter band it could be done with little change.
So manufacturers at the behest of the FCC started removing 10 meters from linear amplifiers. If you showed proof of licensing you could get a plugin to add back the 10 meter band.
As a HAM, to the other HAMs who are worried the FCC will use this as justification to curtail your privilges -- they will, and they'll tell you it's necessary for your own safety.
Will it make us any safer? Of course not. So where does the real problem lie? The people using radios to commit crimes, or the government using that as justification to restrict freedoms?
The answer is: yes.
> At the turn of the 20th century, the terms "ham" and "plug" were used by landline telegraphers to describe an operator "who lacks ability" or who had poor or "ham fisted" skills.
Whether or not that counts as encryption, I don't know.
[1] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/american-indi...
[2] https://romanroadlondon.com/cockney-rhyming-slang-history/
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id...
When I chatted with a SRO about this when programming the schools radios a few years ago, I was told that he didn't know anyone other than the State Police to issue citations for that law, and it would only be a 'secondary' offense (if you were pulled over for speeding, and they saw the scanner, then you'd likely get a citation, but, they wouldn't pull you over if you had an antenna on your car).
When I used to play Ingress we'd use Zello with separate channels for each team and a few more for area coordinators. If you really want to get fancy you can get push-to-talk earbuds that connect to your cellphone's headphone jack, assuming you have an old enough cellphone that is.
Not that anything I'm saying should be construed as advice for people who want to go commit crimes. Frankly I think the best plan is for everyone to stay at home rather than potentially catching Covid and 5-10 years to boot.
But if one licenses spectrum, then it is not an offense, in its own right, to facilitate criminal acts? (Though the acts themselves of course still are...)
Yes, that's why we call it "trespassing" instead of "taking a shortcut".
In some places, "taking a shortcut" is legal unless there is a sign saying, "No Trespassing". So those signs actually make sense, depending on local laws.
I’ll bet most of these people use Baofengs purchased on Amazon. It’d be great if Amazon could echo this warning on the relevant product page(s).
So, yes
There are other ways to do this of course, but driving is the one you can control the most.
However, 2.4GHz and 5Ghz are in the frequencies alloted to licensed Hams so many do set up WiFi networks that can transmit stronger signals than off the shelf consumer wifi devices where this would certainly apply.
tldr; No, if you aren't using an external antenna or firmware that would cause your WiFi device to change from being considered a Part 15 device to a Part 97 device under the FCC.
And they wonder why the kids aren't going into amateur radio.
It isn't particularly shocking that this is a statute. I wonder if ham radio was used in the capitol riot.