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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

In general, amateur radio transmissions ought to be open and unencrypted -- the equivalent of GPL or public domain. There are some instances where the legal ban on encryption is an issue, such as when HAMs come to the aid of emergency management after a natural disasters and cannot pass personally identifying information or patient information in the clear without violating HIPAA. A common-sense exception allowing encryption in these cases makes complete sense and is something the FCC commissioner could probably approve by edict in lieu of legislation on the matter.

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It's hard to use a system in an emergency if you're not used to using it in general. This goes for everything from driving to manually deploying a rollback to your software to ham radio. If we really need encrypted communications in emergencies (and I buy that we do, tbh), we should be using encrypted communications for everyday conversations so we're comfortable with how to turn it on, what the failure modes are, how we handle authentication and key distribution, etc. And I mean everyday conversations, not just emergency practice events.

See also this USENIX paper about how police with encrypted radios (who are legally allowed and generally expected to encrypt their traffic all the time) end up turning off encryption because it doesn't work reliably or easily: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec11/tech/full_papers/C... I have trouble believing that in a disaster, any significant portion of hams will manage to set up encryption.

This is an important point and probably why even the US military doesn’t always elect to encrypt comms/control/telemetry.

Encryption without proper key management is security theater, and proper key management is hard. Just rolling it out into an ecosystem that has never had to accommodate its idiosyncracies is a recipe for trouble...particularly when the cost of malfunction could be life and limb.

HIPAA wasn’t designed for exceptional circumstances. Given the choice between letting a few radio nerds overhear that your kid was severely burned in a wildfire and needs immediate evacuation or letting them suffer longer b/c some certificate expired on a relay, most would choose the former.

That said, if folks are willing to take the risk, you could potentially implement some kind of key escrow system so that comms are tactically protected but still subject to scrutiny.

Lastly digital signatures employ cryptography, rules should be implemented in a way to still allow for that to occur.

> It's hard to use a system in an emergency if you're not used to using it in general.

This is why you will hear the Hospital Net on the the N6NFI repeater every month. Here's the Net Control Operator script:

https://www.scc-ares-races.org/hospital/docs/HospitalNetScri...

If you listen to the net some night, you might hear operators checking in from each hospital saying "No traffic, we sent a packet." Which sounds pretty boring, but confirms two things: the ham radio station at that hospital has successfully completed a voice communication (obviously, because they are talking with Net Control), and they have also successfully sent a message to a designated packet radio address and had it confirmed.

That's about as uninteresting as it gets, until the real emergency happens and everyone is glad you've been practicing this every month.

It's also why, when you see a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/Baofeng/ saying "I want to get one of these cheap handhelds for emergency communication, I know I'm not allowed to transmit unless it's a real emergency, but I can listen in the meantime and then I will have the radio on hand just in case," there will always be replies like "Get your Technician license! It's not that hard - many people study for half a day or less - and then you can practice transmitting on the ham bands, so you know you will be able to operate the radio."

I'm pretty sure that in the event of a natural disaster, HIPAA would accept that saving lives is more important than preserving patient privacy.

This exception already exists in current regulations.

Yup. http://www.hdscs.org/hipaa.html

I disagree wholeheartedly. Ham radio cannot limit itself to unencrypted communications in the modern era. Radio communication is no longer limited to electrical engineers spending thousands of dollars on big boat anchors, as it was in the mid 20th century. It's not a fringe activity anymore. Virtually every American has a cell phone, and we all use our cell phones every day, and our cell phones primarily make encrypted transmissions.

One of the stated goals in Part 97 is for amateur radio to "contribute to the advancement of the radio art". How is ham radio accomplishing that goal and contributing to the bleeding edge of radio science, when it's illegal to use a modern bleeding edge radio on the ham bands?

Encryption is a necessary property of modern radio communications. If ham radio wants to remain modern, it must allow encryption. Conversely, if we don't allow encryption, it will not remain modern.

> In general, amateur radio transmissions ought to be open and unencrypted -- the equivalent of GPL or public domain.

What are your reasons for that assertion?

Imagine if someone suggested that all noncommercial messages over Wifi should be unencrypted and public domain, because it's a shared resource. They'd be laughed out of the room.

If your concern is about identifying abusers of shared spectrum then simply require that all messages be prefixed with the cleartext/speech sending station code.

Yeah, I don't really get where this article is going. All digital signals are required to publish how to decode and D-Star that was called out was designed specifically by hams.

My guess is this is just a push back against pactor and the non ham usage that tends to happen. Either way ham isn't going to be breaking any data rates soon as the frequency used is to small for faster symbols(and they're also prohibited but current laws).

The voice codec for Dstar is proprietary and patented. Luckily it's about to expire and I've seen at least one reverse engineered implementation.

Still, it completely goes against the spirit of a hobby and is an intentional legal and technical barrier to decoding transmissions, today.

Yes. D-Star is the poster-child for the kind of coding scheme that should not be allowed in Amateur Radio. If I can't access the documentation required to do a compatible open implementation, then it is a no-go.

There are some methods that are patent encumbered and the only source of ways to decode them are with tightly controlled modems/decoders. This is especially the case with the advanced PACTOR modems and some of the digital voice encoders. The FCC considered patented methods to be open even if there are no available methods to decode them.

> All digital signals are required to publish how to decode

This is not true.

The real problem is that it makes using https over packet radio 'illegal'; as well as any other TLS service and ssh.

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