USA Today article discussing pros and cons of police encrypting their radio transmissions. Police say it's to keep criminals from listening, but journalists object saying it makes government less transparent.
It seems rather a straight forward question to me. Preventing people from listening in real time is needed by law enforcement. Preventing people from listening in at all is not in the interest of government accountability. Police should have to maintain a complete record of everything that is said and they should be required to turn over those records in response to a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA, or it's state level equivalent) request. To allow police to completely conceal everything they say on the radio is going to allow them to engage in misconduct more easily without fear of that misconduct being discovered. I would think that the video of the UC Davis campus police spraying pepper spray on non violent demonstrators proves that police have a tendency to overreact to being defied even when that defiance is a legitimate exorcise of the defiant citizens rights. When a police officer says jump a citizen should be able to say "why" rather than "how high." So I think encryption has short term benefits and long term liabilities. Hiding police conduct from the press and the public is not a good thing.
There has been some interest on the part of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) administrators in encrypting ambulance radios because of the need to protect patients' private information. In that case, where the encryption is done on the medical control channels, I think that encryption would be a perfectly legitimate tool to use in protecting patient rights. Encrypting administrative and dispatch traffic of EMS agencies however has little legitimate purpose that I am able to discern.
The reason that there is a temptation to encrypt is that the news media outlets often act irresponsibly when they have immediate access to some types of information. As we all know "If it bleeds, it leads." That is how a mercury spill at a public high school becomes "Chemical leak at High School! Film at noon." We have a slogan in Fire & Rescue which reminds us that "The principal difference between the parent of an endangered child and a terrorist is that you have a faint hope of negotiating with the terrorist." So when the news outlet resorts to sensationalism in order to sell the soap they endanger the children and the responders who are trying to protect them. For the responders and their leadership, that gets old pretty fast.
Like many other things in public life there is no easy answer. And, like the pendulum of a working clock, there is no resting in the middle: it will only pause briefly at the extremes.
-- Tom Horne
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