TBH any Police officers reading that post from 2004 are likely today to have either taken their early pension; moved on to doing something more useful such as tracing trolls, bullies and cyberstalkers or have transferred to a private sector IT company doing surveilance/complicance work.
in the first instance its not actually the Police who monitor this board, it is the BBC at Caversham Park in SE England. This is because its a public forum so classed as a media outlet.
They use a combination of bots and various journalists who register and lurk on the forums to find newsworthy stuff (some have even tried to contact me in the past) – but if they find anything that looks criminal its often made into a investigative story and the details sent on to the Police/NCA for further investigation. If you read the “yoof” service “Newsbeat” you might see recent stings against instagram/snapchat etc unearthing NPS and controlled drugs sales to under 18s.
Anything which is viewed as really bad (potential incitment of violence/terrorism) and linked to encrypted content is immediately flagged to GCHQ.
But Caversham have been doing this for 30 or more years (they played a big rôle in wireless intercepts in WW II) – it was their own staff who explained to me how they worked back then.
I lived 5 minutes down the road from their Monitoring Station for a large part of my life; in a suburban area where TVP deployed many of their most intelligent officers and never got any shit whatsoever for my online activities. On the comparatively few occasions I did get in any real trouble I’d either been blatantly caught with drugs or associating with people who were doing other crimes.
The zero tolerance against raves in many parts of England did not happen overnight either nor because cops particularly wanted to shut the events down.
it occured because many folk involved were acting in such ways they were causing actual harm to themselves and others, trashing the environment and filling the Emergency Departments up with as many casualties as the townie venues produced without even paying their contributions towards the extra costs the night time/music events scene creates to the public sector.
For many years I was able to independtly monitor all 3 blue light services using radio scanners (the BBC Caversham engineers also did this for a hobby, we’d chat about frequencies, antennas and equipment quite often!) I won’t directly divulge some of the stuff I’ve heard as that remains illegal and unethical but I’ve heard all sorts.
it was sometimes hard to keep listening when you could hear victims of sex assaults crying in the background (the electret microphones mentioned elsewhere are widely used in public service comms radios), or “Any Tango Romeo units from HB HB HB, immediate attendance required injury/fatal RTC at “- then “Alpha 1, Alpha 2 make pumps 4 from HD HD (fire)” followed by “Mike Charlie 03 from Wokingham Control attend RTC and liase with TVP traffic..”
When the mobile units answered the talkthrough would be shut off (doiwn South the mobile comms was normally relayed through the repeater channel) and you would just hear “pip… pip… pip… ” on all 3 services channels (this was done to remind other mobiles the repeater link is still in use but increase the privacy on an insecure analogue channel which meant the mobile units were passing all the details of casualties and fatalities).
these are the same blue light staff you might encounter at a rave on Sunday; some have already done a 12 hour shift dealing with stuff like the above…
