A link to the actual newspaper report appears in this otherwise user friendly article I'm linking you to.

..."The City and County indicate there is no media or public access policy in place"...

The link below points to Lindsay's effort to obtain crucial technical information about the system that, once known, may once again restore true safety to the public in San Antonio.

Lindsay's site details his ongoing pursuit of a public information request for information. It is always useful for activists in other areas to review and follow the progress of others, and Lindsay is doing a great service by posting his effort. Like it or not, policy is where it's all at folks.

Of key point is the apparent willingness of public records personnel to faciliate the process of public records requests for media representatives, but not for average citizens regarded as "pesky". The laws themselves do not distinguish between media forums and individuals in most cases, yet everyday, it seems hinted, stewards of public records illegally make just such a call at the expense of public interest.

There are a couple of points of contention, some of which I address in an earlier article I wrote on this very matter. Generally speaking, though, I consider it a non-issue. Online court records assure saturation of information which increases the odds that everyone can review them. Even if I don't own a PC personally, I can take a mere two block walk to the nearest public Internet terminal to access those records versus a 5 mile bus trip during very particular hours to do the same thing.

Sorry, court records belong online. Maybe not exclusively, of course. Fortunately while the linked article below highlights this problem, it points out that no one is about to retract this bonanza of information liberation that online court records have initiated!

In those regions that do so, police argue that restricting police communication to the local public safety clubset is better and safer for a community than otherwise. However, occassionally we are reminded that wide area communication interceptable by everyone is more beneficial and makes better sense. In this one, a two year old boy reported lost is spotted by a man listening to his police scanner.

Attempts to mock the efficiency of open broadcasting are often translated into noble projects such as Amber Alert Systems. But really, the question must always stand as to why it isn't better for you or I to have an opportunity to know about a dangerous situation the moment a public safety worker or some agents of the media do?

What makes the story interesting to me, however, is not the knee-jerk reaction to a common scanner radio that led to more suspicion, but a point at the end about something called PocketCop. Explicitly calling attention to the police scanner as evidence of how burglars are becoming more technologically advanced, Police Chief Hayes indicated that they too needed advanced technology to thwart them. I braced myself to read that they needed a digital radio system to scramble the public out of their patrolcasts, but instead read how they were turning to PocketCops to run registrations and so forth with more confidentiality.

This example is striking a balance between some aspects of police work and shutting out the public entirely. If more selective digital communication were applied, many police departments would see that it is unnecessary as well as unsafe to blanket encrypt everything.

In Tampa I actually asked the police department to do the same thing approximately 5 years ago when they first installed the Ybor City cameras. Rather than counting on police to monitor public cameras, let the public monitor public cameras. The idea sounded crazy then, so it helps to be vindicated by this guy's idea today.

The link below requires a New York Times free registration.

• Story 1, Florida Times-Union
  
• Story 2, News4Jax Television

This is an interesting experiment because it so remarkably resembles rapid media as orginally described some years ago. If you connect to this stream (Windows Media Player) you are your own man on the street! Around the camera you can hear dogs barking, Iraqis talking, and of course, the distant sound of bombs exploding. If you watch long enough, you begin to feel the anxiety as the bombs get closer and explode at a denser interval.

If it holds up, you just might see a street battle unfold before your very eyes. Ultimately, you might even see the end game when American soldiers walk right up to the camera and wave.

The camera and its stream are an excellent example of both rapid media and exactly what it can do for our perceptions of events we otherwise have handed to us by organized media.

The night before last I'm clacking away at the PC subliminally listening to the police scanner at the same time. At one point a deputy tells another that his drug operation is going to be hampered because "they called in all the dogs" for the "other" need or operation. He later referenced them as bomb sniffers. I knew they were probably talking about something terrorist related so I took mental caution and moved on. Yesterday they raised the security level from yellow to orange, and today Tom Ridge pointed out that the threat was like 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of likelihood or credibility of militant attack.

Then I thought back to the scanner chatter and it occurred to me how lucky I was to be living in an open broadcasting area. Part of Homeland Security's point in making the color coding thing relevant is to enable citizens to adhere to greater diligence and due cause procedures. Thinking about it, among those who can, that includes keeping the scanner on! If there's an attack at that mall up the street from me, for example, there's a much greater chance of me being made aware of it than others might be in many other places. When the street officer knows of impending trouble I have the opportunity to know at the same time in order to maximize my personal level of appropriate response.

I hope that each of us who still lives in an open broadcast area will include regular passive monitoring of their local public safety channels as part of their high alert protocol. That extra few minutes which sometimes amounts to a half hour or more before anything hits the media can be just the information you need to lock your front doors, arm yourselves (you pro gunners), evacuate, warn other neighbors, or collect your immediate family for whatever contingency you keep at bay. In Tampa and Hillsborough County we can do this and we're much more likely to survive some terrible calamity than not as a result.

For those of you living in closed broadcast areas, areas where concern for the local tow truck driver chasing police calls somehow outweighed the concern for your family being killed in a recin attack, you'll just have to rely on authorities notifying local media, and local media in turn deciding to select the issue as worthy of broadcast. Hopefully it won't be something terrible going down at the premise of someone who advertises with the TV station since the decision to pass on bad news will be harder to make. In all, the soonest you'll know is 30 to 50 minutes at best. No matter how you're notified, nothing could be faster than the potential for you to know something when the dispatcher notifies the road deputy.

I'm being dramatic, but hopefully exemplifying. Open systems save lives! Narrow communication channels waste lives. And now more than ever every public safety facility in this country needs to be mandated to keep a portion of their radio communication in the clear and easily absorbable by the public. Public safety is not public safety business, it's PUBLIC business. And that means plenty now.

www.openness.org

"It's all on the public airwaves," he said. "And we find more often that people listening to them can help us. If there's anything that we don't want to put over the airwaves, we'll call by phone or we have the capability in our radio to scramble up so that people can't hear it."

I was surprised enough to actually look at the report and found the problem. The study was very specific about what information gets pulled off the web, even though all the news coverage of this report keeps the notion of sanctioned web-stripping very generalized. In reality, the questions dealt with specifics such as information posted by chemical or nuclear facilities. When it came to public safety, such as whether or not sex offenders should be posted online, more and more Americans agreed such information should be posted. The entire report, while presented as otherwise in most reports, skips the more thorny question of what information could be construed to help radical militants or not. A conclusion that it's okay to strip governmental web content (and possibly public safety web content) is piggbacking off a common sense conclusion that it's okay not to post the formulas of nerve gas or nuclear bombs.

This story is about something called the "Electronic Message Alert System" which is highly geographically relevant messaging alert network that uses text paging devices (pagers, cellphones, etc.) to keep citizens aware of potential threats and inconveniences. As the report says, all any municipality needs is internet and e-mail access.

One part of the report reads: "Now, sales of scanners and shortwave radios have increased. Mr. Smith sees his scanner as a way to get first word of an attack anywhere near his home 10 miles south of Dayton. He said the scanner will enable him to react quickly. “I would just like to have a heads-up,” he said.

The Metro (Minneapolis) Radio Board is tackling the issue of public radio access by floating a draft proposal to regulate how radios could be used by the media and others to monitor selected talkgroups of its digital trunked radio system. Unfortunately, the draft pretty much leaves the decision on what channels are "open" to the local participating agencies, and never comes close to stating a policy on what information should be available to the public. Local media are hoping to maintain at least what access they have now with analog radio channels. See what the Board left out at:

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