🚀 go-pugleaf

This seems like a "off the wall" solution to a potentially serious problem.

I can sympathize with the feeling of "I dont want people listening to
my cellular telephone".  The problem is that I dont see THIS really
solving the problem.

In the first place, how is someone who is new to scanning (as I am)
going to be able to distinguish between unencrypted police and fire
communications, which are unprotected, and an unencrypted DoD or other
communication, that is protected, before the carrier comes on if a
radio is in search mode.  Is the Congress going to make illegal (at a
felony level) something that can be "committed" by someone without
their knowledge.

What about if I am in the bathroom or otherwise unable to hear the
scanner. Is this still a crime?

How are law enforcement agencies going to enforce this law?  Are they
going to get search warrants for everyone who has an outdoor antenna?
(And this will not work at all for people who have a scanner in a
room, with an indoor antenna....)  Are they going to subpoena all of
Bearcat's, Radio Shack's, etc. sales slips looking for people who have
scanners and then place bugs in the devices to make sure that they are
not picking up anything illegal?  This wont work for those of us who
bought the little buggers from someone second-hand....  C'mon guys....

Even if they can prove that someone HAS A DEVICE TO DO THIS, it does
not seem possible to prove that the person involved has actually
broken the law, because there is no way of telling if the scanner
actually stopped on a particular channel. (Even if that channel is
programmed into its memory, it is possible that any signals were out
of range or not transmitting at the time the scanner was kerchunking
through that frequency).

Nor will making possession of a device capable of receiving certain
transmissions work because:
	a) It is a very large category, involving almost all
	scanners, general coverage receivers, etc.
	b) The scanners can be used for legal purposes (I use mine for
	monitoring the Amateur Radio 2 meter and 440 mhz bands.)

It seems the last time we had a law that tried to do something like
this was at the time of Prohibition.  It seems like that got repealed
too, but only after the law practically spawned a lot of the Organized
Crime around today.  Does history have to repeat itself here?

The current law is probably adequate for dealing with people who
divulge the content of common carrier messages to someone else or use
it for their own personal gain.

What is really needed here is some kind of encryption key, maybe based
on the (unique) telephone number of the cordless phone, if that is really what
people want to protect.  FCC certainly has the power (they regualte
all transmitters of common carriers) to promulgate a standard to take
care of this problem.  A bit can be set in a digitized data stream to
indicate if the caller is running the encryption or not.

I agree that there is a privacy problem to be dealt with, but making it
illegal to receive items is not going to really prevent problems
because it is just not enforceable.  The solution is to develop a
unified encryption standard, and then let the users choose between
whether or not privacy is important to them.  I just do not have
sympathy for people who on one hand want complete secrecy of what they
are saying and on the other hand want to put it on a broadcast medium
at the cheapest possible price and have legislation "solve" the problem
for them.  My feeling is that at least some of the responsibility lies
with the sender to send a private message over a secured medium.

					Peter Baldwin
					(ptb@mitre-bedford)