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FCC Considering Proposal For Encrypted Ham Radio
Bruce Perens writes "FCC is currently processing a request for rule-making, RM-11699 (PDF), that would allow the use of Amateur frequencies in the U.S. for private, digitally-encrypted messages. Encryption is a potential disaster for ham radio because it defeats its self-policing nature. If hams can't decode messages, they can't identify if the communication even belongs on ham radio. A potentially worse problem is that encryption destroys the harmless nature of Amateur radio.There's no reason for governments to believe that encrypted communications are harmless. See hams.com/encryption/ for more information."
So... is it not possible to send/receive encrypted content when using packet radio?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Whenever I try to convert part-15 geeks into part-97 geeks, they're interested in high power, they're interested in DIY equipment, they're interested in satellites, they're interested in propagation, and as soon as I mention that you can't swear or encrypt, they walk away.
"If I can't send useful traffic over it, why would I bother?"
Ham radio is losing a generation of geeks who've grown up on a more-free network and aren't interested in a restricted one. Should we just let them go?
Why, in a supposedly free country, is the possibility of something being "harmful" a justification for its being made illegal?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
We should sue the Japanese for changing their codes just before Pearl Harbor
So your saying for fear of oppression you will oppress yourselves? There are currently no legal limitations on the use of encryption see http://www.bis.doc.gov/encryption/.
We can watermark photos and encrypt the watermark data easily enough... we could totally do that with audio, it's easy enough to do ... FFT the audio wave form, replace fa small percentage of the output, encrypt it, and re convert it to frequency domain... and voila you have an encrypted hidden communique over ham radio. All you need is either a recorded conversation to hide your 'real' conversation in... or even better a second person to talk while you hide your packets in that data.
That was idiotic logic, apparently they have never heard of people talking in code.
Seems like it would be a lot more effective to just add an emergency comms exception to HIPAA.
The great thing about ham radio is that we have stacks of old, analog, simple, reliable equipment and we can get a signal through no matter what.
Encryption on the other hand requries fancy radios and fancy computers and while we could probably swing it most of the time, situations could certainly arise where the smoke comes out of the fancy radio or the computer shits it's bits and we're left with an FM 2m rig or SSB HF rig and people are going to die if you don't transmit their medical info.
Anyway I for one could care less if emcomms groups encrypt or encode patient names, although I think we'd all appreciate it if they didn't blanket encrypt all their traffic.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
It would be too easy to convert into
a business entity and move away from
a hobby. The only way to prove it's not business
is volume and frequency of transmissions.
Automated systems could completely hog the bands.
Although, I think some simplified encryption should
be enouraged for amateurs to experiment with.
"Government has no reason to believe you aren't committing a crime, therefore you are under arrest."
Being encrypted in and of itself is not a reason to believe that a message is harmful.
After reading the actual letter sent to the FCC, it's pretty clear the requester only wants an exception to the encryption prohibition for certain limited situations. Specifically, when assisting with emergency communications and the information is required to be kept private. (The letter cites hospital patient data and HIPPA privacy requirements as an example.) So, this isn't a blanket "let us encrypt everything" request, nor does it have anything to do with web browsing over packet radio (as suggested in some other comments).
That said, I'm still not sure it's a good idea. It seems like anything that is sufficiently important and/or private as to require encryption should be left to the radio channels for the agency in question (they all have their own frequency allocations, after all). The amateur operators who are helping out can be used to offload the less critical traffic onto the open/unencrypted amateur frequencies. I'm curious to hear from other amateurs with more experience working with the various emergency agencies, though.
SSB radio already allows this: encrypted telex over short-wave is an originally military means of communication, which - for a few thousand dollars - is also with an amateur's and civilian's reach. With a 1 kW-antenna, your range is more than half the globe, under good conditions ( which last for about 6 hrs / day ).
