During the 2010 Station Fire, which burned nearly 200,000 acres in the hills above of Altadena and La Cañada Flintridge, local blogger Tim Rutt provided the most comprehensive coverage of the fire with up-to-the-minute updates on his Web site, Altadenablog.com.

Rutt spent hours listening to police and fire frequencies, which allowed him to report wind gusts, fire containment and evacuation centers. But now, a switch by local public safety agencies to encrypted digital transmissions could leave Rutt and others who monitor those frequencies tuned out.

A recent upgrade of the city of Pasadena’s emergency broadcasting system likely will result in better communication between police and fire agencies but at the expense of citizens being able to listen in on emergency calls for service.

This development, the city’s $7-million “Radio Project,” is part of a Federal Communications Commission requirement to convert the city’s emergency broadcasting ability to narrowband systems, which will allow for significantly more radio traffic between agencies from Los Angeles to San Bernardino.

However, the upgrade — the rationale for which is predicated on the harrowing situations experienced by firefighters unable to communicate effectively while trapped in dark, smoky and collapsing buildings in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York — will not allow journalists or private citizens to monitor police or fire scanner calls.

“It frees up the bandwidth and is more reliable,” Rutt said. “But it could lead to a lack of transparency. In terms of covering spot news, it would be a real loss. If you have a hostage situation, the police are not going to stop and tell you what’s going on. That’s what you get off the radio.”

Police have their own concerns about citizens using scanners, especially when they fall into the hands of criminals, who sometimes use the information provided to commit crimes, according to Pasadena Police Chief Phil Sanchez. Sanchez told the Weekly he would seek a way to insure continued transparency.

“It is an encrypted system,” Sanchez said. Instead of picking up signals as simple radio waves, encrypted radios send voice signals over the air as a stream of bits, which are picked and reconstructed into high-quality audio by an encryption key in the radios. Depending on the quality, an analog scanner may pick up those transmissions, but only as garbled talk.

“Folks with analog scanners will not be able to monitor signals they monitored in the past,” Sanchez said. “In a contemporary public safety environment, all aspects have to be able to communicate to coordinate and maximize resources to safeguard against a criminal element that has become increasingly more sophisticated and has monitored police and acted accordingly to avoid apprehension or pursuit.”

That was the case in October 2008, when an unknown person with a scanner caused havoc for six days by broadcasting multiple false distress transmissions on police channels of an officer down. FCC agents failed to triangulate the signal, which stopped on Halloween.

More recently, in April an accidental link was created between the Los Angeles Police Department and Pasadena officers, locking both departments out of their primary channels. Police say the new system will end those problems.

“The intent is not to step away from transparency,” Sanchez said. “The effort is to move toward a program which allows us to better communicate with other safety agencies.”

Several citizen organizations use scanners to monitor police activity, among them the NAACP Pasadena Branch, the Pasadena Star-News, Pasadena Now, an online news publication and Altadenablog.com.

“We have them so that when people call in and say that there is a lot of police activity in one area, we can tell them what’s going on,” said local NAACP President Joe Brown. “Now, we can’t do that. How can we inform the community and keep people calm if we can’t hear these transmissions? It works better when the press and our community organizations can hear what is going on. If we have to wait for them to decipher encrypted messages and supply them, it is just going to lead to more distrust. We are going to sit down and find out why such a radical move is needed. If I understand correctly, the cost of going digital will be enormous. On the surface, the new radios will help law enforcement,” Brown said. “But the news media and some of us in the community who are not criminals like to hear what is going on.”

Pasadena Now Publisher James Macpherson said digitized transmissions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the challenges posed to public transparency in the Digital Age. According to Macpherson, combining encrypted transmissions with legislation like the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) — which could allow the government to shut down Web sites — could make it almost impossible for watchdogs to monitor government agencies. SOPA would allow the government the ability to shut down Web sites accused of copyright violations. Several popular Web sites, including Wikipedia, went dark on Jan. 18 in opposition to the proposed legislation.

“We’re entering a difficult age for transparency with SOPA and digitizing transmissions. The Internet is evolving into lockout and shutdown, the opposite of transparency,” Macpherson told the Weekly. “The potential tools are now in place. If there is increased use of technology for stuff like this, the Internet will not be the place it is now.”

According to Pasadena Telecommunications Director Steven Page, the city’s conversion is about easing the jobs of public safety officials and replacing the city’s antiquated municipal radio system with a modern digital system.

“The old system served the city well, but it was about 30 years old and outdated,” Page said in a statement. “This modern, digital-trunked radio system will allow city departments much greater communications access and range and make sure our first responders never have the communication problems firefighters and police in New York faced on Sept. 11, 2001.”

After the terrorist attacks, investigators learned that communications systems and protocols that distinguished each department were hampered by the lack of interoperability, and firefighters in the dark building were unable to see what channel their radios were on.

With the new system, emergency personnel will be able to easily communicate without having to visually select a channel. Firefighters standing in the pitch blackness of a burning building, for example, will be able to hear the name of the selected channel announced by the radio instead of having to pause to try to look at the radio’s display.

The new system is expected to be in place for other departments this spring.

“We have to figure out what the impact will be and ensure that transparency will be maintained,” Sanchez insisted. “The Police Department is not moving to this system to hide things. Our object is always to work with the community and not against it.”