We Won!

As previously discussed HERE and HERE in previous days this week, there has been a bit of a dust-up in SoCal as the Orange County Fire Authority received a backlash to full encryption going into affect for all OCFA radio communications starting earlier this week. California Disasters was right in the middle of this the day the story broke. Guess what happened today as a consequence? I'm not accustomed to such victories in the public arena. To be fair, it was multiple communities/stakeholders raising a ruckus and I am but one member of one of those communities. However, I did go on KFI-AM Los Angeles about it, something which was initially very uncomfortable and took me out of my comfort zone. 

My KFI Morning

So this morning I awoke still being sick albeit a bit better but still not feeling well. I ambled into my little living room and checked the Internet to see what was going on. To my surprise, my protestations yesterday HERE along with my scannerhead cohorts regarding Orange County beginning encryption this week of all its public safety radio communications apparently grabbed the interest of the newsmedia who follow us and also themselves monitor the scanner. There concern, as is our's, is that encrypting public safety radio communications threatens public safety in an ironic twist. By public safety radio traffic being encrypted, not only the public can't listen in on it themselves, but neither can the newsmedia nor scannerheads like us who parse it out and translate it into meaningful information for the public and combine it with other sources of information like other citizen's tweets and webcam images and so forth to create accurate and timely information which is vitally useful to folks living in areas under threat during disasters in California. This was incontrovertibly proved last November in the Camp Fire in Butte County as Paradise and environs was destroyed and 85 people were killed. Many local citizens thanked the scannerhead community for their service helping them to leave when they did by our public postings on Twitter. Anywho, I digress, at about this time I also got a phone call from La Habra from a number I did not recognize and ignored it. Then it texted me and said it was Corbin Carson with KFI-AM Los Angeles wanting to talk to me about this controversy. I initially balked as I did not feel well and felt others in my cohort would be better spokespersons. However, unable to contact them I jumped in and stood in the gap. Below is what resulted.
*Follow-up Footnote: We Won!

Public Safety Encryption Is Bad For Public Safety

This week the Orange County Fire Authority and Orange County Sheriff's Department began full or near-full encryption of their radio communications for fire and law. I'm not talking about the sort of stuff that has been encrypted for years because it was S.W.A.T. activity or surveillance operations and such. I'm talking about classic routine radio communications that so many of us have monitored our entire lives. I grew up in a household which in the 1970s listened to such radio traffic all the time. This is a growing trend in American life as governments at all levels become more militarized and secretive in the post-9/11 world covered in the fig-leaf terrorist concerns and mass shootings. Also, Motorola needs more useless shit (in this context) to sell taxpayers that not only do they not need, but it is not in their self-interest to purchase it through their local governments. There are many different reasons to oppose this trend of which each are valid. Below, my online HAM and fellow scannerhead Ben a.k.a. AI6YRHAM tweeted the below remark earlier today and much more eloquently than myself or anybody else I read making the public safety argument against. This is the argument which I feel most strongly about, even more so than the troubling secretive authoritarian militarization aspect of this trend let alone the inconvenience to the scanner-listening hobby which is the least important argument but an argument nonetheless.