
Hackers Jammed Chicago Police Scanners with Internet Classic ‘Chocolate Rain’ - notRobot
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/889nw4/hackers-jammed-chicago-police-scanners-with-internet-classic-chocolate-rain
======
RickJWagner
Incredibly stupid. Police are there to serve, to rescue, and to protect. (Yes,
yes. There are some bad ones.)

What if there was a domestic abuse situation? Couldn't reach the cops.

How about a group of racists beating a minority victim? Couldn't reach the
cops.

A break-in in a black neighborhood? Couldn't reach the cops.

etc, etc, etc. This was childish. And stupid.

------
giancarlostoro
Isn't this technically possible by anyone? My understanding from what little
I've read on HAM radios is these are frequencies that are just set aside for
police, people can technically broadcast to them, it's just the FCC will hunt
you down. Nothing overtly special, though I presume regular radios try to
block out those frequencies.

Any true HAMs care to chime in? I'm more amateur than amateur radio.

~~~
salawat
Not a licensed HAM, but you are correct. Technically the radio waves remain
generally useful because we go to such great lengths to minimize incidental
noise emission sources. Get enough pissed off people with spark gap
transmitters just blasting RF noise on across the relevant frequency band, and
you will significantly degrade the capability to separate meaningful signal
from all the noise.

However, using regular noise (repetitions of a well known signal pattern) is
not the best way to go about it, since you can set up signal processing to
cancel out any aspects of the signal you can safely predict, making it easier
to recover the underlying information.

Overlay high intensity more-or-less random noise makes subsequent information
extraction difficult, but as far as I'm aware, you can also still potentially
scrounge signal by looking for improbably regular variations against the
background noise. So as long as you agree to certain signaling conventions
out-of-band, you still maintain some ability to communicate/signal.

The ideal jamming setup is a combination of the two. Seed false instances of
communique you expect your opponent to send, and swamp the channel with high
intensity random noise.

Long tangent short, the radio waves as a useful communication mechanism are a
byproduct of multiple layers of gentleman's agreement and only really
enforcible if the majority of people do not become capable of organizing such
that malicious actors are the norm rather than the exception.

This is why licensure is such a big deal as a control construct. If you can
keep the unlicensed afraid to emit on penalty of prosecution, then you
significantly decrease your policed population to more compliant license
holders (they got the license after all), and what non-compliant folks are
still undeterred by the thought of flaunting the law.

You can look at it from the other way that most people are naturally not
criminal hooligans; however, as I've gotten older I've come to realize that
lack of hooliganism is contingent on the abscence of widespread civil unrest.
There comes a point where collective jimmies have been rustled where the
threshold to act ends up a great deal lower.

Still not seeing that being realistic in terms of outcome with current events;
but I've been wrong before.

