popular logistics

Probably not illegal; but it doesn’t quite seem right, either. According to Bob Fernandez of The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Comcast Corp. admitted yesterday that it paid people to attend a government hearing. Company critics say the freelance attendees were there to crowd them out; Comcast says they were merely saving seats for employees.

The five-hour hearing Monday at Harvard University was organized by the Federal Communications Commission to address the issue of net neutrality, a hot-button topic for those who think there should be minimal restrictions on Internet traffic.

The topic has drawn wide interest from college students, media-reform groups, and Internet companies.

An official at Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy group that has criticized Comcast for limiting the amount of data some of its customers send over its network, accused the cable company of “stacking the deck” at the hearing with the 30 to 40 “seat-warmers.” An official at Harvard said dozens of real participants were left standing outside the auditorium with placards.

“They were taking seats away from other citizens who had a right to be there,” said Catherine Bracy, administrative manager for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. “It was a PR thing. [Comcast] wanted more people in the room who were sympathetic.”

Comcast feared a loud and critical crowd at the hearing where executive vice president David Cohen was scheduled to testify. Comcast, which offers high-speed Internet to 48 million homes, has said it needs to manage Internet use so that a small number of customers transmitting very large video files do not clog the network for everyone.

Comcast admits paying attendees at FCC hearing | Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/28/2008

Via Daring Fireball.

I don’t understand it.

But - Michael Chertoff has started a blog. And, after a recent  post, David W. Stephenson, of Stephenson Strategies, made a comment that actually made it through DHS screening.

I’m not sure he could have gotten the comment onto a commercial flight, though, unless it was in checked luggage.

Check out Mirabile dictu! My comment on Chertoff’s blog was ok’d,  on Stephenson blogs on homeland security 2.0. 

Stephenson is co-author, with Eric Bonabeau, of Expecting the Unexpected: The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy, in the February 2007 issue of Homeland Security Affairs. 

We’ve blogged about this article before - but it’s good enough that I’m happy to shill for it more than once - as I am about HSAJ’s parent organization, the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense & Security.

Between Stephenson, Bonabeau, and Professor Brian Steckler of NPS, I’ve been persuaded of the utility of wireless networks in emergencies - although it’s my contention that, organized from the bottom up - we need more than one system. More about system redundancy and about NPS soon.

One of these things is not like the others. Can you tell which one?

Gunnar J Kuepper, Chief of Operations for the consultancy Emergency Disaster Response, Inc., is the author the the paper, “Emergency Management Symbols, History – Meaning – Relevance. A Commentary to the Symbol introduced by NEMA as the New National Logo for Emergency Management.”

Kuepper thinks one of these three logos is quite problematic.

Paper available here.

We first learned about these from Haninah Levine’s piece in Defense Tech, which had reported that they were under consideration for field use in Iraq.

From the firm’s press release:

This is a revolutionary, plug-and play, rapidly deployable, mobile, hybrid solar and wind power system. It can provide power in hours and run for years with very low maintenance and minimal operating costs. It is ideal for disaster relief, Homeland Security, commercial, military, and intelligence applications in any climate worldwide.

Our ambitions include profiling individual organizations across and outside the country - and to try to develop some comparative measures of risk and readiness. Our principal, and selfish reason, is so that New York area - and particularly Brooklyn emergency responders, can learn from each other. But we’re detemined to do it so cleverly that it looks like we’re providing information useful anywhere. For the moment - we’ll do this in an ad hoc way. Since the Barbecue Recipe heiress is, at the moment, visiting her folks in Lawrence, Kansas, I thought I’d look a bit at emergency response teams in that neck of the woods. (It’s my understanding of the terms of my marriage, and family tradition, that, once I’ve mentioned Lawrence, I’ve also got to say “Go Jay Hawks!” So there it is). Following is the logo of Rampart Search and Rescue - a/k/a Kansas-Missouri Light Rescue Team.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to a point where this is the preferred means of communications or cartography in a domestic emergency in the United States. However, Popular Logistics is committed to makings its readers aware of all types of systems, although we’ll probably drawn the line at squirrels. Here’s an image of a German World War I photo-taking pigeon, from PigeonBlog:

Link to concise article on this subject on PigeonBlog here.

