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Cops, Wifi, Treasure Hunts, And More!
Rob Flickenger writes "This month's SeattleWireless TV
show reveals how the Yakima County Police have built a wireless infrastructure using Cisco Aironet products. Utilizing omni and directional antennas, they cover 650 sq miles with just 8 access points. There is also a segment on the NzWireless group's wireless treasure hunt, where users roamed around the city plotting hidden access points set up for the hunt." Note the bittorrent link.
You just want to be netrunners don't you?
Only teh geeks...
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
I wish to remain stationary at least while I type...
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
This was all I could find on http://www.co.yakima.wa.us is a dead link to Cisco from summer of 2001. http://www.co.yakima.wa.us/ts/news.htm
Our media player here at work is out of date apparently, as well is Real Player and the firewall blocks the bittorrent ports so no downloading there.
Is there no justice in the world? I need to at least kill >1 hour when I first get to work!
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
When committing crimes in Yakama County, WA make sure to carry your 2.4GHz phone.
what do they use it for? to order donuts? handheld donut ordering device! brilliant!
Why else would the cops make a network available, if not to catch roving laptop users who are doing "illegal" things? Not that the real crimes like bribing politicians ever get punished, but of course fighting real crime is not the COPS' jobs....grumble mutter...
I thought I'd get great speeds using this torrent. Where is everyone? Here is the bittorrent link: A HREF="http://tv.seattlewireless.net/shows/December 2003.mpg.torrent">http://tv.seattlewireless.net/sh ows/December2003.mpg.torrent
Start a crime wave while the county is slashdotted!
http://tv.seattlewireless.net/shows/December2003.m pg.torrent
If my memory serves correctly here, 650 acres is just over a one square mile area. (640 acres is one section = square mile). That should give some frame of reference here- pretty impressive amount of coverage. (maybe they say this in the movie- BitTorrent is still doing its thing right now, so I can't tell just yet...)
The big problem with widely scattered access points is user density (you can't have too many simultaneous users with so few APs) and physical alignment of the directional antennas. But you can use phased array antenna technologies to simultaneously increase the range, number of users, and security of access point installations. By electronically forming a narrow beam, the range increases, interference is reduced, and interception is more difficult. As a side "benefit" a phased array antenna could be used to track the bearing angle to each user and create directional lockouts to prohibit parking lot war drivers.
We've discussed this before here and here about products from Vivato.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Assuming no overlap between the 8 base stations (i.e., maximal coverage), this works out to each AP having a range of 5 miles. That is a heck of a lot in an urban setting.
I, for one, welc^H^H^H^H would love to know the technical details behind this.
Hey check out http://www.5gwireless.com/. These guys can make a 8 miles Non line of sight wireless network that runs 802.11b off of a single WAP and Antenna! WOW!
Check out the Wireless network they are installing at Anderson School of Business on UCLA campus... http://www.5gwireless.com/company/pr_12_03_03.htm
A cop who is watching porn and checking his email is a cop who is not paying attention to me. This could be good, and this could be bad...
"where words meet intent, lies rhetoric's lament"
Easy in any given desolate arid desert. Really I'm not kidding, the eastern side of the'evergreen state' is flat flat flat, rural and dry. None of those pesky buildings, a few apple trees but no real hills even. Plains of Gondor folks. :-)
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/witc/ao340a p/profiles/lnfyc_cp.htm
Company Profile
Wireless Network Helps
Yakima County Protect Community
The Lower Valley Wireless Public Safety Network, employing Cisco Aironet(R) technology, is giving law-enforcement agencies in Yakima County, Washington, a high-tech edge in crime prevention and resolution.
Yakima County is the second-largest land area and the seventh-largest population area in Washington state. It ranks first in the nation in the number of fruit trees, was recently ranked the 25th most-livable city in the United States and has also been designated a high-impact drug trafficking area. That inauspicious development was, in part, behind the creation in 2000 of the Lower Valley Wireless Public Safety Network.
The network consists of a series of antennas and radios arranged in a line-of-sight pattern that transmits and receives encrypted signals. These signals travel from the county courthouse in the city of Yakima southward through the Yakima Valley. The radio signals contain data from a central location that law-enforcement and public-safety agencies can access. This allows the agencies to share information and track lawbreakers throughout the lower valley in real time. The upper valley will be added to the network in the near future.
