According to a National Preparedness Group report released last fall, the nation's emergency networks still don't function as they should -- more than a decade after the attacks on the World Trade Center resulted in first responders being unable to communicate with one another. Efforts since then have stumbled over themselves, but
Techdirt directs our attention to a new whitepaper that suggests using residential routers as part of a first responder network in an emergency. German researchers propose giving first responders the emergency ability to disable your router's security so they
can use it in a crisis:
quote:
“The emergency switch is meant to disable the security protocols and allow public access to the wireless router,” says the team led by PhD student Kamill Panitzek of Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany (he's also a research associate at the university’s Telecooperation Lab). “It can only be part of the network if it is open to all users and offers its resources. Abuse of such a network must be avoided at all cost. Therefore this network should be isolated from the citizen’s home network to protect people’s privacy. This goal could be easily accomplished as it is already today possible to install a home network and a guest network in parallel to grant Internet access to visitors."
If safeguards were in place to protect privacy the idea doesn't sound particularly
bad, and the resources consumed should be minimal -- assuming this emergency switch wasn't abused (which of course is a big assumption). However, with the amount of
disregard for the law occurring in intelligence, most people's distrust of government might keep them from wanting
any government entity from getting that close to their home network. If you're interested, the paper itself is
here and their press release is
here.
