Been a ham 40+ years. It is damn hard to intercept specific commnication digitally between two hams if they are trying to be secretive. I know hams that used to send dirty pictures back and forth using TCP/IP over ham radio and only using the radio for entry/exit into the internet via gateways. When you deal with multiple users using the exact same frequency using time division multiplexing it is hard to capture the data. If you wanted to be secretive you just change the frequency or path on a predetermined process every other fdata burst and you would have great difficulty peices it all together. This is alos assumiming that people are transmitting in the amateur bands. Most ham radios also have the ability to transmit anywhere from 1.8 Mhz up through 54 MHZ and most areas inbetween.If you want it secret just float around outside the ham bands when you got real important shit to transfer.
They are cheap but work. What is nice is that they xmit/receive outside of the ham bands including business and police bands which has nice benefits if SHTF.
I had an ICOM V8 that I modified to operate outside the ham bands onto the police band to support Search and Rescue I did as an EMT. Not kosher since the radio was not approved for that. But the Baofeng is legal and already wide open for xmit as needed. Most any radio can be "Opened Up to other frequencies" I agree with the other poster that Kenwood, Icom, Yesau etc are quality radios but Baofeng is a throw away radio that works and costs almost nothing.
The reason for the license even if you are a bad guy using it for evil purposes. If someone shows up to your house and you have a ham radio and they suspect you are using it at all you better have a license otherwise you have a big problem with the FCC if they show up.