With five backbone sites in place overlooking the valley, the network reaches police departments in six lower valley communities: Wapato, Toppenish, Zillah, Grandview, Sunnyside, and Granger. County offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are also on the wireless network, and the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are among several other law-enforcement agencies that have expressed interest.
The network's nodes are linked via nearly 30 Cisco Aironet 340 Series wireless bridges. Designed to ensure high-speed, long-range point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless connections between Ethernet networks, these bridges are not deterred by physical barriers or inclement weather, making them ideal for the Pacific Northwest's weather and terrain. Direct sequence spread spectrum technology enables a data rate of 11 Mbps, comparable to that of Category 3 cable.
High Costs Deflated Original Plan
Yakima County Technology Services originally designed a frame-relay-based solution but found it would cost thousands of dollars per month, according to George Helton, Director of Technology Services. "Then we came up with a design operating in the 2.4 GHz band. We engineered a wireless network emanating from the Yakima courthouse and using point-to-point aerials and radios to reach 80 miles down the valley. This lets us deliver data to police and other law-enforcement agencies, and it preserves all those thousands of dollars we would otherwise be spending for data circuits," he said.
"As we were implementing this, our radio engineer suggested that we could possibly make our data available to mobile users if we used an omni-antenna at each major backbone site. We did so and have created a wireless network where you can drive at 70 mph while still communicating on the network at 11 Mbps," Helton said. Officers can rapidly access traffic records, police files and other data through links with state and federal agencies. "We also are able to conduct video surveillance, hold network meetings, train Web cameras on officers during stops, and handle all sorts of data applications. The sky's the limit: Anything you can do in your office, you can do at your car."
Access for Mobile Officers
Not all law-enforcement agencies on the Lower Valley Wireless Public Safety Network have extended the wireless network to their vehicles. For some, the network is used exclusively for office work, but most plan to add vehicular capability eventually. Those who have made the network mobile did so by installing Cisco Aironet 340 Series wireless bridges in their patrol cars. The bridges allow officers to ac
WiFi was never intended to allow people to cover huge areas--there simply isn't the bandwidth allocation for it. It gets even worse when a small number of access points are used to cover a large area. If all police departments started doing this, you'd probably not be able to use WiFi for anything else anymore, or your WiFi nodes would interfere with police operations.
Let's hope that this will cause the US government to release much larger chunks of spectrum for WiFi-like use, some regulated and some unregulated. And some bands should really be reserved for private use only--no businesses or government entities should be allowed to touch such parts of the spectrum for any purpose.
and frankly this scares the hell out of me.
I have played with these. First of all, they are simply locked down so they will work with almost any Cisco MAC address. Other than that they are completely open.
Once you connect to the AP, you can either telnet directly to the DB server and pull any records you wany, or you can connect to any other PD in Washington State (AFAIK). Atleast all the ones around here. It's basicly a huge private IP network using T1s, fractional T1s, and ISDN lines, all linking back to Olympia.
Funniest part was when I got a call from the main office asking me to scan everything for viruses ASAP, since the windows-worm-of-the-week was making its rounds on the secure network.
C'mon guys..... don't go to the Yakima County website! I need that bandwidth to keep surfing slashdot!
Sincerly,
The poor little sysadmin from their ISP.
Is this going to help them track down all the mad cows?
That's ok, I used to live in yakima, actually still live fairly close, I went back for the holiday's I noticed red light camera's all over the place too. There was a big controversy a while back when the ypd put two officers on duty strictly for traffic infractions. Their orders were to issue as many traffic citations as possible and nothing else, and now there are several more of them. Figure in the traffic cops, the redlight camera's, (revenue, and revenue) and then the wireless network either is for a new revenue scheme, or they couldnt' figure out what to blow all their money on. (my opinion at lease)
heh, my cisco aironet service in Yakima thru a local isp was unreliable, slow and not ready for prime time. Let's hope the constabulary doesn't throw out those walkie talkies yet. And those cameras on the traffic lights - they are supposed to trigger the green/red cycle, but the locals all know how well they work (camera to light: here comes a car, shine red dude!).
what's the 'treasure'?
...what happens to you as a result of that suckiness is largely a consequence of your responses to it. You can amplify or limit the suckiness. Or do nothing about it.
The ball's in your court. It always is. Hit a few more practice shots and see what happens. You can never say you've truly failed unless there is no hope of ever trying again.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing