German Mickey Mouse radio snoops on cops The German powers that be are investigating a kids' miniature Mickey Mouse radio which apparently entertains nippers with police radio traffic. The Chinese-made novelty came with issue 12 of Micky Maus magazine, which hit newsstands last week. Parents reported the eavesdropping to cops, who picked up a few copies to check out …
Germany is rolling-out a Tetra network, 10 years after the British. They were originally intended to roll-out together with the UK, but, well, they never got beyond talking about it.
It is a bit embarrassing that criminals can listen-in to police radios with a standard scanning receiver, but i understand that the police realise this, and treat it as an insecure channel.
Quite how they describe a bank robbery in progress without letting-on to their eavesdroppers beats me, "ze donuts haf fallen auf der box and are rollink down prinzenstrasse, in a mkII Jaguar" ?
If you read the fine print on the TV licence, it says quite clearly that you can't use it for anything else but watching permitted TV channels. But wait, there's more. It also says you are not allowed to tell anyone else if you inadvertently hear or see anything else on it.
Well that's what it said in 1980. I bet it says the same thing today. Living in darkest Berks. I used to hear Radio Lubljana on my little portable TV. Oops I wasn't supposed to tell anyone....
There used to be a clause prohibiting reception of "unauthorised" transmissions in most forms of UK radio licence, certainly including my amateur 'ticket'. They never did say how you were supposed to know what the transmission was without listening to it, of course, so by the time you know it's technically too late.
You should be OK with Radio Lubljana, though, as long as it's a legitimate (i.e., not pirate) broadcast station. What they want to stop is you monitoring the local fuzz while you do the bank over, and since they've transferred most official comms to the encrypted Tetra system you'd have to do a lot more than just tuning your radio (or little portable TV, or kiddie toy) these days.
And actually, police radio was anything but boring - (not) listening to it used (not) to give me a considerable appreciation of the policeman's lot, which is indeed not a happy one. You would (not) hear them being called to domestics, traffic accidents, pub brawls, one after another - all sorts of grim stuff which most of us are fortunate rarely, if ever, to experience at all, never mind having to sort it out. It gave me a lot of respect for the people who spend their entire working life driving from one dismal situation to the next, dealing with the shit end of human affairs. A neat bit of unplanned PR which they've now encrypted away.
Wait until the Daily Mail hear the Chinese are smuggling spy equipment into the EU to support their evil botnets.
I could still listen in to the police here after Channel 5 started broadcasting in 1997, as they were on the same frequency. The police were slightly more interesting than Channel Five.
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