March 16, 2006
L.A. Anti-Terror Plan Could Jam Cell Phones
Baca is exploring the use of jamming equipment -- already used widely in foreign countries and to protect President Bush -- to interrupt cell-phone signals if a terrorist attack was expected in Los Angeles.
The issue gained urgency after terrorists used cell phones to detonate explosives March 11 in railway bombings in Spain. Baca, who recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Pakistan, said a cell- phone jamming device helped avert the attempted assassination of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Dec. 14.
"We have to look at this very realistically," Baca said. "Public safety is more important than public convenience. We want to take the responsibility head-on and do the best we can, protecting people against terrorist attacks."
Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Horace Frank said the department's bomb squad is very interested in the idea and LAPD Counter-Terrorism Bureau Chief John Miller met with Baca recently to discuss the proposal.
Various companies already sell equipment on the Internet that block cell phone signals.
The products include jammers that overwhelm cell phone frequencies, systems that mute cell phone ringers and sensors that detect cell phones.
The products range from hand-held jammers costing a few hundred dollars that darken cell-phone signals over a range up to 15 meters, to nearly $10,000 suitcase-sized equipment sold to government and military agencies that can block signals up to several miles.
"You can block a couple of miles or just in the theater," said Bill Vorlicek, vice president of the Emergency Management Group at Kroll Inc. in New York City.
"The military has airplanes that can fly over and block an entire city. A lot of hospitals use them to prevent cell phones from triggering someone's defibrillator. A lot of devices in hospitals are frequency-controlled."
Although Baca's proposal could be useful in protecting the public, critics say the more powerful jamming equipment could create unanticipated problems, such as preventing fire and police personnel from communicating via cell phone or even on their own vehicle radios during an emergency.
"Is the cell-phone jamming equipment a tool? Yes. But it's not the panacea. It's not the silver bullet," Vorlicek said. "The idea has been tossed around for use in New York, but not for anti-terrorism, but in theaters to prevent the annoyance of cell phones going off during a movie or opera."
The cell-phone industry objects to the use of the jammers, arguing that the airwaves are public property and jammers violate the rights of cell-phone users.
There are 162 million cell-phone users in the United States. In California, more than 17 million people have cell phones and in the greater Los Angeles area, more than half the population sport the fashionable accessory, according to industry figures.
Under law, the importation, sale or use of cell-phone jammers is banned in the United States and can result in Federal Communications Commission fines of up to $11,000 daily per device. An FCC spokesman said the fines have been levied against people for not holding a license to use the devices.
"The FCC rules are clear," said Travis Larson, spokesman for the international Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. "Jamming is illegal, but whether there is an exception made for law enforcement is a decision the FCC will have to make."
An FCC spokeswoman in Los Angeles said they are unaware of any local law enforcement agency in the nation that uses jammers now.
"In an emergency situation, there are different exceptions that could be made," she said. "But that's a decision that would have to come from the headquarters in Washington, D.C."
The Secret Service uses cell-phone jamming equipment when President Bush travels in his limousine, on Air Force One and when he gives a speech. Casinos use jammers to prevent people from cheating using cell phones and some federal law enforcement agencies use the equipment during hostage situations.
John Mack, chief executive officer of USBX Advisory Services, a Santa Monica-based investment banking firm with a specialty focus on the security industry, said the jammers could have the inadvertent effect of blocking communications between first responders in a terrorist attack.
"Many police, fire department, hazmat units and a whole host of people rely on cell-phone communications and to the extent you use jamming devices designed to jam terrorists, you may be jamming the first responders, whose communication is critical in an emergency situation," Mack said.
He noted that since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, law enforcement and fire agencies have taken steps to develop "inter- operability" equipment that eliminates incompatibility among communication systems.
"In a significant terrorist situation, having all agencies being able to communicate is a huge issue," Mack said. "If every time you think there is going to be a terrorist attack you engage the cell- phone jammers in a five-mile radius, not only are you throwing normal commerce and business into disarray, first responders could be blocked from communicating.
"Sure, you could say that you'll get technology specifically designed to jam only the right kind of cellular frequencies, but first responders use all sorts of different kinds of technology and I don't think you could say that first responders wouldn't be jammed while the stuff terrorists are working with would."
