"Police Detector" Monitors Emergency Radio Transmissions 215
schwit1 writes A Dutch company has introduced a detection system that can alert you if a police officer or other emergency services official is using a two-way radio nearby. Blu Eye monitors frequencies used by the encrypted TETRA encrypted communications networks used by government agencies in Europe. It doesn't allow the user to listen in to transmissions, but can detect a radio in operation up to one kilometer away. Even if a message isn't being sent, these radios send pulses out to the network every four seconds and Blu Eye can also pick these up, according to The Sunday Times. A dashboard-mounted monitor uses lights and sounds to alert the driver to the proximity of the source, similar to a radar detector interface.
Inquiring minds want to know... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Inquiring minds want to know... (Score:5, Informative)
Mijn varken gevoel tintelt
Re:Inquiring minds want to know... (Score:5, Funny)
That translates back to English as "My pig-tingling sensation". Pretty sure anything that causes that sensation is illegal.
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Depends what state you are in.
So what if you are in a state of arousal?
Re:Inquiring minds want to know... (Score:5, Funny)
Depends what state you are in.
It's probably a police state.
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Ik ruik spek.
Re:Inquiring minds want to know... (Score:4, Funny)
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Heeft u spek ruiken?
someohow I think (Score:5, Interesting)
our police overlords will have this banned very quickly. Imagine a network of these in a city that can update a location map in realtime. Remember, just because the cops are public officials operating in public doesn't mean they think the public has a right to know about anything they are doing.
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I don't get why anyone would care if its banned. You can still buy something like a SDR radio dongle for around $20, and, with the right software it could do the exact same thing.
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Eh, radar detectors are only illegal in a few places, and they mostly exist to flout the law too.
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Not that most police forces use radar, anymore. They use laser-detectors that are pointed directly at the people being measured. That means you only detect the signal once you've been scanned, so your detector will tell you basically whether or not to expect a ticket in the mail, or whether or not you should expect to be pulled over in the next few seconds.
they are illegal in most of Europe (Score:2)
they are illegal in most of Europe, which is why this company went through the trouble to make "Cop Detectors".
No, they can't and won't ban these, since they are passive receivers and they detect *any* emergency person carrying a radio. I do suspect that the mobile speed trap teams will switch off their 2-way when working and use their cell phones for connecting with home base. Radar detectors only have a single purpose and because of that purpose they get to ban them for "hindring police investigation". Y
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Did the FCC permit any states or DC to make radar detectors illegal? Last I heard the FCC has exclusive authority to regulate radio receivers.
IANAL and I don't know if it has been tested in court.
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I understand from the tone of your post that you assume "cops are the enemy" but you'd have to admit that it would make genuine law enforcement rather problematic if anyone could see where police officers are at any time.
Considering the ratio of police to criminals, the odds that a cop happens to see a person in the act of breaking the law are fantastically low anyway.
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I don't see the problem with knowing where the cops are anyway. Around here anyway, they aren't going to stop real crime, they're too busy hiding in the bushes radaring people in speed traps to actually patrol and possibly prevent a crime. No, they always show up afterwards and tell you what you should have done.
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Here is the fail in your assumption. Knowing where they are at any given moment only helps you if you are about to mug someone on the sidewalk. Pretty likely if you are a mugger you've already mastered the art of making sure a copper isn't around. The same can be said about most crimes that are expected to take seconds to a couple of minutes.
You do correctly point out that it is rare that a cop stops a crime as it is in progress, let alone as it is about to take place. In reality, the cops probably d
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Our rights don't exist solely to make the jobs of law enforcement easier. Indeed, many just make them harder, and that's fine. It's my private property.
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Really, don't think a drug gang is going to have one as an alarm in the various locations they operate from in case the police decide to do a raid as one example?
Re:someohow I think (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not sure about this. A Federal judge recently found [foxnews.com] that flashing your headlights to warn oncoming drivers of a speed trap, is protected speech under the First Amendment. You could make an argument that these are a group of concerned citizens tracking the activities of their local police, and publishing their findings.
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Makes me glad I never stopped doing it. Sadly, I can't remember the last time I saw anyone else engage in this time honored tradition.
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The reality is that the same service is often used by others as well, not only the police, so the amount of random "noise" and false alarms will make it useless and more like a "fun gadget".
It would be a lot more interesting if someone found out a way to crack the encryption in a generic way.
