They don’t like that it’s a way to circumvent and bypass the govt intercept of communication like they can do via phone or internet.
This. They want to head it off at the pass.
Intercept of radio transmission is one of the easiest things -- far less complicated than the phone or internet where they typically use the cooperation of the telecommunications companies.
What individually-controlled radios (as opposed to telecom company controlled radios) afford is they cannot simply be turned "off" remotely. Most of them can be easily jammed, however. Just blast the area with a powerful transmission on the frequencies being used and nobody else's transmissions will get through. For a concentrated riot situation, that's totally practical.
Another thing individually-controlled radios afford is convenient anonymity of carry, receive, and location (the degree of transmit anonymity is tenuous). "Burner" phones are another alternative but that option is being squeezed. I remember when the protests were happening in Ukraine and masses of people in the crowd received a message on their phone, "
You have been registered as participating in an unlawful assembly..." They just grabbed all the registrations from the cells within range and recorded the ID and GPS data of every phone in the area. As far as I know, the announcement was used mostly for intimidation, but they could have subsequently rounded people up. I am sure that's what they did after January 6th. They just didn't send out the bluff text, and they also had far more video and images to corroborate their data with.
So individually-controlled radios (amateur, FRS, commercial, public safety, CB, etc.) afford some advantages, but circumventing and bypassing government intercept of the communication is not one of them. For the most part, handheld radios are just a gross simplification that does away with a lot of the intrusive technology and features that can be used to abuse people while also forgoing the benefits of those features to the user. It's theoretically possible to meld a more sophisticated device containing a powerful microprocessor (like a smartphone) with a more powerful radio for simplex (non-cellular) communications. That is not widely done because to package the cost of development, production, and profit into a device would result in a far, far higher price than what consumers are accustomed to paying up-front when their device also comes with a dependency on a contract with a cellular network provider, and the ability to gather and sell surveillance data, and promote targeted ads, etc. Apple, Facebook, Verizon, AT&T, Google, Twitter, Youtube, etc. don't have to bundle phones with a contract to make them cheap -- they just have to know that producing phones for their whole cellular and internet ecosystem will inevitably drive revenues. Individually-controlled devices could conceivably bypass that ecosystem, but since they don't come with comparable revenue streams, what company would develop them?