If officials received intelligence that terrorists planned to detonate a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport, he would favor using jamming equipment until a bomb squad could render the explosives safe.
"But every day the LAPD responds to a hundred situations where a water heater blows up or noxious gases are emitted in a car crash. Will we presume those are terrorist threats and engage in cell-phone jamming in a big circumference?"
For cell-phone user Phyllis Hines of Lake View Terrace, Baca's proposal sounds good.
"If it's a matter of saving lives, I think that takes precedent over the right to communicate and I would support something like that," Hines said. "It would seem to take some of the danger out of the times we are living in now.
"But if it became an invasion of our privacy or was overused, there would need to be restrictions placed on it. It can't be used as a general policy. It has to be restricted to emergencies."
Source: Oakland Tribune
March 15, 2006
Another Analysis Requested For New LAPD Radios
"We all feel very strongly that this is an important tool that police officers need to carry out their work," commission President John Mack said. "But the real issue is boiled down to cost. We fully support this, but we're in a budgetary climate where things are very tight."
The commission directed Tim Riley, head of the LAPD's Information and Communication Services Bureau, to reconfigure cost estimates on the radios before the panel sends a letter requesting funds to the city's administrative officer.
According to initial estimates, it would cost $51 million for new hand-held and mobile radios. But a new report released this week by Riley showed a slight decrease in the estimate.
The new figures put the cost of 10,000 new hand-held digital radios at $36.7 million, with an additional $8.16 million for 1,500 mobile radios installed in police cruisers.
The revised pricetag was still too high for the Police Commission, which asked Riley to see where further reductions could be made.
City Administrative Officer William Fujioka has told the LAPD that funding isn't available to purchase new police radios for the fiscal year beginning July 1. The city faces a $295 million deficit in its $6 billion budget.
Commissioner Shelley Freeman questioned whether the LAPD needed 10,000 hand-held radios when there are 9,300 sworn officers on the force, some of whom are restricted to office duty or are on medical leave.
"With the current state of fiscal matters in the city of Los Angeles ... it's critically important that we ask for the number of radios the department truly needs in order to effectively carry out their jobs," she said.
Officers have used Astro radios by Motorola since 1994, and often run into "dead zones" while on patrol, meaning they are unable to communicate on the system -- particularly in parts of the San Fernando Valley, according to an LAPD report released last month.
Motorola last made the Astro radio in 2002, and will no longer make repairs to broken radios nor provide parts after June 2007, so the LAPD needs to purchase new equipment, according to the report. The typical lifespan of a police radio is 10 years.
Source: NBC 4 News
Need for Fire Dispatch Center Is Questioned
Although $7 million has been spent on design and foundation work for the center, Chick told Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that one of her private auditors has raised questions about the project.
"It is in the city's economic interest to expeditiously, yet thoroughly, evaluate the potential of LAFD utilizing available capacity within the two existing LAPD communications centers," Chick wrote in a letter to the mayor. "This should be completed before further financial commitments are made for a new dispatch center."
Chick cited a report by auditor Kurt R. Sjoberg, who recently looked at other Fire Department operations too. He warned that bond-measure funds for new fire facilities might be wasted by a project "that may potentially be unnecessary."
The Fire Department operates up to 25 consoles in the basement of City Hall East, where employees take emergency calls and dispatch department crews. Plans call for the dispatch operations to move to a complex at 500 E. Temple St.; ground has been broken on that building, which is also to include a new Emergency Operations Center and Police Operations Center, as well as a separate fire station.
Sjoberg said police officials told him that spacious communications centers built downtown and in the San Fernando Valley in the last three years have 25 extra consoles that could be used by Fire Department dispatchers "on a long-term basis."
The department had experience using the police dispatch centers in October, when its consoles were out of service because of a power outage.
If the department's dispatch portion of the complex is canceled, the city could also save on equipment, given that consoles cost $60,000 to $90,000 each, Sjoberg said.
Fire Chief William Bamattre and his deputies did not return calls Tuesday seeking comment about Chick's proposal.
Source: Los Angeles Times
By Patrick McGreevy, Times Staff Writer
March 05, 2006
A Mystery Police Department - But a "Cool Idea"
With five buses, a headquarters that doubles as an auto repair shop and a police department without police officers hidden in a nondescript strip mall in Arcadia, the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority had operated in obscurity.
