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Dammit Loudlabsnyc - NO!

11/24/2023

Dammit Loudlabsnyc, the fight is for keeping radio access open to everyone! Read the whole thread.

As people - finally - wake up to the reality of public safety radio encryption, they inevitably begin processing a solution that can sometimes look like a policy compromise.

One of the most likely to emerge in any discussion of, is the idea of giving the "credentialed media" access to freshly encrypted systems through some program that maybe involves something like programming radios for media access (that the media houses purchase).

This was something like the policy I once prompted in the mid-90s the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department in Florida to institute. With the crucial distinction being that they would do it for any public person (who purchased such a radio). The policy wouldn't be limited to just perceived members of the media.

It's important to me that such a distinction is never made. The battle is getting public safety offices to keep access to their radio traffic for everyone, not simply those composed enough to come off as a "valid media" operation.

I don't regard profit-seeking media operations as somehow sanctimonious: They are profit-driven and now more than ever we see they are more functionally engineered to spread conflict via their established editorial components, than meaningful intellectual debate -- all while of course reporting on the building fire that validates their front. But the reality is, they aren't any different than you or I or any other business, except they are powerful, and often work together with politicians and law enforcement to develop and fuel useful narratives. Some we can appreciate, some we would be appalled to learn of.

Social media and more broadly the Internet and World Wide Web has nearly pushed local newspapers and TV news stations out of business, and they are lethally thirsty for a solution. Giving them exclusive access to public safety radio traffic gives them every reason to modify the debate to their pecuniary advantage.

This means that even when your local newspaper or TV station gives any ink or air to the encryption debate, it's only to blackmail themselves into being the eventual exception.

They aren't thinking about BuffScan, Tonowanda Fire Alert, WNY Fire Alerts, and so on -- none of the real people really interested in capturing and disseminating news, and whom which the MSM considers a form of competition that has been part and parcel of draining their power gradually over the past decade.

Loudlabsnyc is an Instagram account that remarked (as poorly exhibited above I regret) "that all we ask [of public safety], provide only credentialed press with access."

Well, I could not disagree more.

Loudlabsnyc is a particularly nuanced party in the issue. It operates as a company, but relies on social media and the web independently of printing presses or expensive TV transmitters. It is in effect, one of us, operationally speaking. Yet, it equates the power of the profit process, to the extent that it monetizes, with exceptinal legitimacy over something like BuffScan, that so far does not organize around that principle.

It is bad enough we have to hope that corporate media doesn't succeed in its blackmailing agenda and actually accelerate encryption, but that now we have to worry whether or not those in the pure digital community who know how to monetize, might do the same.

By BuffScan for BuffScan.

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Fist Bumping QSL.NET - Whoever That Guy Is

04/29/2023

A note about the following post: Police scanning must be replaced by something else. In this cross-post from my personal blog though, I nonetheless call attention to tribute content from my Calling All Citizens or Openness campaign, both of which I conducted through the late 90s to the mid-2000s. To explain my feelings today on that effort, while encryption is a key trigger in the motivation for building up a human network of public safety media documenters to replace police scanning, it is not exclusively the reason. I hope public safety agencies will find it in their policies to go back to open-air communication, or to stay that way if they have not yet closed, but honestly -- from the philosopher of "Calling All Citizens" and "Openness" -- it's no longer important that they do. There's a better answer that doesn't require public safety participation in this level of transparency.

Image of bad guy on porch.

For maybe 20 years now the site operator of QSL.NET has kept my "Calling All Citizens" and "Openness" campaign alive.

Or at least the ghost of it.

Occasionally when doing modern day searches on artifacts of my campaign I am inevitably led back to his early style website.

The website operator has preserved key content of the old openness.org website (the domain of which I sold to Intel a few years ago - because $$$). The operator has done this outside the somewhat constrained overhead of its other archive as might be found on the wayback machine.

I would add that he seems to have done so perfectly. He seems to have filtered out a lot of my own nonsense of the day and targeted just the meat and potatoes of the matter.

Beyond all that content, the QSL's author appears to have a superior sense of and commitment to indexing. The main landing page contains scores of links to many now-dead, but just as many still-alive, websites and blogs all related to public safety communication and other websites of the period, some of which are devoted to the merits of keeping police and fire calls in the clear.

I don't know if he continues to add and curate his index today but his adherence to the principle of a flat noise-free web that simply provides information and indeed spreads it is just another point of admiration. Even if done accidentally in this era of the commercialized web it's a sobering illustration of the open web's authentic utility.

The website's creator keeps his actual name off the site almost entirely. The one reference to it (which I will not spell out here to respect his apparent sensitivity to being stamped online) is in the form of a picture of a certification he received with his name on it. Aside from that it seems he wants a healthy porch between himself and the rest of the world.

It's long overdue and frankly, not by much in terms of dollars. But whoever you are good sir, thank you for allowing my donation tip.

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By BuffScan for BuffScan.

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