Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Dog Pound - Jan. 30, 2003

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 12:47:23 -0500

A thorny incident in New York City: a calltaker received a 12-second wireless 911 call at
10 p.m. from one of four teens in a small boat that was taking on water in Long Island
Sound. The connection went dead and there was no way to trace the call or locate the boat.
The teens are presumed drowned after they stole the boat and attempted to row to an
island, police said. When the parents reported the boys missing, police began a search,
and then reviewed cellular records after learning one youth had a wireless phone. They
found a call had been made, and received in New Rochelle, but police in that Long Island
town said they didn't receive a 911 call. It took several more hours to track down that
NYPD had received the call. Now, there's lots of finger-pointing over the lack of Phase
II, how the state's 911 surcharges have been spent, why the city spent $25 million on a
311 system, and the actions of a comm center supervisor who allegedly decided to log the
call, but not notify NYPD's harbor police (discipline is apparently in the works).

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On Wednesday the Los Angeles city council voted to accept a new policy department that
limits when dispatchers send units to alarms: only so-called "verified" alarms will be
dispatched to officers. The department noted 15% of its resources were spent on alarms,
which were false 92% of the time. The policy was supported by the council's Education and
Neighborhoods Committee recommended "Yes" for the policy, but oddly the council's Public
Safety Committee gave the policy a "No" recommendation. Much of the debate centered on the
limited opportunity for public debate before LAPD implemented the policy. Oh, the council
left themselves an out: they agreed to delay implementing the policy for 60 days while a
task force investigates measures that might reduce the number of false alarms (shouldn't
that have been the first step?).

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The Ambulance Service of New South Wales (Australia) will install a mobile data system
from Brisbane-based Technisyst Computing based on the Mobitex packet-data standard. The
Service uses 300 ambulances and 35 base stations to cover Sydney and surroudning areas.
The new units will feature touch-screens, automatic vehicle location (AVL), and will
operate in the 400 MHz band. Eventually the system will be linked to the existing CAD
software so dispatchers can track units and make more accurate unit recommendations for
incidents.

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Today's "Dubious Security" award goes to the Yuba (Ariz.) Police Department, who purchased
six wireless handsets from defense contactor General Dynamics that add encyrption
capabilities to a GSM wireless phone connection--the first law enforcement agency to buy
the phones. The handset is a regular Motorola Timeport model, modified by General Dynamics
with an encryption chip. A department spokesman said that after Sept. 11th, secure
communications has become more important. At about $2,500 each, the Hound wonders what
type of day-to-day radio communications Yuba needs to protect, especially considering the
GSM is generally considered to be "the most secure mobile communication standard currently
available," according to one expert. How come? GSM uses a speech coding algorithm, slow
frequency hopping, and Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) time slot architecture which
would require some heavy-duty work to crack.

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The Hound is hearing rumors: the Greater Harris County 911 Emergency Network will shortly
announce that that all six of the region's wireless carriers have implemented Phase II.
Nice goin'...

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