The N.Y.P.D. Is Upgrading Its Radios. The Public Won't Be Able to Tune In. | Hacker News Reader

The N.Y.P.D. Is Upgrading Its Radios. The Public Won't Be Able to Tune In.

nytimes.com

54 pointsbookofjoe73 comments

I live in the SF Bay Area, and in my sub-region, everyone uses the same P25 trunk system. By everyone I mean fire, sheriff, city police, medical, animal control, public works, park district, other fire departments, and even the mass transity agency has a hookup too.

I listen to it via SDRTrunk which is fascinating, but challenging with so many channels of so many different things going on. That being said, half the police chatter is encrypted. Not by default, but they have the option. And that's totally fair.

The police deal with a lot of sensitive situations and personal information. If it was my information that they were reading across the radio, I'd rather it's not generally available for any random person to get. Plus I've seen first hand what happens when the criminals have scanners tied to police radio. My favorite was 4th of July in San Francisco - everyone was setting off illegal fireworks all over. Some of the bigger displays would go on for quite some time then, as soon as there was a police dispatch call for that location... the fireworks show would stop and no one would get caught. 15mn later... the show would start again.

Clearly people are listening and using the information for illicit purposes. There are not a huge number of benefits to the public having real-time access, but there are some huge detriments. Note: I said real time. Recordings obviously should be kept of everything.

And remember, cops have cell phones. If they really want to say some shit and not have it recorded, they know how to turn off their body cams and use their phones. It's not like the public listening to the radio is gonna keep a bad cop from doing bad things.

> There are not a huge number of benefits to the public having real-time access, but there are some huge detriments. Note: I said real time. Recordings obviously should be kept of everything.

We can't even manage to make police cams work to stop police brutality. It seems hard to believe that anything potentially incriminating would be decrypted and made public with people so well-practiced "technical problems."

Not if you draw the expectation at perfection. Police cameras have been tremendously helpful for accountability and transparency.

In what way? Do you have evidence of your claim? Police flatly refuse to release damaging footage to the public, often turn off or obscure their range of view, and yet somehow these cameras are always running in good working order when they capture incriminating evidence on a suspect.

Police do those things because the camera is effective. The solution here is to punish officers for disabling or obscuring their cameras, not to get rid of the cameras.

It's the DRM argument - publishers don't stop using Denuvo because someone always manages to crack it, they use it to stop little Timmy from copying Assassins Creed 27 on to a USB drive for his friend Dave. In the same way, Officer Porkchop can't openly conspire with Lieutenant Bacon to plant evidence, because the audio is on record. But doubtlessly, the Porcine Patrollers will manage when it really counts, maybe just not as often.

well the first level, any evidence collected and released is more than zero, which is the baseline before cameras. They are frequently included in trials. They are also sometimes released to the public in high profile cases, usually in the interest of exonerating the police, but which is also sometimes informative.

Do you have any reason you do you think that they are a net negative?

The only centuries old effective way to police the police is to have watchmen for them. In ancient time, they have society assassins that will hunt down entire police families (including extended one over several decades). This is usually misrepresented as family feud. The best example of this was how entire family/clan of China first emperor exterminated with the instigation of one of Chu (a country destroyed by first emperor) originated eunuch. You need to have a society element carrying illegal extermination to keep police or rulers in check.

> The police deal with a lot of sensitive situations and personal information. If it was my information that they were reading across the radio, I'd rather it's not generally available for any random person to get.

> And remember, cops have cell phones.

Lotta rural regions combine the best of both worlds: a reliable and cheap to operate unencrypted plain radio system, but small enough that they just call eachother for sensitive info.

Not perfect (gotta call out an address and that may be no bueno for a domestic call). But worked a treat during the Nashville bombing and FirstNet went down across multiple states (ooops).

The entire state of Minnesota has a P25 system (called ARMER[0]) for public safety, and I’ve done the same thing with SDRTrunk. It is fascinating! But you need to filter out a LOT to really follow anything otherwise you'll end up hearing about shift changes on the light rail while you're trying to listen to updates on a car chase.

Unfortunately the same things started to happen and now some users (Hennepin County Sheriff recently) are encrypted by default.

[0]: https://www.radioreference.com/db/sid/3508

"Everyone" except special, uc, and tactical units.

Trotting out every argument against E2E encryption, but in reverse… secure communication for me, but not for thee.

