It doesn’t cost much to break onto a police-scanner channel and curse, spew hateful language or threaten an elected leader as an “unauthorized user” has been doing this week in Pittsburgh, experts told TribLive Wednesday.
In fact, right on Amazon.com, the popular Chinese brand Baofeng sells hundreds of two-way radios that can be adapted to do just that for less than $50.
“Anyone who spends $45 on one of these radios can go on YouTube … and cause havoc,” said Adam Scott Wandt, an associate professor in public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “And that seems to be what you guys are experiencing.”
Wednesday marked the third consecutive day an unauthorized user or users broadcast racist and obscene messages over a public-safety radio channel in Pittsburgh.
The foul comments follow earlier transmissions of antisemitic language and a death threat against the city’s mayor.
The Federal Communications Commission, said by local authorities to be investigating, has not returned repeated phone calls and emails about the intrusions.
In the meantime, Pittsburgh and Allegheny County officials are keeping mum about their investigation — declining to reveal what they know about the origin of the broadcasts or how they are being sent over airwaves.
But experts said committing what they deemed federal crimes by using obscene language on a public-safety radio channel is not rocket science.
“A two-way radio can be used to do it — if you have the frequency, which is easy to obtain for an analog system,” said Timothy Hegarty, a municipal police captain in coastal Georgia and expert on radio technology with the Council on Criminal Justice think tank.
Security not guaranteed
Traditional “analog radio” — the form of communication Allegheny County officials say the user is exploiting — transmits audio through continuous electromagnetic waves. Think of a walkie talkie or a ham radio.
Those systems, which many law-enforcement agencies have abandoned over the past 20 years, are not particularly secure, Hegarty said Wednesday.
Conversations among officers and dispatchers are not encrypted and can be heard by anyone with a police scanner at home or listening to an online feed. And there’s no authentication process required to broadcast something.
Digital is better, experts said. Allegheny County’s public-safety system is at least 3½ years away from completing its transition to digital radio, Kasey Reigner, a spokeswoman for Allegheny County Emergency Services, said Wednesday.
But even advanced technology is not fool-proof, Wandt said.
“Digital? It’s still possible to get through. It’s just harder and more expensive,” he said. “Nothing guarantees full security. There always are answers that are Google-able.”
Both experts were hesitant to express opinions about the radio tirades in Allegheny County, where an unidentified person has said things like “the mayor of Pittsburgh will be killed soon” and “If I were religious, I would say Hitler was the second coming of Christ.”
Inventory control
Officials this week said the transmissions are not a result of the public safety system being hacked.
The messages are not being broadcast with county-owned or county-maintained radio units, Allegheny County Police spokesman Jim Madalinsky said. A Pittsburgh police spokeswoman added the bureau’s radio units also are not involved.
But neither police department could provide TribLive with statistics on the number of radio units they operate — or how many are reported as missing, lost or stolen.
“If I’m an investigator, that’s the first thing I’m going to look at: inventory control,” Hegarty said Wednesday. “Because that’s the easiest way to do this: with an unaccounted-for unit.”
Bradford Arick, an FBI spokesman in Pittsburgh, said Tuesday agents in the Pittsburgh office are aware of the incidents but not involved in the investigation.
A day later, Arick said via text message that he “officially can neither confirm nor deny FBI Pittsburgh involvement.”
The FBI’s role could tell Pittsburghers something about the suspect or suspects police are hunting, experts said.
‘One unhinged individual’
If federal agents aided the FCC’s investigation, it could mean the messages are being broadcast over state lines, John Jay College’s Wandt said. If the FBI isn’t actively involved, though, it could mean the perpetrator is local — and police might be able to triangulate his location based on his broadcasts.
If that hateful language on the scanner is local, it’s probably not coming from an extremist group or terrorist organization, said Hegarty, whose police career brought him from Kansas to Hawaii.
“Especially in this day and age, the instinct is to jump to extremists,” Hegarty said. “But it’s more likely to be one unhinged individual.”
Both men were certain about one aspect of the incidents: An unauthorized person speaking on a public-safety channel is breaking the law.
“Tampering with law enforcement frequencies is a crime,” Wandt said. “There’s no doubt about that. It’s a crime at the state and federal level.”