That all changed when the car owned by Stefan Eriksson, a former video game executive from Sweden, smashed into a concrete utility pole on the Pacific Coast Highway.When sheriff's deputies arrived at the scene, Eriksson, who claims to have been a passenger in the car, waved a badge and said he was a police commissioner with the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority's homeland security unit.
The claim raised a few eyebrows. The situation took an even stranger twist when two other men showed up and said they, too, were members of the unit.
Capt. Tom Martin of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said he made a few calls to see if anyone had ever heard of the group. No one had."
Only in Malibu would something this bizarre happen," Martin said. "The tentacles that come out of this thing are much more serious than your average car hitting a concrete pole.
"The transit authority is actually a nonprofit shuttle service based in Monrovia that helps disabled and elderly residents get to appointments. Digging a little deeper, however, it turns out the obscure agency has its own police department, complete with badges, weapons permits and a police chief.It also has a serious mission statement.
"Our officers are on the front lines, playing a vital role in the defense of Southern California's homeland security," writes newly appointed police Chief Philip J. Sugar. "We police one of our nation's highest-level terror targets - Southern California's transportation system."
In another passage, the transit authority talks about the susceptibility of "paratransit services" to drug trafficking and touts the efforts of its undercover narcotics squad, including a K-9 detection team, in keeping the buses free of illegal substances.
A further investigation shows the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority has no police officers. It has one daytime dispatcher who is also a receptionist at Homer's Auto Services.
At night, calls to the dispatcher are routed to an answering service in Georgia.
The only police badges that have been issued are the ones carried by the five members of the transit authority board, including Sugar. They all appear to be volunteers.
Sugar, who is also an attorney for the city of Los Angeles, could not be reached for comment.
In interviews with board members, they say the rationale for creating the transit authority police is twofold: they had the legal right to do it, and "it sounds like a cool idea."
The transit agency took shape two years ago, when Yosuf "Yo" Maiwandi traded a few toy motorcycles to a friend in exchange for a 25-seat passenger bus.
"It was a joke," said Maiwandi, who owns and operates Homer's Auto Service on Lemon Street in Monrovia. The business shares an address with the transit authority.
"Then I got four more buses. As time went on, it got more serious," Maiwandi said. "And I found out you can have a security or police force. I thought, it's legal and it sounds like a cool idea."
Maiwandi recruited several friends to join the governing board. The list included Ashley Posner, a civil attorney from Sherman Oaks who also happened to represent Stefan Eriksson.
According to Maiwandi and Posner, Eriksson said he had worked on camera technology that could be used by police to monitor buses. The transit authority decided to launch a pilot program.
"We had hoped to get some government grants to pay for it," said Maiwandi. "Now this guy crashes his car and everyone wants out."
"It was a pilot program to develop a fairly high-tech video communications device for transit buses," Posner said. "As a result of this press, everything has been inactivated and we are re-evaluating everything."
As of Friday, the police portion of the transit authority Web site could no longer be viewed.
The bizarre revelations could also cost the agency its contract to operate in Monrovia. City Manager Scott Ochoa said he warned Maiwandi early on that the city did not want him wading into police business.
"I'm having the city attorney review it even as we speak," Ochoa said. "Police work is serious business. We don't need that confusion tied back to an operation that does business with the city of Monrovia."
Ochoa said the city agreed to the memorandum last September based on Maiwandi's other charitable work.
"No good deed goes unpunished," Ochoa said.
Maiwandi said he plans to forge ahead despite the publicity. And he does not plan to disband his police department.
By Gary Scott - Staff Writer Whittier Daily News
Ham Radio Hero
The staff thought they’d seen everything the disaster could bring. Then, in the middle of the night, a pregnant woman dragged herself out of the foul, dark water surrounding the center’s Charity Hospital, having managed to swim several blocks from her home, where she had been trapped. She was in labor and the pain was intensifying. By flashlight, doctors quickly determined that she needed a Caesarean section. But with no running water, no electricity, and no way to clean her up or to sterilize instruments, surgery was out of the question. The doctors conferred, and then sent Tim Butcher, at that time Charity’s emergency operations director, upstairs to a conference room where a 5-foot-3-inch, middle-aged jazz musician, known for his cigarette-rasped voice and salty language, was sleeping on an air mattress. “Richard, wake up,” Butcher said. “We need you.”
