LA Cops get Wi-Fi Drive By Access

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 23, 2003 @03:02AM from the how-long-before-the-warchalking-starts dept.

An anonymous reader writes " A PC World.com article: "the Los Angeles Police Department plans to install 27 wireless local area networks (WLANs) at police stations throughout the city in the next three months, according to Roger Ham, deputy chief for communications at the LAPD. Ham says he plans to equip police cars with handheld computers from Symbol Technologies. The handheld devices will be equipped with 802.11b WLAN cards that communicate in the unlicensed 2.4-GHz band with access points installed in police stations at a raw data rate of 11 megabits per second-far faster than the 19.2-kilobits-per-second throughput in the department's 800-MHz wide area network (WAN) installed by Motorola two years ago and covering the city. Will Strauss, an analyst at Forward Concepts, called Ham's plan "a cheap way to get bandwidth" that would allow LAPD units to periodically pick up high-bandwidth data as they pass by police stations equipped with WLAN systems."

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probably require s by stonebeat.org · 2003-03-23 03:08 · Score: 4, Insightful

VPN tunnel, and 2-factor authentication (RSA secureID), to get connected. otherwise it would be very unsecure.

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Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
1. Re:probably require s by pi_rules · 2003-03-23 05:41 · Score: 4, Insightful
  I'm seeing way too many of these posts. It's a non-issue folks. If you read the article (I skimmed it) you'll see they see it being used for:
  
  Sending mug-shots over the air.
  
  Sending maps.
  
  Sending Amber Alert pictures.
  
  They need it for -- pictures. None of which are sensitive information. Mug shots can be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Amber Alert pictures are intended to be public, and last I knew maps of your local town weren't a closely guarded government secret.
  
  Besides, do you really want police having information that's too secret for you? I sure don't.
It's a transport medium. Security is not it's job. by mindstrm · 2003-03-23 04:33 · Score: 3, Insightful

Seriously. WEP isn't even real security.. if you need security, you use it at another layer.....

Just because they are using 802.11b doesn't mean they aren't using anything else. They also haven't said what network protocol, or what mode 802.11b will be in, or what software they will use to do it... do you want all that too?