Accountability doesn’t need to be real time - every word is recorded, either centrally or by multiple body cam mics. All those recordings are accessible where accountability really matters - in court.

I don't really see why this is similar to the usual E2EE argument. these communications are public record on purpose, whereas people's personal conversations are not.

Bringing that into this is pointless, especially since I doubt this is E2EE in the same sense that private chats are.

These communications also contain personal and sometimes sensitive information of citizens.

I can see how that is an issue, but I still think bringing the E2EE argument in here is completely beside the point, and I think your point here serves to illustrate that: if a private chat didn't contain potentially sensitive information, it wouldn't make it any more reasonable to argue against being able to encrypt it. It may very well be that what the NYPD is doing is ultimately the right way to go, but you can't get there by comparing it to the typical E2EE debate.

I'm not comparing it to E2EE. I'm stating there is personal information in the messages. The subject doesn't have a choice to how that information is transmitted or protected. There should be a duty for the government to protect that person's info if they have the power to force the person to disclose it.

Most recording are not by default public record either. Oftentimes it needs to be censored before being released to protect sensitive information, like subject addresses, license numbers, etc.

I see. Yeah, that doesn't really have anything to do with what I was replying about honestly, so this is more of a tangent.

It was mostly meant as an add-on response to your parent.

"oops the records are gone. Can't rule based on absence of evidence."

Individual rights are not applicable to gov entities. Gov entities can levy fines and apply criminal charges. You're comparing apples to oranges. Every time gov moves power away from the people they're doing it for the benefit of those in power. Not for you. Even if it works now it will be abused the second the current governance is replaced.

NY, like most big cities, is already incredibly corrupt. If you believe adding more power on top is proper then you're playing football with people's lives.

What are they getting over the radio that can't be recorded in person?

The people most likely to benefit from the recordings are the ones in contact. The recordings are a terrible small piece of information and are generally self-censored. Better of recording everything in person.

¿Por que no los dos? It NEVER hurts to know the radio-ins for scenes and if inaccurate information is given, if something unbecoming is shared to one officer by another, if there is conspiracy to participate in the blue wall of silence [1], and many more scenarios.

Indeed, this information can transpire in court, but it shouldn't be the People's only avenue to RECEIVE such intel. If this were to be the case, the courts would have leverage to transparency, whereas the People should have both.

You shouldn't NEED the court to start your search on proving damage from the State. You don't NEED to wait for a courthouse summons to know your rights were violated. If your prerequisites to be upset are explicitly the actions and behaviors that occur in judicial proceedings, then this country is far gone. If that's the one area you want to protect to the largest extent, then bad actors will use every other step before that one (including arrest) against you - and that's where radio comms come in.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence

They use cell phones for the stuff they don't want people to hear.

"If your prerequisites to be upset are explicitly the actions and behaviors that occur in judicial proceedings"

Not sure where you're getting that from. As I stated before, in person recording should have more and better information. This does not require a court.

I think I mistook one comment by another person for yours and thought you brought up that belief that only recordings of police radio should be shared - on behalf of the people - in Court. My mistake!

This.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

― Frederick Douglass

You can't paint in black and white like that without a tool or metric for discerning good govt action from bad.

Laws against murder "take power from the people" too.

The question should always be what you, a person wants.

Even abuse, assuming it happens is a tradeoff. Is it worth it? I usually think no, but it isn't something you can take an idealist all or nothing approach on.

agreed. 90% of the time someone uses a "me..thee" phrasing, it is associated with a superficial and juvenile take.

Different standards apply in different situations. The devil is always in the details with drawing the line. Simply noticing a difference and making it rhyme is not a criticism. "sirens for me, speed limits for thee" isn't a clever point.

All these recordings can be out should be accessible in court. But everyone knows that won't always be the case. In addition you might not know they need to be accessible

> secure communication for me, but not for thee.

Nobody would be opposed to the NYPD having an authenticated channel for their communications. Having an encrypted one diminishes the public’s oversight during a time of already diminished oversight.

Comparing the public’s right to privacy with a government agency’s desire to further escape accountability is a category error.

(More to the point: the precipitating factor for all of this was Eric Garner’s death at the hands of the NYPD; they would not have been held accountable had someone not noticed their chatter as he was being killed[1]. Timeliness of public access absolutely matters.)

