D.C. Officers Upbraided Over E-Mails. “Elected officials from Capitol Hill to city hall chastised D.C. police officers yesterday for sending racist, vulgar and homophobic messages on their squad car computers over the last year, and legal experts said the e-mails could expose the department to lawsuits and provide fodder for criminal defense attorneys.” The behavior was reportedly found in routine internal monitoring of patrol computer usage and email traffic, but The Register, in pointing to this Washington Post story, also blinked to this reprint of an alt.radio.scanner usenet group discussion on “how easy it is to intercept the supposedly secret traffic on
the Motorola mobile data terminals used by many police forces to access
criminal history and other sensitive information.”