Police Scanners

thrash

Using cell phones for critical police business would be a surprise to me. I read a paper recently showing a plausible key-recovery attack on 2 of the widely used encryption schemes in GSM that allowed you to begin monitoring the audio of a conversatino within about 2 minutes of data capture. It required pre-computing a large amount of data but the whole setup could be built and operated for under $10k.

Cell phone scanners are highly illegal in the US, but of course, cops are only going to be talking about criminals and criminal activity anyway.

I always figured a reasonable way to do this kind of stuff was with spotters NOT in vehicles using monitoring equipment, and then using FRS radios in everyones cars.

I was actually thinking about this the other nite on a long ass boring stretch of road... "put some guys with FRS radios here... and here.... and we could run races, speed tests, etc without too much fear of hurting anyone or attracting the fuzz"

The spotters would have some dorky code that would allow for reasonable doubt when the court transcript was read, and that would be that.

Ive been thinking off and on about a mixed voice/data product for in-car computers that ... motorists might enjoy. Lets you do things like share data with the cloud about speed traps, lets you share radar detector alerts and other time-sensitive information with a convoy of vehicles travelling together... etc. The basic peices are all there... you can make GPS, a cellphone, and the Valentine 1 all talk to a computer. It's not much software to say "the v1 showed an alert, my GPS coordinates are blah, send an SMS alert to the following 10 numbers". If the convoy is tight enough an ad-hoc wlan between the vehicles would be even better.

The other thing you can do is report a cop sighting like "cruiser on i94 east bound" and then uplaod that report to a dataserver with GPS and timestamp info. Obvious the cop has a known range for a given time period so you can get an idea of where a danger zone is likely to be 5, 10, or 20 minutes into the future. Motorits that are plugged into this system can receive push warnings based on their GPS coordinates and direction vector.

Most of this stuff is obvious and self evident; i wonder what professional criminals are already doing to tackle these problems. i have no profit motive to do anything nefarious or even clever, but there are plenty of people that could stand to make money from being marginally smarter than the law and using technology to get there.

harwood39

^^^^I like this idea...

Parker

or you could just not do stupid shit

RidinRails

Parker;182046 wrote:
legaly you really cant transport them unless it is in your trunk, and they may even go as far as having it in the box it came in... as for it being off... thats wrong... if its inside your car (not including your trunk)... the cop can take it and you can get a ticket for it even if it is off... i know i got a ticket for this, and the damn thing didnt even work, the cop even tryed to pick up him and couldnt.... i hired a lawyer to fight it.... $300 ticket... dosent go on your record, no points...

when was this?

I also hired a laywer and got out of it.

JN210

Im liking the idea that thrash has said, running speed tests and such with this new technology and cop sightings reported to others so they know where the cops are, so they can "not do stupid shit" or just not do it all and not have to worry about the police.