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Once upon a time, back before Reagan promised to "get the government off the backs of the people", there was this thing called the Telecommunications Act of 1935.
Briefly, it said that it was legal to monitor any unencrypted radion transmission, subject to the restriction that you could not divulge what you heard unless it was specifically broadcast for public consumption (commercial radio, TV, ham traffic and so forth).
You could learn a lot about how your public services operated by listening to the radio.
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Edit:
Originally decrypting scanners were available to the local news services.
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If they were going to speed or text while driving, they are going to regardless if they have a radio detector or not. Same goes for speeding with radar detectors.
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If they were going to speed or text while driving, they are going to regardless if they have a radio detector or not. Same goes for speeding with radar detectors.
Making it clear when people can speed/use mobile phones without being caught will increase the number of people who do so - for example those whom are currently put off from doing so by current laws and the threat of being caught. New drivers in particular are likely to fall into this category given they have little experience of how little road coverage the police have.
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You have heard of a radar detector, right? At least in the states they have been (mostly) legal for decades. Personally, I do not drive that much over the limit anymore but rather go the 10 or so over that the vast majority are going (in part because my current car is not a performance vehicle and in part I'm just less in a hurry) But in certain states, even that is a risk so I always use a radar detector on the highway.
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In Europe, radar detectors are mostly useless. Police here use laser devices, and a laser detector mostly serves as early warning of an impending fine.
More effective are laser jamming systems, but once again the police are a few steps ahead, as one might imagine. If the same car causes police laser speed measuring equipment to fail twice in succession, then that owner then gets a visit from the traffic cops, on suspicion of impeding a constable in the course of his duty. This is an ancient offence going rig
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or it gives them time to move over to the right lane as to avoid hindering a potential life or death situation
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Last time I was pulled over, the speed limit dropped from 65 MPH to 45 MPH in a couple-hundred feet, and the officer was parked 100 feet past the 45MPH sign. Relying on an approximate range to the officer wouldn't have helped in those circumst
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Last time I was I was going just a hair faster than the other cars, all doing 40 I was doing like 42. Turns out the area was a 30 MPH zone for just....no reason at all. On one side of the road, is parking lots with stores on the other side, on the other side of the road.....the huge wall of an onramp to the raise highway section. No houses, nowhere to walk.... no reason to cross the road.
I have never seen a car do 30 or less on that road unless it was gridlocked.
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You should have seen me almost give myself whiplash a few months back, I was on my way home from work. There was a guy looking to turn left and I passed him on the right at the intersection. Not just "the intersection" but, an intersection I have been driving through for my entire adult life, and which I grew up and live within 1/4 mile of.
I get pulled over "Do you know why I pulled you over"
"No clue"
"You rolled through that stop sign back there"
and my head spun so fast, I am surprised I didn't have a chiro
Re:someohow I think (Score:5, Insightful)
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When more than a small minority of police start behaving like criminals, I'l worry about your concerns.
A small minority of police is still enough to really screw up a lot of people's lives. Cops are humans and like any other profession, some will be good, some will be bad, and some will be in the spectrum in-between. However, while an asshole waiter has the power to mess up your dinner, an asshole cop has the power to mess up your life.
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Sorry, AC, that's a big fail. The public has a right to know what public servants are doing.
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Not in real-time we don't. The only reason for needing to know if the police are nearby is if one is a criminal and/or thinking of doing something criminal.
(Expecting downvotes from the "all police are pigs" idiots)
Re: someohow I think (Score:4, Insightful)
do we go Schindler, Martin Luther King, Jr., or George Washington at this point to illustrate the 'criminal element'? Oh, nevermind, it's all Jeffrey Dahmers out there trying to eat us.
Re:someohow I think (Score:5, Insightful)
...The only reason for needing to know if the police are nearby is if one is a criminal and/or thinking of doing something criminal.
(Expecting downvotes from the "all police are pigs" idiots)
I have mod points right now, but rather than downmod you I'll jump into the discussion. While I wouldn't say that all police are pigs, anybody who maintains that the average law abiding citizen has nothing to fear from the police either has his head in the sand, or is trolling. If your qualifier had read "if one might be viewed as a criminal and/or thinking of doing something that the police claim is suspicious in order to further their own ends", I'd agree with you. But then, there wouldn't have been much of a reason for you to post, would there?
