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Sunday, December 08, 2002
ScanningUSA: "The Radio Hobby After September 11th" [Source: Tracy Justus] If you haven’t already read the December 2002 issue of Scanning USA it has an article by Jack Hickok of www.norcalscan.org titled “The Radio Hobby After September 11th”. The article goes into some detail about Jakes concerns regarding the dissemination of sensitive radio system information in the world we woke up to on 9/11/2001. A few months prior to his article being published, Jake had contacted his fellow California radio scanner web site owners (an unofficial group of web sites that cover California), www.scancal.org and www.freqofnature.com to discuss these concerns. We all agreed that there are certain things that should not be published on our web sites. While I can’t speak for Jake (www.norcalscan.org) or Mike (www.scancal.org) I have made a concerted effort to not publish certain information that I consider sensitive. It’s a much larger task to go back through the entire web site to remove such items, but it is being done as I update those pages. The following is a list of things I consider to fall under the definition of “sensitive information”: * Surveillance specific frequencies/talkgroups * Surveillance operations * Body wire frequencies * Transmitter locations * Input PL tones * K-12 School frequencies/talk groups In his article, Jake mentions newsgroups like the popular Yahoo Groups where radio scanning information is shared. Since only a small percentage of group members actually contribute by posting messages, it gives you the feeling that there are only a very few members reading the messages when in fact there are hundreds. Before clicking that SEND button, remember that hundreds of people are going to read your message. Our hobby of radio monitoring should not be at odds with public safety; in fact it should contribute to it. How many police officers and fire fighters choose their field of work because they listened to a radio scanner as a kid? How many radio scanner hobbyists hold a HAM Radio license? How many times have a citizen reported the location of a wanted suspect after hearing the description of the suspect over a radio scanner? I think that Jake has initiated an important trend in our hobby by voicing these concerns and actively meeting with public safety officials. Hopefully, by self regulating ourselves we won’t contribute to the risk of those who serve to protect us and we will be bettering the public image of our hobby. Tracy Justus www.freqofnature.com |