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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.