Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

There's very little emergency communication that wouldn't benefit from at least cryptographic signatures; in many cases it's also important to be able to communicate private data in emergencies. Not allowing encryption makes amateur radio of very little use in emergencies.

There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too.

The broader problem is that prohibiting new technologies in ham radio until they've been demonstrated to be useful (in your case, demonstrated to be useful in ham radio, despite being prohibited at the time, but most people are less blatantly unreasonable) is a recipe for, at best, chasing the taillights of commercial radio systems, and more commonly total technological stagnation and gradual abandonment.

View on HN

> Not allowing encryption makes amateur radio of very little use in emergencies.

I can't even imagine what would require encryption ... maybe PII medical traffic under some peculiar artificial scenario and most pessimistic possible HIPPA interpretation?

Now remember, that the stereotype of ham radio emcom is people roll up with no idea how to program their HT to the correct frequencies so they can't even participate. So demanding everyone participate in a GPG WoT or join a Kerberos domain to share encryption keys is an absolute non-starter. If the general public cannot participate without extensive preparation before the event, it means its not part 97 emcom, its just a poor low budget imitation of part 90, its not part 97 operation at all. Why not get GMRS licenses?

Remember there is the perpetual battle in emcom between the people who think "provide emergency communications" applies to Big Brother despite his infinite budget outclassing any possible Ham response, vs the people who think emergency communications is for the people or the general public or even for the individual. Both sides like to denigrate the other side, unfortunately.

So consider I was listening to a rando ham "involuntary storm chaser" report a tornado sighting to the NWS a couple weeks ago. How, in that scenario does encryption help? By making it impossible for the ham to talk to the NWS station because they never shared keys in advance or they shared the 2020 keys and not the 2021 keys? By making it impossible for the general public to hear the tornado report they would be safer not knowing?

Consider something topical, like the hurricane in NO. A rando member of the general ham radio public reports hurricane related flooding. The value encryption provides is making it impossible for the ham radio operator to talk to people to make the report, and encryption also makes it impossible for the general ham radio public to help. "Real ham radio emcom" situation he'd just dial up the repeater and talk to net control and make his report and move on with life. Somehow encryption would help, but ... how?

Edited to add:

> There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too.

I forgot to agree with you on that. Repeater control links and the like.

Maybe "very little use in emergencies" was an overstatement on my part. Clearly there is some important communication in emergencies that doesn't need crypto.

But I think the vast bulk of communications necessary in an emergency is between people who need to talk to their family members to find out where they are, what condition they're in, and what resources they have. That information often needs to remain private between the people who are communicating. Right now it's not mostly sent over ham radio because it can't be. In fact, it isn't transmitted at all, so people die. Advances like Codec 2 dramatically expand our possibilities for communications in emergencies, but mostly for doing new things like that, things we're not already doing.

As another example, suppose that, instead of one person reporting hurricane-related flooding you had a water-level sensor every 100 meters in a rough hexagonal grid, each transmitting a packet every 6 minutes carrying a 16-bit ID and an 8-bit water level. In theory this is an average of about 8 bits per second per square kilometer, so it wouldn't have to cause much interference or use much average power, but it's hard to get it to work under Part 15 rules because Part 15 doesn't allow you to average your power usage over 6 minutes, so you pretty much have to build a mesh network to get adequate range at the allowed power levels. You probably need to cryptographically sign the packets for the system to be reasonably reliable. (They don't need to be secret, but you need to be able to distinguish legitimate reports from griefers trying to divert emergency resources when there's no emergency.)

Nowadays you might be able to do that with LoRa. But you could have done it 20 years ago on the amateur bands --- except that it's illegal. So again hams are chasing the taillights of commercial radio, the opposite of how it's supposed to be.

In an emergency, I can’t imagine having an amateur radio link available, having a need to comm with family, and deciding not to because the connection was unencrypted and unsigned.

Airplanes are controlled by in the clear, unsigned radio comms every day. I don’t see why emergency comms over AR is a more compelling case for a secure link.

The hypothetical person I described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28361769 could certainly imagine deciding to not provide information her family needed to know for that reason, or not to attempt to meet up with them, because she is in a distinctly different position from an aircraft! And real emergencies are full of people in situations like hers, and worse.

That specific message is ill-advised. A significant portion of that message could be transmitted safely and would be way better than "Nah, not going to key the mic at all unless it's encrypted..."

"Katie and Uncles Bob and Jim are all moving from X to Y. We're armed only with our AR-15s and have plenty of ammo. We had to leave behind a few other things at the house, but we're moving safely and expected at Y before dark."

If the family knows they don't own any AR-15s and don't have any uncles named Bob or Jim, the message is received (or enough of it to be practically useful without being an unneeded forfeiture of OpSec).

Probably I'd think Katie was off her skull, or someone who didn't know us was trying to trick me into going to Y. If I did think Katie was just lying, I'd wonder if she was lying about Y too.

I've listened to several police radios with my SDR - "old male with [medical condition] at [person's address]" isn't uncommon.

Some research - paramedics are likely covered under HIPAA (if they work for a healthcare entity that provides ambulance services), I don't believe police or the fire department would be covered.

The things I'm thinking most need to be protected are more like "unaccompanied 16-year-old girl [name] at [station's address] plans to cross the recently burned area to rendezvous with [family member's name] at [rendezvous point]. She was able to get the cash savings out of the safe before the house burned, but couldn't get the gun safe open."

After Katrina, dead bodies with gunshot wounds rotted in the streets for weeks, uninvestigated. Human jackals aren't common but when they sense impunity they do make their presence known.

There is a lot of unnecessary information in your hypothetical message. What, beyond "[name] plans to rendezvous with [family member's name] at [rendezvous point] (about [time])" needs to be conveyed? Suddenly it's a very different message.

Well, if someone is listening to the girl's voice on the radio, they can guess her age. If her voice isn't on the radio, you as a family member have no reason to believe that it's really her. You need to plan out the route to the rendezvous point so that you know where to look for her if she doesn't make it, and she knows where she should go if you don't show up. If you (the family member) are trying to find a place to stay, or a way to buy gas, it may be crucial information to you that she has money, because that information may keep you from attempting trips into dangerous areas to get it; likewise, that she is unarmed, because, if you feel that you need to be armed, you know that her arrival will not provide that, and you still need to keep considering alternative options, like dropping half a grand at the pawn shop before they sell out. When you are having the discussion with her and discussing alternative possible plans for meeting up, the fact that she is unarmed is relevant to choosing among the alternative plans. You probably also need to discuss with her what things to take along on the trip; maybe she hasn't thought about the need for N95 masks in the recently burned zone, but maybe she can get one from someone at the station.

So really this kind of rendezvous arrangement benefits enormously from being able to discuss such plans at some length, but it would be terrible if random strangers were listening in. Without cellphones, you have to discuss this stuff in advance in order to successfully meet up with people; you can't pop off an SMS to ask them where they are or let them know you're running late.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com