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
There's no reason for private citizens to believe unencrypted communications government can spy on are harmless. Evidence: All of human history, and the reasons behind free speech and right against search and seizure.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The worse threat to ham radio is not cussing and https, but to simple lack of amateurs, which in turn will encourage grabs for our "unused" spectrum.
The day I got onto packet and sent an email and in turn got the ham news with a handipacket and an Icom W2A radio from my campsite was the kind of magic I remembered from childhood when powering a crystal radio using only the ground potential drop over a couple of feet from a core-wound antenna. I could listen to radio all night without batteries. through photons that could go through the walls of my room. Magic. Still is.
Dropping the code requirement for Technician benefitted radio, and this change will help as well. 73 ko6eb
Does anyone seriously not believe the famous numbers stations as already an ultra-low-throughput form of encrypted transmission?
Whether you send the data as electrical bits, RF, carrier pigeons, or a recording of Angelina Jolie saying "zero" and "one" over and over and over really has no relevance to the underlying meaning. Either it already breaks the law, or it doesn't.
Sending data between me and neighbors works great using pringles cans or old un-used TV Satalites, but it would be great to have another way to send encrypted data from one state to another with out having me to put my data on a thumb drive and encrypt that and then send it by carrier pigeon accross state lines ;-)
Then we can move all our phone calls and texts over to Ham Radio and avoid PRISM...LOL
Ah yes, ham radio, the original home to tens of thousands of the original nerds. Starting in the late 19th century it provided a way for obsessive, and sometimes brilliant, nerds a home-brew hobby on an obscure technology (e.g. quartz and schematics) which allowed broad communication with each other. Sad that some new modulation is encroaching upon this pastime.
If you can't tell who or what is transmitted, you can't tell if it's 2 HAMs talking to each other or an agent reporting in to big bro.
On the flip side, they could also not update the laws and just start arresting HAM operators by accusing them of encrypting.
*Try to prove that you were not*
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This is not a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM). This is simply a petition by a Citizen.
If the FCC decides to consider the petition, it will issue a NPRM and open a comment period. It will THEN consider the petition with the collection of public comments.
There's no reason for governments to believe that encrypted communications are harmless.
That's why we must encrypt as much as we can.
If 99% of all communications are encrypted, and 99.9999% of all encrypted communications are harmless, then encryption will lose its magical power to scare governments.
Without encryption, we're sitting targets. And encryption won't be truly safe to use until it's ubiquitous. So there's only one way forward.
It's unfortunate that encryption might cause ham radio to lose the culture of old-fashioned civility that it currently enjoys. But the new norms of atrocious corporate and governmental snooping have spoiled communications for everyone, and encryption is the price we have to pay for the fact that our overlords became so evil.
as most naval communication is encrypted de-facto in the 21st century and often dedicated outside the ham band, the original licensing purpose is rather useless. One could argue in the 50's the radio act served to ensure VHF and UHF television broadcasts and commercial radio would not be interrupted by hobbyists, but the anti-cryptography purposes intended 'do-no-harm' clause smacks of the cold-war.
If hams can't decode messages, they can't identify if the communication even belongs on ham radio. A potentially worse problem is that encryption destroys the harmless nature of Amateur radio.
while hams cannot identify these communications we do regularly hold triangulation contests to see where theyre coming from. The mysterious Yosemite Sam broadcast in the southwest was detected and triangulated by a number of hams during its run with relative success. Again, the "harmless nature" of amateur radio must be re-evaluated in the modern context of the united states government in the 21st century. The NSA warrantlessly spies on us all, we run a torture camp, and execute our own citizens without trial. To continue to enforce anti cryptography in amateur radio is to the benefit of the state, not the amateurs which hold the rights to the airwaves. And if you consider commercial radio as any bellweather for the nature of the radio wave, then its charter to provide a public good is evidence enough the airwaves do in fact belong to the people.
Disclosure: I am a licensed ham operator working toward their general class upgrade.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Exceptions are made for remote control (telecommand) of space stations and model craft.
