Entries Tagged 'Interoperability' ↓

According to the San Francisco Sentinel,

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and other local officials came together at Treasure Island today to unveil an initiative aimed at making it easier for public safety agencies in the region to communicate with one another during emergencies.

Newsom said, “Today, as we mark the sixth anniversary of 9/11, the best way we can pay tribute to the fallen is by giving our local first responders the tools to handle a major disaster.”

Newsom said, “By making our emergency communications interoperable among all disciplines and jurisdictions, we are ensuring that we are prepared for any future disasters, either natural or man-made.”

Newsom said the so-called Bay Area Public Safety Interoperable Communications Initiative is the largest urban area interoperable communications collaboration in the nation.

Laura Phillips, the executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said the idea is to make it easier for cities and counties throughout the Bay Area to address and develop strategies to communicate, respond and recover in the event of human-generated and
natural disasters.

Dellums said, “This initiative provides our first responders with the ability to communicate with other cities and counties across the Bay Area, further improving upon the way our emergency officials can respond.”

Phillips said the problem known as “interoperability” developed over the past several decades and involves a scarcity of radio frequencies or spectrum that hinders the ability of public safety agencies throughout the nation to communicate with one another.

Newsom said the Bay Area initiative will cost about $200 million, of which San Francisco will contribute more than $72 million.

Phillips said the project will be funded by federal grants, including the Public Safety Interoperable Communications Grant, known as PSIC, and the Community Oriented Policing Services, known as COPS.

Newsom said parts of the project will be brought in gradually over the next year, additional parts will be in service by 2009 and it will be fully integrated by early 2010.

Phillips said the project currently includes the cities of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose and the core counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Marin and Santa Clara.

She said other cities and counties also have expressed interest.

In New York City, we’ll remind our readers:

1. transit police (assigned to the subways, formerly a separate department) have spotty communications underground;
2. the police and fire departments don’t often drill together, don’t yet have substantial interoperability;
3. Radios long known to have been malfunctioning - especially inside the World Trade Center complex - led to the deaths of firefighters, other responders, and others on September 11th, 2001.
4. Interoperability with the Port Authority Police Department - a separate government entity which manages the three largest local airports, owns the World Trade Center site, and at least two bus terminals is  reputed to exist, according to one source, only between a few designated NYPD units and a few Port Authority facilities.

Interoperability  with adjacent authorities seems, given our perspective, quite an accomplishment.

But how are they going to pronounce BAPSIC?

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.

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.