Abusing The Police Scanner

On Friday, millions followed the progress of the Boston manhunt via the BPD scanner. Ambers, a longtime police-scanner junkie, maintains that journalists should never use information from a scanner without a second source and believes that continued misuse, like that seen last week in Boston, will lead to greater encryption of the feeds:

Because authorities have the power to force police agencies to encrypt their channels, and because few will take the time to think about the equities the public and the media have in preserving access to them, I worry that this information commons, as it were, will be regulated too quickly because of the irresponsible actions of a few.