[Scan-DC] "Officer Safety, " Phone Apps, Scanners cited as Reasons for Encryption

[Rick Hansen]

Thanks for this and the Amazon story!

Rick

Sent from my iPad

> On Feb 17, 2015, at 11:09 PM, "Alan Henney" <alan at henney.com> wrote:
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> 
> The Stamford Advocate (Connecticut)
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> Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
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> February 16, 2015 Monday
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> Greenwich police encrypt all radio calls
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> BYLINE: Robert Marchant, The Stamford Advocate, Conn.
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> SECTION: STATE AND REGIONAL NEWS
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> LENGTH: 1069 words
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> Feb. 16--The Greenwich Police Department is publicly off the air.
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> The department has switched over to a completely encrypted system for all its communications, routine and otherwise, so that the general public can no longer listen to police radio calls with scanners or specially programmed mobile devices to police radio calls.
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> Scanners, until earlier this month, delivered police reports in short staccato bursts about everything from shoplifters on Greenwich Avenue to kids hanging out in parking lots to erratic drivers getting pulled over on Saturday night. That "chatter" between cops and their dispatcher, an auditory snapshot of the community's underside, has now gone silent. 
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> The move is a reversal of a 2009 decision to keep the open-ended communication channel public.
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> Police Chief Jim Heavey explained the rationale for the new policy in an email:
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> "There were several factors in the decision to put the police department radio transmissions in encryption. The number one reason was officer safety. We have received credible intelligence that criminals were using scanners and smart phone applications to monitor the location and activities of police officers. Another factor was that some of the information that comes over the police radio is of a confidential nature and this better protects privacy concerns."
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> A number of freedom-of-information advocates have been seeking to slow the trend toward total encryption, as numerous police departments in the region are switching over. They say the public interest is better served by open communications.
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> The police department in Meriden was among the first to use an encrypted communications system in 2011, and other departments in the region have been following suit. Advanced communications technology that police departments have been installing -- digital instead of analog -- allows for easy encryption. Greenwich installed a $5.5 million digital communications system in 2009.
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> Public-information advocates like James Smith said they are disappointed by the growing trend toward encryption. Smith described the police scanner as one of the mechanisms that build up an informal system of checks and balances over powerful institutions like law enforcement.
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> "Knowing how the police respond, and whether they respond competently or not, it's important for the public to know," said Smith, a former newspaper editor who presides over the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information, an open-government advocacy organization. "The police are paid by the public, they're meant to serve the public -- which they mainly do -- so when they shut off information about the police, the public is in the dark about how they're performing. It causes concern and questions about how safe our communities are."
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> Smith said he understood the need for certain transmissions to be kept quiet, but said a blanket policy was misguided.
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> "Some info needs to be held tightly, but there's a balance," he said. Full encryption also hinders news organizations that used scanner traffic as a way of gathering and reporting breaking news.
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> Paul Curtis, an advocate of open government in Greenwich who set up a system to put police communications onto the Internet, questioned whether a modified form of encryption would not have worked.