97.211(b) Space telecommand station:
97.215(b) Telecommand of model craft:
Anyone, licensed or not, is authorized to use any means of radiocommunication to protect life and property.
97.403 Safety of life and protection of property:
Most binary data will sound like white noise if you listen to it (zip files, video, mp3...etc)
No sig today...
which is to say, the compression algorithms for the various packet formats are open to all. some packet generators are proprietary. some are free or low cost things whipped up on computer by hams.
there is an argument going on at eHam these days about whether your (open) transmissions are being copied by the spooks.
duh. they listen to everything.
encryption is a path to banning amateur radio communications altogether, as various pig-headed dictatorships try to lock down discussion and turn everybody's eyes back to Fearless Leader on the big screen. the IATU should be protesting this, hard. -- KD0REQ
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
People already can (and probably do) use ham radio for encrypted transmissions through steganography and you wouldn't even know it. Allowing this explicitly wouldn't let "the bad guys" do anything they can't already do, but it would help regular, law abiding citizens to use it more effectively and safely. It might also create a communications channel that you can be pretty certain is free from state-sponsored espionage and corporate control.
There's no reason for governments to NOT believe that encrypted communications are harmless.
Now that everyone knows that the NSA is (and apparently, has for some time been) wiretapping every phone on the country, I guess this is how lobbyists and legislators and business persons intend to communicate privately with one another.
Well depends on the type of encryption. I can read off a series of numbers that are a one time pad encrypted message and get the same effect. If they are talking about full on scramble and sounding like white noise (for more bw). Then yeah I could see how that could be an issue.
I don't know why your post was scored so low, because I see the point you are making, but you are wrong. Reading off a series of numbers from a one time pad IS illegal and exactly the same as a full on scramble of the signal. There's no difference whatsoever. The law is that you can't obscure the meaning of a message, and both of those examples do just that.
You need to buy decryption keys (patented and closed source) from ICom.
FCC has clear rules that state encoding scheme should be OPEN and published in order to be called encoding and not encryption. D-star is neither open nor published.
France already made D-Star illegal on those grounds and I am very glad. D-Star is the biggest SCAM ICom has pulled on HAMs, they sneaked in their proprietary closed tech as a "solution" to a problem that didnt exist and in effect almost monopolized digital market.
You can compare D-star to Nvidia physX except its even worse - you need physical hardware from ICom to be able to use it, there is no interoperability.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I've seen HAM radio at it's best, and how it can be taken out by any idiot with enough broadcast power. I was in Puerto Rico when a bad hurricane hit the island and wiped out all communications over most of the island. A good friend was a HAM operator, and he linked up with a semi-formal network of HAM operators along the east coast that activates whenever there's a hurricane disaster. These people provided the only communications for large numbers of people for several days, and were instrumental in saving lives. At one point, however, one pin-headed yokel got on the frequency the net was using and rebroadcast AM radio music with a lot of watts behind it. They finally got this guy off the air (with some FCC help), but he hindered the net for almost a day.
The HAM community does a lot for many others who are not HAMs, and to open their bands up to individuals who only see dollar signs everywhere and only think of their own "rights" to do whatever they damn well please would be both a travesty and a serious mistake.
Bruce Perens said "that would allow the use of Amateur frequencies in the U.S. for private, digitally-encrypted messages" but then he FAILED to include the rest of the story, which is that this request only covers the case where ham radio is being used in support of emergency communications. That is an important restriction to be aware of, as another poster mentioned.
As an Extra Class license holder, I sincerely hope this doesn't get approved. Yes, it's restricted to only emergency communications, but allowing encrypted transmissions at /all/ means that any of them could be from non-licensed individuals, and brings into question legitimate uses of the airwaves. Leave our airwaves open!
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
NO. Never, do not allow it.
Their argument that "it is needed" for emergency situations is bovine fecies.. this is the WORST time to obscure your communications.