Via Cynical-C.

Here’s Streetwriter, one of a number of projects from the nice people at the Institute for Applied Autonomy:

Apparently the Streetwriter has had more than one incarnation - first built into the body of a van - the more recent and advanced model being towable. From the IAA website:

The system consists of a custom built, computer controlled industrial spray painting unit that is built into an extended-body cargo van. The vehicle prints text messages onto the pavement in a manner much like a dot-matrix printer. The expanded width of StreetWriter allows for messages and simple graphics that are legible from tall buildings and low flying aircraft and is capable of rendering messages that are several hundred feet in length.

New! A radical redesign of StreetWriter has taken place. The new machine, tentatively called SWX, recently infiltrated the finish line festivities of the DARPA Grand Challenge. The earlier version of StreetWriter has been officially decomissioned [sic].

Text and other images here.

We’d like to propose an additional use for this technology - when government signage fails in emergencies - viz. certain of New York City’s “Flood Evacuation Route” - which may be signs leading to the flood, rather than away - these machines might be put to use correcting government misinformation. Which may, we think, have been the artists’ original intent. If anyone amongst the Popular Logistics  readership has a connection to IAA - an exclusive group, from what we hear - we’d like an introduction.

I remember saying this when, in school, I was trying to get the hang of adding and multiplying polynomials. (Full disclosure: I passed Calculus I, but apparently by virtue of lax standards and/or divine intervention). So when you hear government officials testifying about how difficult - how nearly impossible it is to make communications systems interoperable - be skeptical.

If you’re mystifed by how government agencies could manage voice/data wireless interoperability - take a look at Communications Applied Technology.

While the company is based in Virginia (for my nearby neighbors, Virginia is a state just south of Washington, D.C.; very scenic; for everyone else, just remember that New Yorkers are very provincial and ignorant of geography outside of the tri-state area), the intellectual engine behind this firm comes from the borough that brought you Jackie Robinson, Al Capone (yes, from Brooklyn, not Chicago), abolitionism, the Broooklyn Dodgers, Coney Island, Olmsted and Vaux’s masterpiece Prospect Park. and Stanley Kaplan - the man who put the lie to the notion that the SAT was a test of good breeding.

You don’t need to be a big gearhead to see that C-AT has already designed solutions that directly address comms interoperability problems. If we’d had this gear in the hands of the NYPD and NYFD on 9/11 our hearts might be a bit less broken.

This is just one model in a series of “Incident Commanders’ Radio Interface(s)” - it can connect one wireless telephone - and, according to C-AT, “provides a rugged, highly-portable, radio cross-band (VHF, UHF, 800MHz), cross platform (digital/analog, trunked/talk-around, AM/FM) capability for mutual aid operations.”

In lay terms, this means that, in an emergency in, say, a tunnel, an incident commander can get the EMS, NYPD, Red Cross, and one or two federal agencies working together in two “talk groups.” I suppose the phone interface is best used to relay messages to entities not on radio nets (elected officials arranging photo ops; utility contractors like Con Ed whose radio frequencies might not be immediately available).

The interoperability problem is - we’re repeating ourselves here - not a technical problem - and, given the scale of our economy, neither is it a problem of cost.

The model above measures 10″x3″x7″ - and weights 3.5 lbs. By way of comparison - a single hand-held radio (the Vertex 920) weighs 13.0 oz with battery, antenna and clip.

See our earlier post on the Justice Department’s IG report on interoperability between DOJ,DHS and Treasury law enforcement units here.

