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LA Cops get Wi-Fi Drive By Access
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."
Gah, don't put LA and Drive By in the same sentence!
LA and Drive By Two things that go together better than Michael Jackson and little boys.
I can't be the only one that instantly associated LAPD and Driveby am I?
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
...to drive a police car and surf for pr0n at the same time. ;-)
Ham says he plans to equip police cars with handheld computers from Symbol Technologies.
Please ensure the handhelds are soldered to the car. If they're lost or stolen our state-of-the-art cops will have trouble saving face.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
VPN tunnel, and 2-factor authentication (RSA secureID), to get connected. otherwise it would be very unsecure.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Ham said that he views WLANs as a stopgap measure and that police departments around the country need additional WAN spectrum ... large police departments would eventually need to buy wideband WAN service from commercial cellular carriers
... but the article focuses on 802.11b when 802.11g is supposed to offer a substantial boost in performance -- can't they just upgrade their equipment when 11g gets stable instead of having to use up other parts of the spectrum?
I think this guy's got the right idea, deploying wireless stuff around police stations
So does this make them Ham Radios?
I wonder... 802.11 has large security holes... It's only a matter of time before someone snorts the WEP key and gains access to the system.
It _would_ make it a lot easier to -say- make your speeding tickets "disappear" etc...
RickTheWizKid
..."you can NOT leave the magic!"
"Hey Stan, it says here there is a new donut shop up ahead on Wilshire. We can even order over online! You game? I'll buy."
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Wasn't it the Department of Homeland Security that was concerned about the security of wireless networks that extend far beyond the property of the network owner? The article says nothing about how the LAPD plans to secure this network. WEP just doesn't cut it, as we learned years ago when a variety of people broke WEP keys using timing and other techniques. I suppose they're going to follow everyone else's lead and place a firewall between wireless and wired networks, providing VPN access. I astonished me this was not even mentioned in passing in the article.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
They need to put them in donut shops to reach the greatest number of cops.
Yo. @ Randy's catching a cruller. Where ya?
Wilshire. Gettin ready to go roll some whores for the night's take
Kewl. Be there in a minute.
sweet. well save sum pimp ass to kick
dam
?
just got pwdrd shug on my shirt
LOL better clean it up b4 sarge sees ya.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I know there are security issues in using Wi-Fi but on a serious note, the police department would be transmitting sensetive stuff which I'm sure could be intercepted and somehow read eventually with the right key... I wonder if they are atleast thinking of a way to make it more secure... They could encrypt data sent from the central station and decrypt from the car, they could use a handshake process for authentication or they could just let things be sent and received raw and wonder why no one is seen doing anything wrong all of the sudden.
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
Now they'll have what, video of a suspect if they do a drive by?
Sounds good in theory, but in practice a few years down the road, people can hack an open system like that.
God spoke to me
I consulted on a deal to help NJSP patch the Win98 laptops installed in their cruisers. Apparently they too have a 19.2k link statewide, but have a higher bandwidth microwave link available when the cars are very close to the station houses. We built routines to pull down packages by ftp over the microwave link when they turned on the car and booted the laptop.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Now cops can search Google ultra-quickly for their criminals...
"Hey Frank! That the guy?"
"Hang on Burt, lemme do an Images search..."
The coolest voice ever.
Now when you get pulled over in LA, you can use your war-driving setup to check the police records on the cops before they get of their car. You will be able to greet them by name and know if they are the type to give you the rodney king treatment for doing so.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
... be a problem? Judicious use of jamming technology in areas of importance (to the criminals e.g. gang turf) and suddenly all the functions ported to online are unusable. This may be a niche market here for the less scrupulous.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
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?
There was a time when most of us envied the rich dudes who had the 2400 baud modems.
Assuming the newly-equipped cars occasionally send out probe frames looking for those APs, then forget radar detectors! Just run Kismet and if one of these guys pops up, you know there's a patrol car around.
This is going to show up more and more. A Sears repair van paid a visit to my area recently, and two new ad-hoc nodes showed up on channel 6. When he left, they did too. If I ever happen to go past that van again, it'll be quite obvious, since the MAC addresses will be the same. The same technique applies here with the police cars.
I drove from CO to KS and back yesterday. The main thought on my mind was - what if even car on the road had a WAP configured to talk to every other car on the road, and to look for WAN access to the net - creating a HUGE mobile network. I'd be a LOT less upset by a traffic snarl if I could read /. AND the kids would of been a lot less roudy if they could surf cartoon network on the trip. Heck, could be a neat way to meet that hot blond in the BMW next to you.
/.
I seem to remember hearing this idea before... maybe it was on
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.