![]() Another court in another state will rule it does." "In one state if you make it to a court, the court will rule it doesn't violate this law. "The outcome can often be a checkerboard, with very similar laws from one state to the next but different outcomes," he said. "The technology is Buck Rogers stuff that nobody had heard of or thought of at the time the law was written," Wright told me. "This is the latest example of old laws bumping against new technologies where the application of the law is not clear." ![]() You don't need to be in radio range, or even in the same state, for them to work. Instead, they receive feeds from police, fire and EMS channels all over the country, streamed over the Internet - and over your cellular network - to your device. The apps don't even turn your phone into a true scanner. The problem, police and legal experts say, is that if you have it with you - in other words, if it's a mobile police scanner - then you can use it the way Matthew Hale is accused of: to aid in the commission of some other crime.Īt least five states - Indiana among them, along with Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota and New York - make it illegal to use a mobile police scanner without a license from the Federal Communications Commission (i.e., a ham license) or permission from local law enforcement. Where things get sticky is when you take it out of your home. ![]() It is legal to own a police scanner radio on that, pretty much everyone agrees. (An earlier version of this post misspelled Benjamin Wright's name.) ![]() "As you look across the United States, we have 50 different states, and every state has different laws on things like obstruction of justice," said Benjamin Wright, a legal scholar in data security and forensics technology at the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md., which teaches law enforcement and other security personnel the ins and outs of technology. Should you scrub that scanner app from your phone? It depends. The law, it turns out, is quite literally all over the map on whether it's legal to use scanner apps on smartphones. ![]()
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