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a little tool for notifying people when your local police department's encrypted chatter changes

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Umbrella

This is a tool for monitoring the amount of encrypted radio chatter from local police departments and (optionally) publishing this info to twitter. It does not include any sort of scheduler.

Setup

If you don't intend to tweet, the only thing you'll need is a recent version of node.

If you want to tweet, you'll need to make a twitter account, apply for developer access, and then generate and save consumer keys and access tokens. Then, populate a file named secrets.json with these fields:

{
  "consumer_key": "",
  "consumer_secret": "",
  "access_token_key": "",
  "access_token_secret": ""
}

Using umbrella

To run it once: node umbrella.js. This will not publish to twitter. You can add these flags to customize behavior:

  • --tweet: Publish to twitter
  • --debug: Output debug info

Running on a schedule

Add a cron job to a machine that'll be up often. I recommend something like this, which will tweet and print debug logs to /cron-log.log: 0,15,30,45 * * * * /absolute/path/to/node /absolute/path/to/umbrella.js --tweet --debug > /cron-log.log 2>&1

Docker

The docker container can be built using docker build -t umbrella .. Be sure to populate the values in the secrets.json file first, then run the container with docker run --rm -v $(pwd)/secrets.json:/app/secrets.json umbrella.

Upcoming features

  • Generalizable for different jurisdictions
  • Graphs as images, not ascii sparklines
  • Better metrics
  • Alarming

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a little tool for notifying people when your local police department's encrypted chatter changes

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