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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

In my part of the US, I can overhear loads of PII by just tuning my VHF transceiver to various public safety frequencies. I hear drivers license numbers, medical info, all sorts. I hesitate to think that there’s a better alternative though. I’m terrified that the UK is moving to LTE rather than the current trunked radio. The amount of damage caused by comms failing in a major emergency (or even just dead zones) massively outweighs the risk of a little data loss at present. If there are more reliable communication methods that preserve privacy, then we should be using them, but I’m not sure they exist at the moment.

edit: to be fair, it should be possible to encrypt some of the traffic, but things should fail open, not closed, or people will die.

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Meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on to digital, encrypted communication.

Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster as long as the base station batteries hold out and that’s with cheap base stations serving very large amounts of idiot users using the cheapest of the cheap handsets limited by regulations. Why wouldn’t you be able to make this work indefinitely with a limited amount of trained users using selected, powerful expensive handsets.

In other words, a bunch of poor excuses made by coincidentally those same people who love to profess that privacy doesn’t matter as long as it’s someone else’s privacy.

Agreed about privacy, but the "Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster" is a very optimistic view.

It was no a disaster, far from it. In Belgium, few years ago, a fire under a bridge broke an bunch of fibers from the main telco operator.

Result on a region of about 200,000 inhabitants:

  - no radio (on my usual station), first thing I noted that morning.
  - no internet
  - no TV (comes via internet)
  - no cell phone coverage
  - no land-line either
  - emergency calls impossible (by cell-phone or land-line)

This started early in the morning and was only solved in the afternoon for most people. We are over-reliant on some technology with many single point of failure we do not even know about.

That sounds insane. Any network other than very basic ones should have physical redudancy, ie. not being in the same duct or even travelling close to eachother. Hell, our local MAN network here does it! Thats in a city with 130k inhabitants, they actually made the network backbone out of redundant rings.

I would hope most telco networks would be somewhat resilient.

I heard in this case, both Proximus and Telenet, the main operators in Belgium, run their fibers in the same conduit. So every company thought they were redundant by buing both, but weren't.

I also heard the railways are the main fiber provider: They have long stretches of rail between all major cities, so they are ideal for fiber. But very bad for redundancy

A former employer of mine tried to have redundant connections. They had two fibers from two different providers, going separate paths from their Dallas office, etc. However, the 2nd provider utilized a 3rd provider as a regional carrier. And for about 100 miles between Dallas and Chicago, the fibers were run in conduits that were side by side. We discovered that when a single backhoe took down phones, data, etc, to all our southeast Region offices. (it also affected many others). Found out the hard way, that the 2nd providers redundant uplink also went through the same connection. Good luck tracing your fibers all the way from end to end.. Most of this stuff is all contracted to 3rd parties, and most don't want to give you detailed maps.

Companies often sell services to each other, too. So what you think is a redundant connection may just be a link on the same fiber, resold.

> - no radio (on my usual station), first thing I noted that morning.

I imagine that's internet radio? That couldn't be normal AM/FM radio.

Normal AM/FM radio still needs a way to send the audio data to the transmitter. Either the studio was in the region and their internet uplink was affected, or the local transmitter was using the internet to receive the audio feed.

It was FM radio, and I think the studio sends its data to the antenna using some internet link, which was down.

> Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster ...

Except when you go over your Verizon bandwidth limit.

That's for data. This conversation is about voice communication.

This is in reference to a specific incident last year where fire fighters operations were impacted because their service plan inadvertently was setup with a monthly limit.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

Point stands. "Emergencies are a terrible time for an upsell" is not something I thought would be controversial, but building systems in which one has to have permission to communicate in an emergency is a recipe for people dying.

Which is why emergency phone calls can be made anywhere you have coverage in the U.S. or Canada, whether or not your subscription is current.

>Meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on to digital, encrypted communication.

It's happening slowly in the US. Biggest reason it's slow is "defense/law enforcement" suppliers and their markups for the industry which add cost and causes departments to delay as long as they can until someone ponies up the money. Not to mention there is new IT overhead in managing the configuration on said radios and while bigger agencies have the internal team to do it, smaller agencies don't have that benefit.

Unlike say France where there is one singular police force that can share resources, in the US there's hundreds of them in just one state. Don't get me started about ambulances. Because this is #amerika, there are thousands of private ambulance services. Getting them on board with encrypted comm isn't really going to work given they begrudgingly paying most EMTs minimum wage.

>Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster as long as the base station batteries hold out and that’s with cheap base stations serving very large amounts of idiot users

Maybe? There are numerous accounts of inoperable service when incidents like 9/11 or the Boston bombing occurred. So in cases where the system is flooded, it might be a crap shoot.

The only way this would work is with dedicated frequency and possibly infrastructure, similar to FirstNet.

Mobile phones are not reliable for natural disaster situations, because of channel loading characteristic on the control channel, LTE may survive better.

> Mobile phones continue to work during a disaster as long as the base station batteries hold out and that’s with cheap base stations serving very large amounts of idiot users using the cheapest of the cheap handsets limited by regulations.

Why "idiot"? Are they idiots for using cheap handsets? I really can't tell why you added that word.

There's a need for comm that works without middlemen that can predictably fail.

Like Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES)?

http://www.arrl.org/ares

The reason radio is robust against disaster is because it's peer-to-peer, not because it's analogue.

So, a like-to-like alternative is probably a encrypted local mesh network.

Trunked radio systems, as used by police, firefighters and EMS worldwide are not peer-to-peer. You transmit to the trunk, it relays to people in your selected group. All radios rely on a control signal from the trunk for determining where to send and when to listen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunked_radio_system

All our 'digital' signals are ultimately transmitted over some analog channel. "Digital" is an abstraction. There's no reason you can't encrypt a radio transmission without relying on intermediaries to relay it as in a mesh network.

You can do encryption without mesh - the digital radio standards all support it.

My municipality is using encrypted trunked P25 for police comms now. Seems better than LTE for reliability at least. Just a simple digital voice codec and optional encryption system ontop of the traditional trunked radio systems. Compression means you can wedge many more streams out of it too.

I have mixed feelings about the encryption though, especially with police data, generally I feel much of that data should be public with a more limited amount which should not. It's good to make public "there's a drunk driver on this street, right now", you just might not need to share their plate with the public.

Use LTE and make it fail to the VHF transceiver, seems easy.

Sure the cost is higher, but the cost is for privacy. This would also allow an actual backup system, versus purely VHF.

> If there are more reliable communication methods

Of course there are.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_25

the reason its left in the open typically is both for interoperability and police accountability. Both P25 and DMR support AES256 encryption.

That isn't PII in the sense that it's protected at that point.

It's not PII when a police officer says your name and address. It's only protected health information when someone who is governed by medical privacy laws does it, like a nurse.

I have only seen PII interpreted as personally identifiable information. License numbers and names fall under this category.

Oh, if you're not talking about medical data, then yes, personal identifying information is everywhere in America society. Counties have public lists of property owners, states have public lists of business owners, almost all court proceedings have online dockets and public access, etc etc. Just take a walk to city hall or where the local area keeps records and you'll find PII on basically everyone who lives there.

PII (personally identifiable information) != PHI ([legally] protected health information)

I think you are referring to PHI not PII.

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