LADY LIBERTY GETS WIRELESS FENCE

Before, when bud­ding Big Brothers wanted to watch over their facil­i­ties, they needed to spend a bun­dle on infra­struc­ture in order to do it. But with the growth of mus­cu­lar wire­less net­works, all those fiber optic cables (and the gear asso­ci­ated with them) have become less nec­es­sary. And that means lock­ing down an area has sud­denly got­ten a whole lot cheaper.
Take the Statue of Liberty. Officials there are putting together a wire­less bomb detec­tion net­work, UPI reports.

The net­work sends a fully encrypted dig­i­tal sig­nal over a pri­vate broad­band net­work cre­ated solely for detect­ing bombs. The network’s bomb tech­ni­cians receive X-​​ray images, as well as voice over Internet audio, trans­mit­ted in real-​​time from the national landmark’s site. The sys­tem works round-​​the-​​clock deliv­er­ing video and audio data.

But there are draw­backs, of course. Wireless net­works tend to be a whole lot eas­ier to illic­itly access than tra­di­tional ones. A sin­gle mis­con­fig­ured wire­less access point could give a hacker all the room he needs to wig­gle his way into the net­work. But, given the poten­tial cost sav­ings, I’m guess­ing it’s a trade­off that more and more secu­rity man­agers are going to be will­ing to make.
THERE’S MORE: “After spend­ing more than $4.5 bil­lion on screen­ing devices to mon­i­tor the nation’s ports, bor­ders, air­ports, mail and air, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is mov­ing to replace or alter much of the antiter­ror­ism equip­ment, con­clud­ing that it is inef­fec­tive, unre­li­able or too expen­sive to oper­ate,” the Times reports.
Among the problems:

Radiation mon­i­tors at ports and bor­ders that can­not dif­fer­en­ti­ate between radi­a­tion emit­ted by a nuclear bomb and nat­u­rally occur­ring radi­a­tion from every­day mate­r­ial like cat lit­ter or ceramic tile.
Air-​​monitoring equip­ment in major cities that is only mar­gin­ally effec­tive because not enough detec­tors were deployed and were some­times not prop­erly cal­i­brated or installed. They also do not pro­duce results for up to 36 hours — long after a bio­log­i­cal attack would poten­tially infect thou­sands of peo­ple.
Passenger-​​screening equip­ment at air­ports that audi­tors have found is no more likely than before fed­eral screen­ers took over to detect whether some­one is try­ing to carry a weapon or a bomb aboard a plane.
Postal Service machines that test only a small per­cent­age of mail and look for anthrax but no other bio­log­i­cal agents.

May 7th, 2005 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.