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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
There is no restriction on encryption in general. There IS a restriction in the amateur radio licence that states that you cannot encrypt your transmissions made under the terms of the amateur radio licence. I'm not sure what the US equivalent is, but here's the UK terms and conditions: http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/spectrum/amateur-radio/guidance-for-licensees/amateur-terms.pdf See specifically section 11 (2).
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
"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.
This still does not make it legal. Like how you can kill someone by hitting him in the head with a wooden stick while wearing rubber gloves, then later burn the stick and the gloves. Voila, no one will ever know.
c++;
Ummm, they certainly have. "The pearl is in the river" is just another form of encryption, and just as illegal on the ham bands as AES.
That's about exporting encryption. It has nothing to do with amateur radio. For that, you need to check out FCC title 47 CFR, part 97. That says that anything that "obscures the meaning" of communication is not allowed unless specifically stated in part 97.
That doesn't mean everything has to be plaintext, though. It's been generally held that secure authentication methods are okay, for example. Thus, you can use challenge-response authentication, public key authentication, or other such things, even though those involve encryption. In such a case, the actual meaning of the communication is: "prove you are who you say you are", followed by "here's my proof".
It'll be interesting to see if the FCC will allow it. I do agree with you, though, that it's foolish to fight against allowing encryption; if the government doesn't want to allow it, they simply won't. It's well established in US law that being able to communicate via amateur radio is not a right - if it were, amateur radio operators wouldn't have to be licensed.
That is a misunderstanding.
Let me shift the bulletin down: The only reason ham radio is allowed to operate anywhere in the world is because the governments of the world (including ours) do not regard it as a threat to them. Encryption is a threat as far as governments are concerned; and legal limitations (or their lack) in this country don't matter, since ham radio is global. If you add encryption to ham radio, then ham radio becomes a threat to governments, too. Then ham radio will become largely banned or restricted, and its enjoyment elsewhere will drop to the point where it is no longer viable as a hobby.
This proposal, requested by a relatively narrow sector of society (hospitals) out of fear of litigation, if it every becomes allowed, will turn and bite hospitals in the collective butt when they face a shrinking pool of licensed radio operators. Any remaining ham radio operators will use ham radio at work, where the employer assumes the legal risk. Otherwise, why bother, when encryption makes ham radio too much trouble.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
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.
Ummm, they certainly have. "The pearl is in the river" is just another form of encryption, and just as illegal on the ham bands as AES.
That's an interesting choice of phrase to let your friend know your wife is having her period.
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.
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
If this passes, how will you be able to make the difference between a encrypted HIPPA-Approved hospital communication, a friendly encrypted chat between two drug trafficants or some kids browsing the web using their new "Long-Range-Super-Cripto-WiFi" USB dongles that will be shortly available from selected Shenzen online-shops ?
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Why would you need to?
How do you do that on the internet or POTS or any of the other networks out there?
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.
Why do you believe this to be the case?
Governments of the world allow the internet and it supports encryption just fine. They also allow phones, which can do the same.
Just like owning a gun is a right, but in some areas you do have to be licensed. And they are all taxes, some more heavily than others.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
What? My mother was a saint!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What you call a problem seems to be just the idea behind the whole spiel...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
The bigger problem is that when I was young i had 20/20 sight and ic were like chocolates with easy to spot soldering leads. Now that I have 4/20 sight without glasses they're only make smd components smaller than poppy seeds, and to solder them you have to use costly soldering irons. I remember also when I listened to BBC Radio 4 using a variable air capacitor tied between the radio an the phone line: now I'm listening to the same radio using the DSL line, that o course makes the capacitor trick unusable. The technology marches on and unfortunately for ham radio, and more for CB may I say, this means that are more interesting things to do for the inclined nerd, and to make interesting things in amateur radio is a lot more difficult today than 20 years a go.
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.
You already can't determine the difference, nor is there any need to.
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.
Thank you mister FUD. Do you have anything else for our daily dose of Fear and Misinformation?
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.
You think that is magic.... While camping talk to the guys on the ISS in realtime while you track the ISS by hand with a portable yagi. THAT one kicks the crud out of anything anyone can do on the internet.
I just wish there was more 2meter sideband activity out there. ICOM and other manufacturers fault for only selling FM handhelds.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The worse threat to ham radio is not cussing and https, but to simple lack of amateurs
Actually, the number of US amateur radio licenses reached an all-time high last year.
http://www.arrl.org/news/2012-marks-all-time-high-for-amateur-radio-licenses
kc8mmu
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.....
Because the argument he's making is from the 1940s.
Liberty in your lifetime
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.
The internet is not that centralized. The phone system is to some degree. Good luck getting the ISP for mcDonalds to tell you that it was me at that restaurant. Simple mac address cloning makes that basically impossible. That assumes I do nothing outright illegal. Which would make this sort of tracking much harder.
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.
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.
I've been a ham since the 70s and have no problem if the FCC rules that limited encryption for 3rd party message traffic during disasters is legal. If they are going to do that, they should also allow it during ARES/RACES drills, to allow verification that the encryption mechanisms work.. From what I've seen in the RM proposal, that is the limit of what they are proposing..
K7DGF
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
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?
In an emergency or disaster, you are specifically authorized to use whatever means necessary to get your message across, so whatever you do will not be in violation of the rules. However I cannot envision a scenario where the use of encryption would be necessary to facilitate communication, but if such a scenario exists, you could easily argue the point and it is likely you would not get a green slip for it, let alone a NAL.
In any case, I agree with you that this is a bad idea.
Encryption IS allowed on Amateur Radio as a means of "access control," so most of the petitioner's points are moot, and his complete lack of understanding of how HIPAA works makes his privacy point irrelevant.
Besides, this is just a petition that will be hopefully swept right into the garbage bin. As I said in another post, the fact the petition has been filed does not, I repeat, does NOT mean the "FCC is considered allowing encryption for ham radio." It means "someone filed one of many many petitions received by the commission that day."
Not if Billy Barty's involved...
Um, not really. There's always Steganography.
Or I could just put my daughter and some of her friends at each station. I don't understand her. The government is welcome to try.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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. "
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.
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?
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.
You can tell people I'm your "elmer", the person who inspired you to get your license, then.
Bruce Perens.