The ham bands are not for private communication. I hope the FCC does not let these fools ruin ham radio.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The examples he gives in the NPRM are borderline uses of ham radio in the first place: medical info, logistics info and natinal security info(WTF?). If you're transmitting sensitive information, there are far better ways to send it. If (in a declared emergency) all you have is ham radio and you're ordered to send sensitive info (encrypted), then get authorization or ask the FCC for forgiveness after the emergency. There's already a "safety of life" exemption in part 97 for pretty much anything. Ham Radio doesn't need encryption. That's not why it was created and encryption doesn't further the goal of ham radio to foster international goodwill. Apparently, this is somehow related to WinLink, an email forwarding network using packet radio on the ham bands. The petitioner operates a WinLink gateway.
Are we an Emergency Service? No - we are not. That is what part 90 is for.
We are hobbyist, enthusiasts that practice the radio art and sciences. As such, we develop the skills and methods to make things work, when all else fails.
We fill in, when asked, when established systems fail. We are not a "First Responder" that jumps into any and every situation with our "magic" HTs to save the day.
If you want to be part of an EmComm organization, join one - they have their own radio service under part 90 rules. They use encryption there - and it works well.
Thankfully, the public communications community has noticed when things have gone bad and we've stepped in to help. They've evolved their systems to be more robust and survive events. No, they're not perfect and there will be opportunity to help out in the future. But, we provide that help out of civic duty. Not as an EmComm service.
Allowing encryption on the Amateur Bands will further dilute the separation between our hobbyest, experimental service and established EmComm services. When those EmComm service start asking for more bandwidth to support their growth - where do you think they're going to look? If we're already providing EmComm services - predeployed, dedicated, secure encrypted, agency specific communications - what shouldn't they have our bands?
Senior NCO in the fight against entropy. I've seen things, man. Things no one should have to see.....
Can't the main objection be solved by restricting encryption to certain bands? If a repressive regime was worried about encryption, they could mandate that radios not operate in that frequency.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
i guess my question would be why ham (pigs?) would need to encrypt stuff in the first place? trading secrets or something? Anonymous wants to use radio? wouldn't it be easier to use TOR or freenet? or how about a smart phone app with encryption? just asking.
or how about buying a commercial radio with encryption already installed? i think its called P25 apco or something that operates on 900 mhz near the mobile phone band? just get a license and your ready to go.
I think this is confusing "mostly well behaved" with self policed. For instance, look at the abject fuckery that goes on at 14.313 MHz each and every day. All manner of rule violations. Not judging the rules here, but no question, deep and serious violations of them. No one "polices" this in any sense of the term; nothing any ham does shuts it down, slows it down, restrains it, or otherwise serves as a "police" function. Reporting it to the FCC does nothing; years and years of reports have gone without any response.
Now, it's quite true that most hams don't take part, and further, view the situation as appalling; but this is like your neighbor disliking seeing crack sold on the sidewalk. That's behaving well, not policing. They're not policing it; they might report it, but that's still not policing it. Only the police can do that, because they have the authority and power to do something about it. In the ham situation, the feds aren't coming when they are called, either, so the activity goes unchallenged in any realistic way. And believe me, getting on there and arguing? Not helpful.
There's more than that going on, too. I know for a fact that there are stations on the air using considerably more than legal power; stations that intentionally interfere with others in several ways, etc. I *also* know that the FCC has the analytical tools to detect, and the authority to stop, this kind of behavior. I lay the blame for this shameful garbage entirely at the FCC's feet.
Yes, but any ham can do the same thing for free. Encrypted or not. That's going to make your business model unsustainable. Also, I should point out that packet has allowed email back and forth to the Internet for decades now. So I think your idea of "providing Internet" isn't going to choke the spectrum. Hard to sell something others give away for free (not impossible... but hard.)
