Now I wonder if you can fingerprint antennas…

I have a detection on there for the MAC address "00:25:DF:*". That's the MAC OUI prefix for Taser International.

I keep it on while driving, because the badgecams and hardware in cop cars spurts this out regularly. So even unmarked cars show themselves.

For about $700, you can get some pre-made kit to use SDR to do Radio direction finding. IIRC this device uses the same chips as a RTL-SDR, but it uses 4-5 of them, all synchronized and has a signal emitter for calibration, and a nice web ui to report the data.

(I have not used it, but I've been learning about all sorts of neat radio products as I'm dabling and learning about SDR)

Criminals sophisticated enough to do that are usually not going to get caught regardless, encryption or no and are generally savvy enough to not make themselves a serious threat to public comfort and order.

I don't think its a long reach to say that the public may be better off with more ability to monitor police activity at a cost of being weaker against that kind of criminal.

I'd guess that's due to the expense of the equipment and all the regulations coupled with the lack of immediate usefulness to a casual hobbyist. Without the sort of vibrant wild west ecosystem that FOSS provides innovation happens much more slowly and most of the participants will be entrenched.

Nah, but lots of these parties have kids below than 21 (or whatever the legal drinking age is). So they get fined or arrested if caught so they leg it.

A friend attended a Chicago-suburb high school for a year (exchange student). Said he had to run from cops at private parties about a handful of times in that year, and that it was pretty normal in his group.

During the Munich 1972 olympics(1), terrorists took some Israeli athletes hostage, and then this happened:

> Meanwhile, the terrorists learned from radio and television broadcasts that the police were approaching and had planned a rescue operation. The authorities had failed to cut off the terrorists' electricity and remove the press from the Olympic Village.

If they did all that and the terrorists were able to listen to their radio, what's next? Is encryption allowed then? If they could enable it then, why not enable it all the time, "just in case"?

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre

Aaaand now we're all on yet another watch list!

First you need to make darn triple check extra sure that when you deploy it, you won't change it. It is a one-shot switch and whoever gets to your site is stuck with the configuration for days, weeeks, months. And you cannot tell them "my bad, try again".

Then if you have a sensible setup, you would redirect immediately to HTTPS anyway.

Sure, it protects you from some marginal risks (such as you not setting your cookies to secure mode) but then you have other problems and HSTS will bite you when you prod the security settings without a good plan.

its an interesting domain but hard to get solid info on unless you are working on these types of projects or for some MoD somewhere. most info out there on the net is about old tech.

as far as i know preshared keys are common. hard to rekey ofc in case of compromise so likely they have some tricks up their sleeves to make sure if for instance a unit is overtaken by enemy not all coms are compromised by this key in the device. (guesswork here ofc..) dont think much of this stuff uses priv/pub keys and https or vpn like auth schemes etc.

If there is a clear pattern to it, then that’s either unencrypted framing, or bad encryption. (Think 90’s cable TV ‘scrambling’).

If anything, it's the most basic of "wireless site survey" applications.