It's a bit disingenuous to lump everyone in the 'government' together. It is perfectly reasonable for the NSA to be conducting a massive illegal wiretap of all digital communications for all persons on the planet creating 'profiles' for each digital communication and linking them together with a myriad of other systems AND for the DHS to not know how to communicate on their radios, let alone encrypted. You must consider the underlying competency of the group which could perpetrate a 'conspiracy' when considering the validity of that conspiracy. And the 'government' is little more than a feudal system that loosely works together sometimes.
I actually do agree with you, especially your last sentence. Certain groups in the government are very organized and they are definitely capable of some of the conspiracies that go around. The problem, in my experience, is most conspiracy theories/theorists accuse this non-existant, single entity called the "government," which is so organized and has control over everything that goes on. If you take 9/11 for example, how many different groups of the government would have to be involved to pull something like that off? I just don't see how it would be possible to have so many people keep their mouths shut, have different departments work together, while pulling off one of the most horrific attacks on the USA.
Wire-tapping and creating digital profiles on the other hand is something that I can totally see happening since nobody is really getting "hurt" and you can split up the work between different groups of people that really have no idea what they are working on. But I do not see something like that happening to satisfy some end-goal like gaining control of the public. I don't think we humans can organize that well. There are too many groups with their own interests in mind to be able to unite an entity as big as our government (or parts of it) to pull off most of the conspiracies that go around.
"how many different groups of the government would have to be involved to pull something like that off?"
Why does everyone say this? You create 'terrorists'; have them hi-jack a plane, and crash it. It really takes what, 50 people MAX, including the terrorists. One Mission Planner, however many terrorists...a few benefactors, some intelligence guru's; and that's pretty much it. Maybe a guy or two planted to interfere with birds going up to shoot down the planes but even that is a bit questionable as to 'needing'.
Everyone wants to say that oh the NYPD would have had to have been involved and the fire department would have known...noooo...they reacted as they normally would.
Not saying I really believe it was an act by my own government...or fine, part of my own government; but I just wanted to point out that not everyone and there mother would have been involved...really just a few guys and gals in the grand scheme of things.
Because the most popular theories about 9/11 conspiracies are never as simple as you outlined. I think a small group did plan and carry out the attack, and a part of the US government is just as capable of doing that as Al-Qaeda.
But once you start adding extra details (the buildings had explosives, the pentagon got hit by a missile, etc), the number of people you need "in on it" starts to climb. That is why so many people point out the huge headcount of the supposed conspirators.
The conspiracy theories generally hold that 9/11 wasn't perpetrated by "terrorists", regardless of their benefactors. E.g. WTC towers were brought down by explosives, not planes crashing into them, Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a plane.
The simplest and most plausible theory is simply that Bush and Cheney knew, but didn't do anything because they needed the attack to go into Iraq. Even then, at least tens of people in the White House and upper echelons of US intelligence would have known and would have known that they could have stopped this by making a few phone calls. Even 12 years later, not one of them has regretted his complicity in killing thousands of civilians and spilled the beans to a reporter.
I think whether the government was involved in 9/11 is irrelevant. Seriously who cares? I don't think the American public even cares. How do I know this? A simple example is the Iraq war. One doesn't need to be a genius to understand the immorality and illegality of that war before it started. After it became fact that the "reasons" for starting the war were complete bullshit, what did the American public do? Nothing, we did absolutely nothing. Patriot act, escalation of the Afghanistan war, drone strikes killing innocent civilians, targeted assassinations of American citizens, indefinite detention, etc. All these actions, and more, by government are just as bad or even worse than 9/11.
Most likely it's Motorola Solutions providing the hardware, although there's probably some 8A business playing middleman to collect their guaranteed contracting dollars.
Everyone likes to bag on the big contractors, and not without reason, but if you really want to raise your blood pressure, look at the rules, laws, and entitlements regarding 8A contracting. We've had to deal with middlemen that took 10% simply to get a fax from the gov't, and pass it on to the hardware vendor (also on the GSA schedule), who then shipped directly to the gov't. 10% of a quarter million dollar order for receiving a fax, and faxing it onward, because as a small business who meets all the contracting requirements, they're guaranteed a certain amount of federal payola, simply for existing.