Another thing: With the plethora of digital modes available right now, it's become a royal PITA to try and figure out what you're listening to, much less decode it. Is it Olivia? RTTY? Amtor? Heil? Packet? and on and on for must be over a hundred modes and variants. The difference between an encrypted packet and one you can't figure out otherwise is... nothing.
And one more thing (lol): As far as HF goes, we don't have the bandwidth to supply anything like Internet to anyone. There's no risk whatsoever of commercial interest of that type coming in. You'd have to be talking about operation at UHF and above, and *that* means line of sight, and *that* means latency that grows with every link, and it also means that those 99.99% dead bands would see some use, which might keep them from being taken from us. Not a perfect reason by any means, but a reason regardless. The fact is, cellphones have almost entirely killed VHF/UHF ham activity. It's sad as hell, but there it is.
Oh, hey. One MORE thing: Your "Internet supply" is going to have to accept all manner of interference from other hams, etc. That's going to make your service really, really poor. Quite aside from the free competition that will start up the day after you do because you're going to offend every ham with half a wit.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Think of how much more interesting ham radio would be if the ARRL was anything like the NRA...
Think of how much more interesting ham radio would be if the ARRL was anything like the NRA...
That will only happen when people find a way to start killing other people with amateur radios. Then membership numbers will skyrocket.
I'm sure there's a Homer joke in there.
Two points:
1) The proposal (which is indeed from a private citizen, as many are) points out that ham radio cannot be used, at least in this country, to carry certain kinds of emergency traffic, because, for one thing, medical info about a particular patient can't be put out over the air UNLESS it's encrypted, due to HIPAA.
2) Encryption of ham traffic is already allowed in two specific instances: a) control of a satellite in space, and b) control of certain kinds of model craft.
So the ice has been broken, and the current proposal attempts to overcome certain legal hurdles in carrying emergency traffic. It's not just encryption for no reason, and it wouldn't be allowed for normal traffic.
In the event of an emergency or disaster, I will violate whatever regulations required to get the message out. In conditions like that it is most expedient and prudent to ask for forgiveness later than to ask for permission upfront.
If that emergency includes the need to use encryption over the air, I will use encryption over the air.
However, in normal daily use, ham radio transmissions should be made in the clear and unencrypted. This is, after all, about the art of radio communications --not security, not commercial applications, not HIPAA or anything else.
I should also point out that authentication is not the same thing as encryption. You can send AUTHENTICATED packets in the clear with a hash that was derived from a digital secret to validate that you are who you say you are. That should not be illegal and it should be able to prevent unauthorized people from sending commands to spacecraft, remote controls, and the like. Yet, we'll still be able to see what you're sending, even though we could not generate such messages ourselves.
Jake Brodsky,
Amateur Radio Station AB3A
So a couple of people speaking to one another in Alawa will be breaking the law. The validity of a thing is easy to test by applying any possible context and seeing if it still seems reasonable.
It's not dead. Actually, there are more hams today in the US than at any time in history.
But if you want to kill it, making it just like the internet might be a good way.
A lot of us don't consider swear words useful traffic. Just annoying immaturity. And we can send any useful traffic that we don't want to hide. Stuff you want to hide belongs on the ample resources already provided for that.
As it happens, you can authenticate using encryption and have digital signatures within the current rules. You just can't use encryption to obscure the message.
We really like that it's not like the internet.
Bruce Perens.
lives and property have been protected with ham radio, just as with guns.
even the encrypted communications have identifiers in the clear to indicate who they're coming from
Imagine if they wanted to send a message "Mr X is patient zero of a horrible plague, quarantine anyone who contacted him."
Would you really want that in the clear?
I believe there is no violation of FCC rules using P25 encryption on Ham bands if the encryption key is public. How is that any different than unencrypted digital?
Have you ever heard ham radio traffic ? QRZ, QRK, QSL, QTH.....all this useless Q code stuff repeated over and over in plain voice communications.
"There's no reason for anyone to believe that encrypted communications are harmless..."
