ismycityencrypted.com

The Problem

Across the United States, police departments are increasingly encrypting their radio communications — cutting off public access to emergency broadcasts that journalists, researchers, and citizens have monitored for decades. The Radio Television Digital News Association has flagged this as a growing threat to press freedom and public transparency.

The scope of the problem is staggering. Over 26,900 law enforcement agencies operate across the country, each with their own radio infrastructure, encryption policies, and technical configurations. Some departments have fully encrypted all channels. Others have partial encryption. Many are in the process of transitioning. The policies vary not just by state, but by county, city, and even individual department.

But there was no single place to check: is my city encrypted? The data existed — scattered across RadioReference.com’s massive database of over 224,000 frequencies and 7,100 trunked radio systems — but no one had built a tool to make it searchable at the city level. Journalists had to dig through technical databases. Citizens had no way to know if their local police could still be monitored. The information was public but effectively inaccessible.

The Approach

Binary Rogue identified the gap, proposed the project directly to RadioReference (the world's largest radio communications database), and built the entire application from scratch. No RFP. No six-month discovery phase. We saw the problem, pitched the solution, and shipped it.

The Build

The tool ingests data from the RadioReference API — 26,900+ public safety agencies across all 50 states and DC — normalizes it, classifies encryption status using a multi-factor algorithm, and makes it instantly searchable by city, county, state, or zip code.

Architecture Decisions

Every technical choice was made for a reason:

• Cloudflare Workers over traditional servers — The app runs at 330+ edge locations worldwide, so a user in Alaska gets the same sub-50ms response time as someone in Miami. Zero cold starts. Zero server management.
• D1 (SQLite at the edge) over Postgres — 1.18 million channel records needed to be queryable with minimal latency. D1 puts the database at the edge alongside the compute. No round-trips to a central database.
• Vanilla JS over React/Next.js — Zero framework overhead means the page loads instantly. The entire frontend is under 50KB. No hydration delay. No JavaScript bundle blocking the first paint.
• Client-side filtering over server queries — After initial page load, all search and filtering happens in the browser. No data leaves the user's device. Privacy by architecture, not by policy.

Key Features

• Search by city, county, state, or zip code
• Interactive US map with state-level encryption rates
• Browse-by-state pages for all 50 states + DC
• 1.18M individual channel and frequency records per agency
• 60,000+ conventional channels alongside trunked systems
• Automatic county-level fallback when a city lacks its own agencies
• Client-side filtering — after page load, no data leaves the browser

The Results

The site launched and immediately gained traction in the scanner and press freedom communities — with zero marketing budget.

• 2,500 visitors in the first 5 days — zero paid marketing, zero ad spend
• Organic traffic from 5+ countries: US, France, Singapore, Ireland, and China
• Community feedback drove a complete v2 rebuild within one week of launch
• 2.9ms median CPU time — 100% success rate, zero errors in production
• $0/month hosting cost — Cloudflare Workers free tier handles the entire workload
• Featured in scanner community forums and press freedom discussions

Timeline and Cost

From proposal to v1 launch: under 2 weeks. From v1 feedback to complete v2 rebuild: 1 week. Total development time: approximately 3 weeks for a production application handling over a million records with nationwide coverage.

The ongoing cost to operate the entire system is effectively zero. Cloudflare Workers' free tier handles the compute. D1's free tier handles the database. The weekly data sync from RadioReference runs automatically. No servers to manage. No infrastructure bills to pay.

Why It Matters

This project is Binary Rogue in a nutshell: identify a gap nobody else has solved, propose the solution directly to the stakeholder, ship it fast, get real user feedback, and iterate aggressively. No committees. No six-month discovery phase. No endless requirements documents.

The v1 launched with core functionality. Real users tested it in the wild. Feedback came in within hours. A complete v2 shipped within a week — addressing every piece of community feedback, adding browse-by-state pages, an interactive US map, and county-level fallback logic.

The same approach applies whether the project is a public transparency tool or an AI automation system for your business. Ship, then iterate. The fastest way to build the right thing is to build something, learn from it, and make it better.