Richard Webb, who happens to be legally blind, is one of the nation’s more than 660,000 licensed amateur radio operators. (They’re nicknamed “hams” for reasons that are unclear.) As an amateur radio operator and a member of the Mobile Maritime Network, Webb regularly relays messages from small boats, occasionally participates in small-vessel rescue operations and helps with tracking hurricanes.
Pitching in and helping is a long tradition among hams, particularly in times of emergency. In fact, the Federal Communications Commission’s regulatory charge to amateur radio operators urges them to enhance communication, “particularly with respect to providing emergency communications.” Whether it’s an earthquake or a forest fire, a blizzard or a hurricane, when usual communication systems go down, ham radio operators are up, ready to connect the scene of disaster with the outside world. As the series of recent emergencies and other natural disasters so amply illustrates, hams are often the sole means of communication from disaster sites. Within minutes of the first impact in the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001—which put the radio and phone towers atop the building out of commission—ham radio operators set up an emergency network that authorities used to coordinate rescue operations.
When the phone lines are down and “wireless” takes on a whole new meaning, when cell phone and PDA networks fail and batteries go dead, when the lights go out, authorities fall back on this seemingly antiquated but always reliable form of communication. Amateur radio becomes quite literally a lifeline.
“Most communications systems are all going through some common chokepoint,” says Allen Pitts, media and public relations manager of the American Radio Relay League. Whether it’s a telephone switchboard, an Internet relay or a radio tower, “knock out that chokepoint, and the whole system fails,” he says.
Rather than relying on a network, each ham operator has a complete, self-contained transmitting and receiving station. “There is no chokepoint,” says Pitts. “They are like ants at a picnic. You can knock out some, many or even most of them, and they still get to the food. Each one is a mobile, independent unit working in cooperation for a common goal.”
Understandably, many government agencies and hospitals have enlisted amateur radio operators to be on call for emergencies. When the two hospitals making up New Orleans’ Medical Center—University and Charity hospitals—decided to set up their station two years ago, they looked around for volunteers to run it. Richard Webb and his wife, Kathleen Anderson, who is also a ham, raised their hands. They set up the station and tested it every week or so.
The night before Katrina hit, Webb pushed Anderson—she uses a wheelchair—to their van and she drove them to the hospital from their small home in suburban Slidell, Louisiana. Pretty much every other vehicle they encountered during that 30-mile trip was heading out of, not into, downtown New Orleans. At the hospital, this unlikely A-Team—a blind man and a woman in a wheelchair—set up their antennas and gasoline-fired generators, got on the air, tracked the approaching storm and rode it out.
Like much of New Orleans, the hospital suffered relatively little damage from Katrina directly. Then the levees broke. Soon the hospital was isolated, an island surrounded by water 10 feet deep in places. (And, yes, when the power went out, a hospital staffer did offer Webb a flashlight. “Thanks,” he said, “but I don’t need it.”)
Webb and Anderson kept communications going 20 hours a day, relaying messages to and from the state command center in Baton Rouge. They passed along the hospital staff’s requests for food, drinkable water, medicine, bedding, cleaning supplies and more. Authorities repeatedly told Webb that rescuers were coming to evacuate the hospital—later that day, in a few hours, the next day—but day after day, nobody showed up. Coast Guard boats delivered supplies, and took out a handful of patients who needed critical care, including babies in incubators.
Webb and Anderson listened in on the emergency networks and heard how other hams, including many who drove in from all over the country, were a vital part of numerous rescues. In hundreds of cases, people trapped by floodwaters in homes or on rooftops tried calling 911 on their cell phones. The calls wouldn’t go through. So they called relatives in other parts of the country, sometimes a thousand miles away, and the relatives in turn dialed 911. Their local emergency dispatchers then would pass along messages to ham radio operators who contacted rescuers in New Orleans: There are three people trapped in an attic at this address . . . five on the roof of this building . . . 15 on an overpass at this intersection.