Oh my god, really? Just like those people whispering in the corner, oh they must be saying something bad about you.
"If hams can't decode messages, we can't identify if the communication is appropriate for ham radio or not"
Right! if you can't decode it, only the intended audience will be able to tell if it is appropriate. Because it isn't your fucking business.
not trying to be disrespectful, but stuff that i hear on my shortwave radio is:
see q (queue?) field day
please copy four alpha Maryland
seventy three good luck in the contest
what i want to know is what the prize for the contest is. $1,000 USD? A gold-plated trophy? your photo in the radio magazine?
also..
something called traffic.. thought they were giving traffic reports on the freeway. lol like route 90 is backed up due to an accident.
june 26
Oklahoma city, ok
whisky bravo five november kilo delta
standard text of 25
it'll be interesting to see if these messages are encrypted. but why would someone encrypt disaster relief messages? its not like the radio operators are performing law enforcement or national security.. just saying
if you wanted to send a private message, wouldn't it be easier to send text messages? even kids in school have mobile phones. just saying
http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/Data%20Encryption%20is%20Legal.pdf
"Just like Dorothy returning to Kansas, it turns out we've been able to do it any time we wanted to. Data encryption for our intended purposes is already permitted under Part 97 of the FCC rules. We just hadn't realized it. Read on for the details. "
"...Established in 1912, regulation of amateur radio was a result of the U.S. Navy's concern about interference..."
Yes. That was then. But now - I think that amateur broadcasting should be allowed. A broadcast station would be transmitting in clear, non-encrypted signals.
So WHAT is the objection NOW to any amateur broadcasting?
I would take two bands for amateur broadcasting -
1. 1720 - 1800 khz, limit to 5 watts,
2. the old channel 6 or the top portion. Maybe 54.01 to 55 mHz, or 87.5 to 87.9 mHz. the former can be picked up on the old "TV Sound" receivers. The latter can be picked up on any FM receiver.
JOE - W3TTT
The "meaning" of the message is very clear. I am sending a series of numbers or letters to someone so they have a brainteaser to occupy their time. It was even made public so anyone can work on the brainteaser.
1) Emergency response agencies should not be *depending* on ham radio. There's plenty of money from FEMA, etc. to properly equip them with state of the art communications systems. The problem is often small agencies where they've got one part time guy who does the radios and comm 2 hours a month, and even with free gear, they don't have the resources to properly configure and integrate it. "It's worked fine since the county bought it in 1980, why are we changing?" - because when "all else fails" you won't be able to talk to the communities around you.
Emergency response agencies SHOULD be using hams (the people, not the amateur radio bands) as a resource. They tend to be able to improvise well, know how to rewire things, etc. But that's different than using the amateur bands as a substitute for public safety or land mobile radio. But if hams want to participate, they need to know how the system works and understand it. In the past, some hams have griped about background checks, while others want to be de-facto emergency response officials. You can't do both at the same time. Hams don't speak as one community (which is as it should be).
2) HIPAA is a bogus reason. If you really think hams are carrying traffic that needs that level of protection, then they need to comply with ALL of the HIPAA rules, not just encryption. How about security plans, regular audits, recordkeeping for 6 years, etc? What about secure key distribution and authentication.
I'm looking for a paper I saw a while ago, perhaps using GNURadio.
It described what I believe amounted to the use of very wide spread
spectrum 'transmit on all frequencies at once'... combined with
encryption, such that the encryption 'key' was the map of frequencies
and bandwidths that were selected for use at random. A one time pad
of sorts. Your datastream was tx/rx by masking off the entire
airwaves with that map, processing the spectrum, etc...
What made this cool was it was completely untraceable strong
encryption and also indirectly unintrusive upon use by other 'normal'
radio tech.
You could not find it by dialing in on any given freq and triangulation
because there was no freq to dial.
Interference wise, this would appear as random noise on any given
freq you look at. So not a direct hit, but overall nonsensical
random power bumps of 'bits'. A spectrum analyzer would simply show
a rise in signal levels across the board.
