Can someone confirm that NYPD uses analog radio in 2023?
If you go by the article, the answer is yes.
"At his office last month, Chief Beltran picked a Motorola MX-350 up off his desk. The clunky hand-held radio, roughly the size of a Chihuahua, was the same model he used in the 1980s when he joined the force.
The chief, a 38-year department veteran and longtime technology buff, knows every facet of the vast communications network and how it functions: A call from one of the 42,000 hand-held radios, or one of the 3,400 in boats, helicopters, patrol cars and other vehicles, is picked up by antennas throughout New York, then transmitted to a dispatcher, all in nanoseconds.
But the network was overdue for an upgrade, Chief Beltran said. The decades-old analog system used outdated copper wire circuitry that is susceptible to harsh weather and takes longer to repair."
Went down a research rabbit hole wondering about doing security research on these encrypted radios. Looks like you’d have a pretty hard time finding a legal way to do it considering it’s illegal to transmit encrypted per FCC rules. So though you can get the hardware on eBay for 100 bucks, even beginning to test for flaws is already a gray area. Probably have to rig something up to avoid transmitting at all. Plus a faraday cage? Modern solutions use AES256, so a major flaw in crypto implementation on top of a failure to rotate keys is the only likely avenue. Even if you found a vulnerability, reporting seems like it would be highly risky with the legal murkyness and arrest happy authorities.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But a new $500 million radio system the New York Police Department introduced this past summer encrypts officers’ communications, meaning the public, including members of the press, will no longer be able to listen in.
Those who oppose the shift — including elected officials, news outlets and advocates for demanding more accountability from law enforcement — argue that encryption inhibits such transparency, erodes trust in the police and prevents crucial information from being reported quickly.
“The idea that we’re going to turn this sort of vital information into something that’s only accessible to the public at the whims of police is just truly chilling,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in New York.
In the 55 years since, he has captured some of New York’s most memorable photos: The Avianca plane crash on Long Island in 1990 that killed 73 people who were on board; Michael Jackson after he collapsed onstage in 1995; and, in 2003, a full-grown tiger in a Harlem building as it stared down an officer through a fourth-floor apartment window.
As soon as Roosevelt crossed, “The word to open the bridge to toll traffic was flashed from a special short-wave field station to police radio cars and motorcycles,” according to a front-page article in The Times the next day.
The chief, a 38-year department veteran and longtime technology buff, knows every facet of the vast communications network and how it functions: A call from one of the 42,000 hand-held radios, or one of the 3,400 in boats, helicopters, patrol cars and other vehicles, is picked up by antennas throughout New York, then transmitted to a dispatcher, all in nanoseconds.
The original article contains 1,377 words, the summary contains 280 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