Of course, you may actually believe that Driving While Black, clenching your butt [huffingtonpost.com], wearing a backpack with graffiti on it [vice.com], or carrying cash [jalopnik.com], are crimes simply because they seem suspicious to fucked-up and/or corrupt police. If that's the case, then shame on you.
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Needed to counteract the police are saints [nydailynews.com] fascists.
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useful on a highway (Score:3)
like if you are driving 90mph in a state where radar detectors are illegal
Re:useful on a highway (Score:5, Informative)
Also (Score:3)
Radars produce signal when not active. Normal ones aren't "off" when not taking a reading, they are inactive, which means their components are still warmed up. They emit detectable signals, nothing electrical is quiet when it is on.
Now there are what are called "pop" radar guns that go from off to on real fast... but they are, near as I know, not legal for measuring speeds since such a device cannot be made accurate. You can't make a 20GHz transmitter that turns on and stabilizes in a fraction of a second.
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It's not as useful as you think. The American device's #1 function is to tell you that you're currently being hit by a radar gun. Surprise, too late. Same with laser-based guns. In some cases some models detect radio frequencies but a lot of radios now have listen-only mode and the detector goes off like crazy anyway.
The proper way to use a radar detector is to detect radar hitting a car in front of you. As long as you have traffic in front of you, you can get a warning. It works quite well, as my detector has saved me from a number of tickets.
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link here link here [cbsnews.com]
so although I am happy you consider yourself not a selfish asshole, your argument falls apart when the local pig patrol becomes selfish assholes...
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two things:
1) Most radar speed guns have a broad band and the radar bounces like crazy, so with a good radar detector, you'll get the warning a mile before the cop, well out of range of an accurate measurement and even out of line of site.
2) There are no "laser-based" guns. There is LIDAR which people refer to as "laser" because it is a much more narrow band and it doesn't bounce nearly as much as traditional radar. It also has to be shot from a stand still, at as close to a 0 degree angle as possib
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I actually need to correct myself on the above.
LIDAR is a laser based gun.
Sorry about the dumbs.
-Rick
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According to the summary, the radios passively send signals to the tower every few seconds, so you need not transmit a message to be detected. I do agree however that these are likely not useful for detecting speed traps, as you would likely detect officers on parallel side streets, generating a lot of false positives, especially in dense urban areas.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Note that no state law against scanners has ever gone to court; the Supreme Court, in the Kentucky Antenna case made it very clear that it is legal to receive any radiation coming through you
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How is finding the location of a state trooper's radio the same thing as listening in on the trooper's cell phone conversation with her husband? Apples and oranges.
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Not sure about the scanner part. Every car radio I've ever had had a "scan" button on it. I doubt the individual states would make a carve-out for certain frequencies. There may be such laws, but they're probably not enforceable.
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Back in the US it existed as far back as 1991. Back then I had a product called a K-40 "Chipsradar". What it did (aside from being a normal radar detector) was detect the handheld radio frequency of the CHP walkie-talkies (1-2 mile range) that linked up with the cars that relayed the transmissions to the station and used the signal strength as a proximity detector. It worked beautifully sniffing out speed traps since at the time CHP did not use radar all that much and would just hide on or behind overpas
Old Tech? (Score:3)
Ambulances are using the same technology (Score:4, Insightful)
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I do not see that a false positive. It is good to know when an emergency vehicle is near by.
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So you know if it's worth stabbing someone or starting a fire?
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No so I have a bit of warning before I hear them. I would love to have an indicator of the direction they are in so I know where to look when I hear them.
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rotfl, my wife and I were at an event and some dude had an odd sound on his phone that he just had to talk about, and he said it was the turbo engaging on an engine, to which I turned to my wife and said "its one of the sounds you would hear our car make on the highway if our car had no sound insulation".
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I recently had an issue with my car's muffler/exhaust assembly. It sounded like I was driving a motorboat down the road. A very loud motorboat. It was quite pricey to fix also. You never appreciate how quiet modern cars are until your muffler goes. (Now imagine an urban area with no mufflers on any of the cars.)
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Then you will learn to appreciate older cars....or at least honest mechanics.
I had a similar experience except, for me it wasn't the muffler. No no, it was the mount for the flexpipe connecting my cat to the exhaust manifold. Of course, being a newer car, this entire flexpipe piece was not considered its own part but, part of the cat itself.... awesome.