Since your crypto key map is your access, you have no need to
overpower anyone in the traditional sense to get on the air. And
even though you are adding power (noise), it is at a very low overall
level and spread out across the spectrum. And for the same reason,
no one can power you off the air. In fact, you play nice by choosing
sensitive rx equipment and low power, and are naturally driven to
do so so that you can pick up peers and exchange with them using
cheaper smaller lower power gear.
Anyone have a link to the paper for this?
Or the proper name to search for it, etc?
PS: the low level of imparted noise is a guerilla byproduct and NO
we don't need your HAM lecture about it... you're blasting far more
fixed freq power than we ever need (after division across the board)
so we're not bothering you.
The hardware isn't from Icom, it's from DVSI and available, at least on paper, to anybody that wants to pony up for a pre-programmed DSP from them. The existence of the DV Dongle from Internet Labs completely disproves your statement.
Now, as I've previously posted, I don't like that it's a proprietary codec that is only implemented in hardware, but that doesn't mean "you need to buy decryption keys [...] from Icom". Let's keep this conversation factual, shall we?
Interesting!
In the eyes of getting caught, reading off a OTP is even more illegal than using a code.
Consider the most advanced form of radio encryption is wideband-CSS, where the carrier frequency is spread over an entire band (or wider) according to the output of a cryptographic counter (generally with some compromise to allow the clock to be recovered by the receiver), and the coded portion of the signal looks like nothing but a bump in the noise floor, and in a very good system is undetectable without the code. You won't even hear or see that the transmission is present. It is possible to concieve a system whereby the cipher clock is recovered by a thirdparty transmission, for example a commercial DVB station or navigation system transmission. The IV and cipher clock is then determined by the shared clock and a correction for the offset between the transmitter and receiver. Any small errors in cipher sync can be corrected for by searching bi-directionally in cipherspace and looking for a sync code present in the despread signal. Good luck even detecting such a carrierless signal, much less gaining an accurate fix on it's location of origin (If you still don't get it, consider that the entire earth's surface looks like a WBCSS transmission that you lack the spreading code for).
OTOH, someone reading random numbers over SSB is easily detectable and could easily be reported and triangulated.
DVSI makes vocoder chips, but its ICom that made a push with this proprietary tech into HAM market.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Martin,
I think you missed the point that we are talkinig about radio.
When people fill a page with noise on Slashdot, they aren't really using up a scarce resource. Slashdot would just get more servers if they ran out of bandwidth to present blather to readers. So, the only thing that's really being wasted is the reader's time, and the reader has mechanisms to avoid that such as moderation, and I think "foe" lists (I haven't tried them).
On radio, in contrast, frequencies in which to operate are a scarce resource. So, that noise is getting in the way of a more useful communication. And while we can tune off the channel, we don't have an infinite supply of other channels to use.
The situation is made worse by radio propogation, which makes many of the frequencies we do have unusable for much of the time; by issues like the hidden-transmitter problem, which make frequencies that might appear usable by one station unusable by the one he's trying to talk with; and by various incompatible sharing partners, the worst being PAVE PAWS out here in California. So, frequencies in which you can do something useful become scarce.
So, we have valid reasons to keep as much noise as possible off of the Amateur bands.
Bruce Perens.
Encryption requires the parties agreeing on a code. If they explain it over the radio, then it is insecure because they passed the key. If they use another messaging system or meet in person to create the code, then why not use that system to pass encrypted messages? Obviously there could be some advantages to sending encrypted messages over the amateur bands, but I don't see them outweighing the risks of commercial use etc.
If Encryption Isn't Harmless, then why does our Government do it all the time ?
You can tell people I'm your "elmer", the person who inspired you to get your license, then.
Bruce Perens.
FCC considering DRMs for HAM airwaves?
Finally 15 years later HAM will be quashed by the DMCA :)