Should we be worried about hostile powers building radio transmitters to interfere with emergency broadcasts, but only turning them on before they launch a nuke at us?
Radio is available for use for everyone with proper licensing and certification; there's even a block of frequencies reserved for amateur use (read: ham radio).
The US is a country based on rule of law, your anarchist arguments aren't providing useful discussion.
Conversely, if we're not worried, are illegal broadcasts such a danger?
yeah, but it is not legal to encrypt the ham radio traffic, kinda defeats the whole point of having a frequency for DIY usage.
My comment was questioning the efficacy of FCC regulations against protecting from a "real" threat, i.e. same kind of argument as "gun free zones only stop good guys with a gun while not stopping bad guys with a gun."
If anything, I was asking if there should be more regulations to protect against threats that attempt to obfuscate their presence.
Any incidents that go beyond just interference will likely involve other regulatory and law enforcement agencies anyway, so it's unlikely the FCC itself needs more powers for now.
Though it's not like Russia hasn't already tried anyway[0].
I'm pretty sure most people here are going to at least know what ham radio is. That's not the reason why people here are sympathetic to pirate AM/FM radio broadcasters. It's moreso because the AM and FM radio bands are basically a cultural dead zone: ClearChannel and friends bought them all up in decades past and turned them into garbage. This is the sort of misallocation of resources that economists tend to have a blind spot for. According to them, efficient markets[1] are perfect allocators and anyone not having their tastes satisfied are just harbingers of failure[2] angry that their Crystal Pepsi got discontinued. The reality is that there's literally no reason to have eight stations all playing the same mainstream format in one market, and the FCC has dropped the ball on maximizing public utility of the spectrum.
'Cause here's the thing: yes, radio is "available for use" with proper licensing and certification, but that's basically an elaborated no. It's sort of like saying "copyrighted material is available with proper licensing". Nobody is going to be able to afford the licenses, if they're even offered, because the FCC runs on an auction system. And it turns out that that the mainstream station formats are really, really profitable to the point where you can outbid everything else. Is this an actually worthwhile use of the AM/FM bands to have what are effectively duplicates of the same station on every band in every market?
[0] Ok, it was a radar system, not a jamming system, but that's just a difference of intent. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbi6eoh63ZQ
[1] Fun fact: did you know the Efficient Markets Hypothesis implies P = NP? It's true - if markets are perfectly efficient then they can solve boolean satisfiability problems, which are NP-complete, and thus you can break all crypto.
On the other hand, inefficient markets also imply all those finance soothsayers with their technical analysis can actually beat the market.
[2] "Harbingers of failure" are people who are unusually good at buying doomed products. See https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...