We’ve finished readng the IG’s report. As we’d expect, given the recent work of the DOJ IG under Glenn Fine - it’s well-written, and to the point. It’s redolent of pre-9/11 interagency sniping and foot-dragging, and a very crass joke, well-known in law enforcement circles, involving three dogs - each a search dog working for a different law enforcement agency. If  you’re not familiar with this joke - and know someone in federal law enforcement or intelligence circles - ask them. If you’re really curious, e-mail me privately - with the understanding that’s it’s told for historical/allegorical purposes. I tell jokes badly in person - worse via e-mail.

 

This is the international maritime signal flag “prepare.”  From Wikipedia entry on maritime signal flags.

Daniel Pulliam piece in the daily briefing on www.govexec.com:

A partnership between the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to create an interoperable wireless communications network for police and first responders has fallen apart and the project is imperiled, according to an audit released Monday.

The report from the Justice Department’s inspector general office stated that despite more than six years of development and $195 million in funding, the Integrated Wireless Network project “does not appear to be on the path to providing the seamless interoperable communications system that was envisioned.”

We haven’t read the Justice IG’s report yet. Disappointing news - but no surprise. More to follow.

Update: I’ve gotten about halfway through the IG’s very clear report. No less disturbing - but the obsolescence they’re talking about is principally in encryption functionality of their two-way voice communications. Question: it’s clear that the Russians were good at cryptography and steganography - is there any reason to believe that Al-Qaeda has ever used anything as sophisticated as a book code? Are they transmitting number groups via satphone?

Of course the Bureau and Marshals Service, Secret Service, DEA should have interoperable encrypted systems. But it’s not clear that it should have taken this long, not clear that this isn’t at least in part the result of long-standing institutional rivalries and inertia, not clear that it should have cost this much. This, so far, is what I take to be the import of the Inspector General’s Report.

What remains clear is that 10,000 or 20,000 fully interoperable, image-handling, encryption-updatable-on-the-fly two way radios won’t do a whole lot for first responders.

I haven’t puzzled out yet - perhaps I’m being thick - how an interoperable trunked, encrypted radio system:

• lets two Special Agents of the FBI, or any two people from the same agency talk to each other in the same neighborhood;
• what happens with the same two agents don’t have repeaters nearby and are far from their home offices;
• how two federal employees from different agencies can communicate point-to-point in the same neighborhood (or same warehouse)

More coming when we finish reading the Inspector General’s report.

What are the implications of this? Especially in places like New York, where state and local governments are also struggling with interoperability and system design issues - the clear answers are

1. to support the ARES and RACES systems and
2. to build local, FCC-licensed, locally-run comms nets - either on frequencies in the Business-Industrial Pool or,
3. with local or state permission, on public safety frequencies.

The ideal solution would be an integrated and redundant system which uses all three of those elements.

For those of you that like illustrations with your text, we now provide the graphic portion of this post: ARES and RACES logos.

Shaila Dewan has a good piece in this morning’s Times, describing difficulties less-affluent communities are having upgrading the 911 systems - and the attendant consequences.

The piece includes an excellent description of the various flavors and vintages of 911 systems. One particularly useful feature in the newer systems

At the next level is Enhanced 911 Phase I, as it is called, which provides the call-back number of wireless callers and the location of the cellular tower their signal has reached. Phase II provides a more precise location, accurate within 50 to 300 meters depending on the technology the carrier has chosen.

[Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said in Washington this week that he would propose new rules to improve accuracy.] [in orig.]

Experts are laying the groundwork for what they call Next Generation 911, which will better handle Internet-based calls, text messages, cellphone photos and other forms of communication already in common use.

“Deaf people are using text messaging,” Rick Jones, the operations director for the national association, said by way of example. “They can’t talk to 911.”

For now, though, many counties are focused on Phase II, which shows a caller’s location on a computer map, allowing emergency responders to find people who either do not know where they are or cannot say. Beyond saving lives, it promises to put a stop to chronic prank callers or tell dispatchers when many calls are coming from the same area, which happens when multiple cellphone users try to report the same car accident or heart attack, threatening to overload the system.

Link to the Times article.