There was a lot of joking about forming our own businesses, BOFH style (translation: our fax machine and office is co-located at the local pub), to cash in on that gravy train.
Yeah, this seems like pretty typical misuse of government money. Even if these radios are an effective investment why wouldn't they spend a couple million more and train the employees responsible for using them? It's pretty ridiculous in my opinion.
Because the official who gets credit for the bullet-point on some report doesn't gain anything from the training. The incentive is only to be able to brag about having led the initiative on communication in their department.
(100% cynical conjecture; I'm sure the reality is much more nuanced)
Radio programming is almost always local to and customized for the department or agency or location, and the channel names and tags seemingly always vary.
Even in a system that's been architected with specific channel layouts, there's almost always some weirdness somewhere, and some differences, and some number of radios always seems to arrive mis-programmed and needs a trip back to the radio shop, and this if the folks receiving the batch of radios are paying attention and can afford the reprogramming. Not all do, or can, either.
Not all radio shops pay attention to what they're doing here, and even the good shops can be using radio service software most charitably described as atrocious.
And yes, anyone that thinks you can have everybody on one of the mutual aid frequencies is headed for trouble. The pile-ups are always massive. Add in encryption and tone squelch (CTCSS, PL) and you might be stomping on the other agencies without knowing it.
In a typical organization, you'd want your dispatcher(s) or communications officer(s) or (if not delegated) one of the senior officers on the shared channels.
Modern radios can be surprisingly complex tools, and the FCC migration to trunked radios and digital trunked radios, and adding inter-operations features (gazillions of channels, etc) and digital communications and deadspots, and the over-the-air rekeying and reprogramming, emergency button(s), and the seemingly obligatory remote kill can all combine to makes your average high-end radios hairy.
Certainly various radio users don't regularly train with and aren't familiar with the "odd-ball" channels; the "national" and mutual aide frequencies can have different names, or weird local oddities, and many of the end-user folks are often trained to stay off the other channels.
Training is certainly part of this, and of using the radios correctly. Conversely, you're probably not expecting the folks to be picking random channels. In the newer radio systems, you can be told (by dispatch or by your supervisor) which channel to use, or dispatch can reprogram your radio and your talk group(s) on the fly.
And as for training, every emergency services department I'm familiar with has been chafing under the political and technical and documentation requirements arriving from outside entities; blanket mandates requiring time and thought and budget for stuff that's probably never going to happen to a given individual or agency, but the obligatory training and documentation requirements pull the folks away from the stuff that they can and will be dealing with. Like dealing with their radios. And delivering whatever service the folks hired on to provide.
Yes, modern radios can be far more complex than it should be. So is the rest of the mess.
Startup ideas here? Sure. The two-way radio version of a ruggedized iPhone; a radio with a "modern" UI.
"Ruggedized" gear is a requirement here. Emergency services radios need to be very solid, and very easy to use — you're always working on something else and quite possibly life-threatening, and the radio is a tool.
If you can drop it, slam it, whack it, rain on it or even dunk it, cover it with blood or vomit (and clean it), balance your weight on it on a stairway, use it as a wheel chock (unintentionally) and (depending on the particular users) operate it with your gloves on, then we'll talk.
For some users, you further need to allow for heavy gloves.
Or provide emergency buttons, or other features.
As great as it is, iPhone isn't close to providing this.
In emergency services, specialists tend to be communications officers or dispatchers, or the radio shop, and variously assisted by the computers and the radio consoles that are increasingly supervising the radio networks.
To a reasonable degree, radios need to be useful and functional and understandable by everybody in the organization; to all of the users. It's this ubiquity that was at issue with the original article, and it's the radio's UI that tends to be inscrutable.
Who buys that level of new equipment/technology without user training, just silly. Whoever sold it also probably should of sold training or bundled something in beyond the manual.
Now we don't know all the facts and probably what happened was they did put a tender for the radios and training to use those radios. One way or another be it budgets or somebody doing a cheaper training bid though starting later after the radios are delivered or whatever permutation of events. They ended up with radios there users are unable to use. Why they are unable to use them again is not detailed and I can imagine many on here who would love that challenge to work out how to use a new peace of technology.
