JudCrandall

"I don't answer questions. Am I being detained?"

I got asked this question a couple times when mentioning that I always have the police radio playing at home.

There are a lot of (totally legal!) ways to listen in on your local gang in blue's radio communications, but the easiest is to use Broadcastify.com, a service run by RadioReference (awesome boomer RF resource). It's free, works pretty well, and is so easy to get running that your ACAB grandma could figure it out.

Click your state, scroll or Ctrl+F for your locality, then click play. Police channels, fire channels, public safety, etc.

If the department you're looking for isn't listed it may be for a couple reasons. If they're using encryption in addition to just digital trunking, then it's unlikely anyone will be streaming them to Broadcastify. But if they don't use encryption (and you can use RadioReference to look up what system every PD is using!) it may just be that no one is currently streaming that specific PD. Maybe it's a really small town, or maybe the person streaming it before is under arrest lmao.

Which is actually excellent, because now you can learn about RTL-SDR and start capturing their radio yourself! Gone are the days when you need to drop $500 on a police scanner just to handle trunking. You can spend less than $30 on an RTL-SDR dongle and couple that with free software. The actual set-up is beyond the scope of this quick post, but there are a lot of articles out there on how to do it, and it's really fun.

I watched a couple really interesting talks from this past Def Con. In one of the talks, Snoop Unto Them As They Snoop Unto Us, Null Agent points out that all Axon equipment (the company putting tasers on drones) share the same organizationally unique identifier (OUI) and communicate via Bluetooth Low Energy. When you pull your firearm or taser from an Axon holster, it can be set up to signal your bodycam to automatically turn on, for example. So by snooping on the BLE data channels you can look for Axon's OUI and infer that a law enforcement officer is within your Bluetooth range (max 300ft or so in optimal conditions).

That's all this script does. If it detects Axon equipment it plays a sound, alerts on your terminal, and logs the MAC address / time of encounter. I run it on my laptop in my living room with a super cheap Bluetooth adapter and I get notified when there are cops outside. Couple this with listening to your local police / public safety radio and you'll never be surprised by a no-knock again.