You guys are missing the modifier "once upon a time". It's true: once upon a time, some (at the then once-upon-a-time time) geeky reporters got some interesting stories out of radio scanners. And now, it's not geeky to own a computer. But once-upon-a-time (as in when some of us, yer elders, were kids), it was only geeky people what had them. Anyway, agreed with tptacek, completely.
Remember CB radios? They were hot in the seventies with consumers -- and many of the bigger units had scanner functions as well. Any decent newspaper has had a scanner running in the newsroom since the 1960's, although the older models required you to set 5-10 frequencies using crystals.
Police radios are mostly used to dispatch and provide baseline information about incidents. There's no chatter about confidential informants, etc. Take 10 minutes, go to any of the scanner webcast sites on the internet and listen to the traffic for a few minutes.
Duff, I don't think police dispatch radio is what the original article was talking about with regard to encryption. It seemed to be about tactical radios used by the FBI, etc.