There is also the prospect that they got training and it was either not very good or clearly not targeted at the level of customer understanding.
With all that if these chaps landed planes then it would get rather dangerous too fly. Worrying thought perhaps.
I've seen two fortune 500 companies do exactly the same thing with ERP systems. The projects were over budget so they cut the user training, no one used the system beecause they didn't know how.
Yes, it does lack common sense but they were companies (publishing,pharma, resources) where current profits are driven by investments made decades ago by investments into assets that only one firm can own. Plus one had 34 employee grades plus another 12 for execs, that the system was a major failure was invisible to the exective class.
Usualy with a short term we made budget this month and hows the company share price now posture. Everything could be broken if there company share price is OK, thats how.
Who buys that level without training? Someone who doesn't know what they're doing, doesn't care, and needs to check off a box to satisfy part of their yearly goals.
It's not at anywhere near that level, but I've been involved in PACS (online radiology result viewing) rollouts across hospitals three times (or 2.5 depending on how you define it), and it doesn't matter how well you train people, or how clever they are. If they aren't interested, they won't learn. Even if the new system is quicker or faster or better. Until you throw the printer out, everyone wants film. The cynic in me sees people, broadly, as untrainable.
It's not exactly rocket science picking the right channel, I am more disappointed that the people we hire for DHS jobs can't figure out how to work a radio. I would bet that the radios are commodity hardware and the manuals are online.
I'm also more than a little worried that each radio costs $3500 when even milspec radios don't cost that much. I'm sure a simple FRS/GMRS radio with scrambler chip would have sufficed, and those retail at around $30 each.
I was pretty surprised to find out what "high end" walkie-talkies go for. This year at burning man, a couple of DPW girls were hanging out in our dome and one my my camp-mates started oggling their radios.
"Oh! Wow, I sell radios and those things are like $2000!" or something like that.
This is what a bunch of dirty hippies are using to talk to each other in the desert. I'd imagine what the Department of Homeland Security uses is probably even more expensive.
You have probably dealt with consumer or simple commercial systems. Military, government and even ham transceivers can be a maze of menus and modes. Not to mention the trunking, programming, dispatch, data modes, propagation, fading, interop, etc... One doesn't simply hand grunts and officers a COTS radio and expect success. Training is key.
These PRC 152 radios are pretty common in the military, I imagine DHS folks have something comparable. I'd wager that you wouldn't be able to figure one out without training if it was just handed to you.
They don't cost that much. The $430M covered a lot more than just the portable and mobile radios themselves.
And no, "a simple FRS/GMRS radio with scrambler chip" would not have sufficed. Public safety radio systems, even on a local level, to say nothing of a national agency's requirements, are a heck of a lot more complicated than most people realize, since there's a lot that most people, including most of their employees never see.
Yeah, but probably not all of the people using the radios have access to computers connected to the internet.
Even at my company, they restrict flash over the internet, so people can't watch YouTube, but that means we can't access training materials provided by our vendors in flash.
Shooting our feet into the 21st Century, already in progress.
Fortunately the government isn't expanding that; it's just mandating that insurance companies give health insurance to more people, and that employers do the same. They're not providing a public option.
No it's not. It's the most horrible thing I've ever experienced.
You have Part A, B, D, with an option for C. Then for D you need to go to a 3rd part to actually get the coverage, and for A and B you can pay for Gap coverage, from yet another 3rd party.
Or switch to C and cancel all the rest. Except of course for when you don't cancel them and instead combine it with some of them.
Then there is PACE which replaces part D, except when it doesn't and you need both of them. And depending on your income you might actually need PACENET with a different set of rules.
Medicare is an incomprehensible MESS. There are people who's entire job is simply to understand Medicare and help people with it.
And I'm sure I've missed a whole slew of other programs.
In contrast private insurance: Pay your premium to one company. Done.
Think of all the millions of people looking for jobs in this country, there might actually be some slightly more intelligent folks to replace that 120k or so.
But I guess the only good side of this is THEY WILL NEVER HAVE TO USE THEM, it's theater.
$430000000/123000 = $3,500 per radio, which is also insane.