[1]: https://gothamist.com/news/nypd-is-spending-390-million-on-a...

In my experience it seems there is not a lot of understanding, even among people who are technology oriented, that it is possible to do strong cryptographic authentication without encryption. Whether from oversight or purposeful omission, it's an option that very rarely surfaces in discussion.

In the UK, police radio has been encrypted for the last twenty or so years and in fact it’s illegal to even try to listen in on anything without permission.

Yes but the UK has been one of only 2 countries in the world with that peculiar legal stipulation (not being allowed to listen to unencrypted signals)

But yeah in Holland the police radios have been encrypted for 20 years as well.. Their pagers are not and there's many sites publishing this info. I believe in the UK publishing info that was received is also not allowed.

On the one hand I understand, even before it was encrypted they'd often have to call the officers on a cell phone to protect personal information.

However on the other hand it makes the police service even more opaque again. The public radios made for great accountability.

I think in UK, you're allowed to listen, but not doing anything with that info. Which has been taken to extend to redistribution or recording, not just showing up at a crime scene.

I found this: https://www.pprune.org/atc-issues/206063-listening-uk-atc-co...

In regards to listening to ATC and police (where unencrypted of course).

So apparently it's not allowed to listen at all. It's just very hard to catch and someone spreading heard info is of course much easier to identify so I guess enforcement is more focused at the latter.

$500 million is quite a lot for encrypting radio signals. And it wont help against jamming.

Meanwhile, imagine what that could do for the MTA, the housing shortage, the migrant situation, or the homeless population.

It’s slightly more than the annual budget of the New York Public Library system, which is being forced to open fewer days and close branches thanks to Adams’s budget cuts.

It’s slightly less than the amount by which the NYC schools budget is being cut this year (the same year federal stimulus funding goes away), forcing schools to cut things like pre-k programs.

For the MTA, not much. Their yearly budget is more than $19 billion per year: https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics.

A lot of that is earmarked for capital projects and debt servicing. An extra $500 million would actually go pretty far: reduced headways (like they’re trying this year), more frequent station cleanings, etc.

These radios aren't cheap (not saying they're justified). The ones we just got issued in my county's fire departments were over $9,000 each.

But they are both VHF and UHF, fully watertight, connect to our SCBA packs, can give precise location info (UWB as well as GPS, I believe), can withstand high heat, are 'intrinsically safe' (which I gather to mean that even if dropped the battery / pack / terminals should not arc, which could be a problem in a hazmat/flammable gas situation) and are very heavy duty.

Again, not saying it's worth that, but also a lot more going on than the HT1250s they're replacing, which go for about $150 on eBay now.

The main reason prices are so high is indirectly due to the civilian restrictions on encrypted radio. There's no real competition because the market is a relatively small B2I environment with no ability to defray costs by rolling out to civilians (plus they wouldnt be able compete on price with cheap Chinese radios anyways).

> And it wont help against jamming.

No, but if you're running a jammer, it's not going to be long before the FCC pays you a friendly visit, and instructs to you to kindly turn that shit off.

'What if someone will be running a jammer to disrupt police communication' is about as big a concern for this procurement as 'what if there's a full-scale thermonuclear war'. Sure, it can happen, but it's not on a PD's top-50 list of things to be concerned about.

It sounds more like $500 million for upgrading the entire network, which isn't entirely unreasonable. It could have been cheaper, but there are some factors that make it more expensive:

* The network is in the US, where infrastructure is always more expensive.

* It's for a government entity, and the US is known for its inefficient government spending.

* They may have to buy American instead of shopping around for the best deal. Encrypted government radio networks are state-of-the-art technology from the 90s. There are plenty of established systems to choose from if you are willing to trust them.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no requirement that the NYPD only procures American-made equipment.

Replacing a radio network is expensive, but $500M is eye-poppingly large. Given the NYPD’s track record of financial infidelity, it isn’t unreasonable to suspect a decent amount of graft at play here.

Hong Kong budgeted HK$ 948 million for a comparable TETRA network in 2001. That's $120 million nominal and $210 million adjusted for inflation. Compared to that, $500 million doesn't sound entirely unreasonable.

It's hard to find more recent numbers, because these days everyone is transitioning their government radio networks to use commercial infrastructure.