A word about all this relaying. While most of today’s sophisticated communications equipment uses horizon-to- horizon, line-of-sight radio frequencies, ham radio must rely on lower frequencies for long-distance transmission. “Low-frequency waves do an interesting thing,” says Pitts. “They ricochet. These waves bounce off the ionosphere, 60 miles over your head.”
Depending on atmospheric conditions, some days you can communicate more clearly with another ham operator in Kenya than with your buddy across town. “By using different frequencies, directions and means, ham operators learn the art form of getting them to bounce where they want them to go,” Pitts says.
Webb took one call from a teenager who had a brand-new license with no kind of emergency training. He was in a school building with a number of other people, and nobody knew they were there. Two babies needed formula, and an elderly man needed a respirator. Webb relayed the call, and the group was rescued.
As the week wore on—the storm hit on a Monday night—more and more people began stopping by Webb’s radio room, the only link to the outside world. When he could, he sent out word from hospital staffers and patients to their families: I’m at the hospital, I’m OK, I hope to be evacuated soon, I’ll call you when I can. Hams who received the messages in other parts of the country telephoned or e-mailed the families.
A number of people tried to pay Webb for sending out their messages. “Sorry, can’t take it,” he’d growl. “Not allowed. I’m strictly a volunteer.”
Sometimes during lulls between radio transmissions he pulled out his guitar. Small crowds gathered, welcoming the diversion. Webb became a rare source of light and calm in the darkness and confusion of a disaster scene.
The night the woman in labor swam to the hospital, Tim Butcher shook Richard Webb awake and told him that she needed a helicopter. “We have a two-hour window to get her out of here,” Butcher said. Otherwise the mother would probably die, and the baby might, too. Webb ran to his radio, broke in on the network, and tried to relay a message to anyone.
On this evening, the first ham that Webb could reach was a fellow member of the Mobile Maritime Network in Texas. The Texas ham contacted a Network member in Cleveland—who was also an auxiliary Coast Guard officer. The Cleveland ham contacted his superior officers, and within a short time the patient was being airlifted to another hospital, where she had a C-section. At last report both mother and baby were doing well.
Webb saved one life that night, Butcher says, maybe two. And no one knows how many other people at the hospital might have died if Webb and his radio had not been there. Butcher’s sure of one thing: “Richard is a real hero.”
From Delta Airlines SKY MAGAZINE
By Timothy Harper
March 01, 2006
Police Panel to Pursue LAPD Radios Upgrade
The issue arose as the commission considered use-of-force cases, including some where officers said they radioed information to others, but transmission tapes show nothing from them.
Tim Riley, LAPD chief information officer, said the department's 10,000 hand-held radios are 10 to 12 years old and should have been replaced after seven.
Source: L.A. Times
Officials: New Radios For LAPD Would Cost $51 Million
Officers have used the Astro radios by Motorola since 1994, and often run into "dead zones" while on patrol, meaning they are unable to communicate on the system -- particularly in parts of the San Fernando Valley, LAPD Capt. Sharyn Buck said.
"We all understand that there are dead zones in the city of Los Angeles," Buck said. "Any of us that drive home talking on our cell phone know there are dead zones, but we hope to address those issues because officer safety is very important."
Tim Riley, the LAPD's chief information officer, said new equipment is needed because Motorola stopped manufacturing the Astro in 2002, and will not make repairs to broken radios nor provide parts after June 2007.
Commissioner Alan Skobin agreed, noting that the typical lifespan of a police radio is 10 years.
"We're well past that," Skobin said.
But getting the funding may prove difficult.
The city's Chief Administrative Office has told the LAPD that money for radio isn't available, noting that the city faces a $245 million budget deficit.
It would cost $43 million to purchase 10,000 new hand-held digital radios, and another $8 million for 350 mobile radios installed in police cruisers.
The Police Commission agreed to have its executive director draft a letter to the CAO, requesting that funds for a new radio system be included in the city's budget.
The commission is expected to approve the wording of the letter next Tuesday.
Meanwhile, commission President John Mack asked Buck and Riley to develop a plan to address "drops" in radio calls.
"Even one occasion is too many when you talk about the safety of officers and of the public," Mack said.
Source: http://www.nbc4.tv/news/7553032/detail.html