Of course, I went to a small shop who said "the cat alone is over $1000 for this car, I can weld that piece for you and have you on the road again for $250.
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GP: "Ambulances and firefighters are using the same technology"
You: "were you just being an ignorant police apologist"
Fail again, skid.
Encrypted? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but is it encrypted?
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Yeah, but is it encrypted?
Yes, the detector system detects that the police radio is transmitting, and when it does the metadata of the transmission can still be read (it's packetized transmissions), only the data contents of the transmission are encrypted. This lets the system know that kind of radio transmitted and how strong the signal was, but can not allow the person to listen to what was said. It's like with a VPN, if you snoop the wire you can still tell that two systems are talking, and what the endpoint addresses are, even
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Is it that hard to drive safely? (Score:3)
Isn't it easier to just drive carefully, refrain from exceeding the posted speed limit by more than 5-10mph depending on whether you're in town or on a highway, stay in the right lane, avoid tailgating, and use your turn signals? The people who would find this useful are the sort of crazy asshole drivers for whom I used to keep a grenade launcher.
Unfortunately, my wife took away the M-79 I kept under the dash soon after we got married. Said it made her nervous.
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"The people who would find this useful are the sort of crazy asshole drivers for whom I used to keep a grenade launcher."
Okay.....
But this can aid in safe driving. Knowing when an emergency vehicle of any kind is near by can be a very good thing.
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If an emergency vehicle is nearby, the only thing I need to know is whether it's behind me with its lights flashing. If so, I have to get the fuck out of the way. Otherwise, its presence is irrelevant.
Really? I rather like to know when one is coming from the opposite direction so I can pull over and stop as the law requires, and so he knows he can turn in front of me if he needs to. I also like to know when one is approaching from either crossing direction at an intersection so I can, again, stop as the law requires and allow him to pass.
It ain't just the emergency vehicles behind you that you need to look out for.
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If all of that would actually keep you from getting a ticket, it would be great. Too bad it won't in some areas.
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It does, but since that doesn't seem to be forthcoming, we'll have to do the best we can with a technological fix for now.
Is it that hard to see the revenue generation? (Score:2)
Speed limits are rarely set by how fast you can drive at a safe speed on a given road, rather than arbitrary zoning.
But even that is following the canard that the only people wanting to know where the cops are are those looking to break the law. In the age of DWB, asset forfeiture, checkpoints, revenue generation, and cops being free to murder innocent people with impunity [cnn.com], that's obnoxiously naive.
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If you want to talk about obnoxious naivete, start with yourself if you think this device is going to fix any of the issues you mention.
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Yes, but I don't run things. I suggest you thank the deity of your choice that this is the case, because I'm not qualified to run anything but Jack and shit -- and Jack just buggered off to the pub.
Nice (Score:3)
I had an idea to build something like this combined with a police scanner using an SDR and a Raspi or similar. And at over 1000 euros for this system, those plans are still looking pretty good.
People with skills ... (Score:2)
... can build passive receivers to detect the presence of any radio frequency broadcast.
Equally do-able is fabricating radio frequency jammers.
Hell, beginning HAM operators can do this.
College-level electronic techs can do this.
If there were any real black market for such devices, they would have been ubiquitous way before now.
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and typical jammer is very easy to find, you wouldn't believe the severity of punishment either.
Now you'll know every time... (Score:2)
That a cop goes 10-100.
Could be helpful (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)
Turnabout is fair play
Government should fear the citizens, NOT the other way around.
We had similar tech in the late 80s (Score:2)
For California, at least: CHiPs Detector [stason.org]
Police should embrace this (Score:2)
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Or you could, you know, follow your local traffic regulations instead of casually breaking the law.
Why is everyone so obsessed with breaking speed limits?
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You have never driven in the US midwest have you... (Or most of the rest of US outside cities).
Distances are ridiculously huge, and roads are usually nice, wide and straight.
Re:Kickstarter! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I have better things to do with my life than sit in my car, and because speed limits are always set far below the speed at which I feel safe driving.
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Let's see how US compares to Germany [wikipedia.org] with traffic related death rate:
Germany: 4.9 road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle km
USA: 7.6 road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle km
Maximum speed limit:
Germany: unlimited (on 70% of the Highways)
USA: 120 km/h
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-KI
Re:Seems Fair (Score:4, Insightful)
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