2.5x what a larger municipality paid for a system that was newer at the time seems pretty unreasonable to me. It’s not like the NYPD is field testing something cutting-edge here.

It's NYC. They have a way more infrastructure needs that most cities.

https://archive.ph/YuGhR

Police radio being public hasn’t been a problem for like 100 years and it’s still not a problem today.

Just another way public money is stolen and given to the police industry. Call it civil forfeiture I guess!

Current governor seems to like throwing money at tech just to show how tech-savvy he is (coincidentally, it’s all for the PD). Keeping the libraries open on the weekend would’ve cost a lot less!

JFYI: Adams is the mayor, not the governor.

Thanks, brain fart. They're all pretty unimaginative.

It could be a problem. Though I think attestation more than encryption would be good.

I seem to remember that NYPD, NYFD, and Port Authority had problems on 9/11 because of incompatible radio systems. Are we going back to that mishmash?

My wife was a dispatcher with the sheriff here for awhile until she decided to be a stay at home mom. They had at least one instance of someone listening to a scanner as a warrant was about to be served and bad things ensued. They started encrypting before she left.

Really sucks but at the same time radios are only public because of how they work by design. I am surprised that encryption wasn't the default on sensitive channels like this (and ATC, which I enjoy listening to)

Unless it’s made illegal I’m sure there would be plenty of streamers that can get a hold of one NYPD talkie talkie and broadcast that.

They'll probably rotate keys every now and then.

That’s bound to be fun. Encryption is easy; key management is hard.

These radio systems are designed to handle key management fairly intrinsically.

Well wouldn’t every radio receive the updated keys unless it’s specifically reported as lost and blocked?

Despite being very illegal, Toronto had encrypted radios for a while, and they were both somehow cloned and “lost” without being deactivated.

Primarily for crooked tow truck drivers, whom streaming subscriptions were being sold to.

But you could imagine that being a lot worse.

And Toronto police are very well paid, probably better than NYPD.

https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/toronto/2021/2/19/1_5316595.ht...

https://nationalpost.com/news/toronto-cop-part-of-organized-...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-polic...

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5622069

edit: not sure what the term is for trusting a "more secure" system with more sensitive information, but ultimately goes sideways when it turns out to not be as secure as thought.

Those crooked tow truck drivers were organized crime fronts as well. Some of those tow trucks had so many antennas they were basically mobile sigint stations. With the voice transcription tech available today, you could pretty trivially run a private one.

Can you further explain what all of that means?

Like basically every sentence? What were the two truck drivers doing crooked? How is it a front and for what organized crime?

Why would they have so many antennas and run a private what?

Generally considered to be part of a mob/mafia. Lots of extortion (and murder) against anyone investigating them [1] and taking vehicles to connected shops that would do more damage to dial up the insurance bill. Often the rates for the tow itself are unregulated and your negotiating position is often weak (or they lie to you and say you have to remove your vehicle from the road immediately, which isn't true unless ordered by a police officer, whom per above links, have also been corrupted by the industry).

There's also been a tow truck war locally where they'd torch competitors (or non-complying) tow trucks [2]

[1] https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/do-you-want-to-grow-old-stop-suin...

[2] https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/police-investigating-after-multip...

How are they making money? Just damaging the cars more and then what?

Had a crooked company near me get caught stealing parking permits out of cars then towing them for not having said permit. With $300+/day lot fees, they can often make $1000 for a single tow, especially if it takes the victim a few days to track down which impound lot has the car.

Ok so they are using the police radio to figure out when an accident happens and be first on scene? Is that right?

Here we just have a rotation. Every two truck registers with the police and they get dispatched just like the cops based on their spot. Seems like an easy fix and rates are regulated.

Any idea how this impacts things like the Citizen app? It's helpful to see if there is violence or similar risks nearby, particularly in major metros. Would be a shame if they were cut off from being able to provide that info to the public to help protect themselves.

Citizen app usage has been on the outs for a while now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sandiego/comments/104yyev/citizen_a...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axejw/citizen-app-doxes-bil...

https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/12/crime-reporting-app-citize...

Have they said what protocol will be used? P.25 or something else?

https://archive.ph/amg24

This is an archive of the HN homepage. Correct link: https://archive.ph/YuGhR

Sorry - thanks for correcting it.

Here is another link for those whose archive. access is limited:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/nyregion/nypd-police-scan...

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