COMPUTERS ARE BAD is a newsletter semi-regularly issued directly to your doorstep to enlighten you as to the ways that computers are bad and the many reasons why. While I am not one to stay on topic, the gist of the newsletter is computer history, computer security, and "constructive" technology criticism.
I have an MS in information security, more certifications than any human should, and ready access to a keyboard. These are all properties which make me ostensibly qualified to comment on issues of computer technology. When I am not complaining on the internet, I work in professional services for a DevOps software vendor. I have a background in security operations and DevSecOps, but also in things that are actually useful like photocopier repair.
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This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while,
but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers
Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am
moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible
length.
Elevator control panels have long featured two buttons labeled "door open" and
"door close." One of these buttons does pretty much what it says on the label
(although I understand that European elevators sometimes have a separate "door
hold" button for the most common use of "door open"). The other usually doesn't
seem to, and that has lead to a minor internet phenomenon. Here's the problem:
the internet is wrong, and I am here to set it right. This works every time!
A huge number of articles confidently state that "80% of door close buttons do
nothing." The origin of this 80% number seems to be a 2014 episode of Radiolab
titled "Buttons Not Buttons," which I just listened through while doing
laundry. Radiolab gets the statistic from the curator of an elevator history
museum, who says that most of them "aren't even hooked up." This is reason to
doubt our curator's accuracy. I don't think there is anything malicious going
on here, but I do think there is an element of someone who has been out of the
industry for a while who is at least misstating the details of the issue.
The problem is not unique to Radiolab, though. An Oct. 27, 2016 New York Times
article, "Pushing That Crosswalk Button May Make You Feel Better, but...,"
covers the exact same material as the Radiolab article a couple of years later.
And the article was widely repeated in other publications, not by syndication but
by "According to the New York Times..." paraphrasing. This means that often the
repetitions are more problematic than the original, but even the original says:
But some buttons we regularly rely on to get results are mere artifices -
placebos that promote an illusion of control but that in reality do not work.
Many versions of the article lean on this line even harder, asserting that
door close buttons in elevators are installed entirely or at least primarily
as placebos. But the NYTimes article provides brief mention of the deeper,
and less conspiratorial, reality:
Karen W. Penafiel, executive director of National Elevator Industry Inc., a
trade group, said the close-door feature faded into obsolescence a few years
after the enactment of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990.
...
The buttons can be operated by firefighters and maintenance workers who have
the proper keys or codes.
There are a few things to cover:
First, anyone who says that the "door close" buttons in elevators are routinely
"not even hooked up" shouldn't be trusted. The world is full of many elevators
and I'm sure some can be found with mechanically non-functional door close
buttons, but the issue should be infrequent. The "door close" button is
required to operate the elevator in fire service mode, which disables automatic
closing of the doors entirely so that the elevator does not leave a firefighter
stranded. Fire service mode must be tested as part of the regular inspection of
the elevator (ASME A17.1-2019, but implemented through various state and local
codes). Therefore, elevators with a "door close" button that isn't "hooked up"
will fail their annual inspections. While no doubt some slip through the cracks
(particularly in states with laxer inspection standards), something that
wouldn't meet inspection standards can hardly be called normal practice and the
affected elevators must be far fewer than 80%.
But perhaps I am being too pedantic. Elevator control systems are complex and
highly configurable. Whether or not the door close button is "hooked up" or not
is mostly irrelevant if the controller is configured to ignore the button, and
it's possible that some of these articles are actually referring to a
configuration issue. So what can we find about the way elevators are configured?
I did some desperate research in the hopes of finding openly available
documentation on elevator controller programming, but elevator manufacturers
hold their control systems very close to their chests. I was not lucky enough
to find any reasonably modern programming documentation that I could access.
Some years ago I did shoulder-surf an elevator technician for a while as he
attempted to troubleshoot a reasonably new two-story ThyssenKrupp hydraulic
that was repeatedly shutting off due to a trouble code. In the modern world
this kind of troubleshooting consists mostly of sitting on the floor of the
elevator with a laptop looking at various status reports available in the
configuration software. The software, as I recall, came from the school of
industrial software design where a major component of the interface was a large
tree view of every option and discoverability came in the form of some items
being in ALL CAPS.
The NYTimes article, though, puts us onto the important issue here: the ADA.
Multiple articles repeat that door close buttons have been non-functional since
1990, although I think most of them (if not all) are just paraphrasings of this
same NYTimes piece. The ADA is easy to find and section 4.10 addresses elevators.
Specifically, 4.10.7 and 4.10.8 have been mentioned by some elevator technicians
as the source of the "door close" trouble. With some less relevant material
omitted:
4.10.7* Door and Signal Timing for Hall Calls
The minimum acceptable time from notification that a car is answering a call
until the doors of that car start to close shall be calculated from the
following equation:
T = D/(1.5 ft/s) or T = D/(445 mm/s)
where T total time in seconds and D distance (in feet or millimeters) from a
point in the lobby or corridor 60 in (1525 mm) directly in front of the
farthest call button controlling that car to the centerline of its hoistway
door (see Fig. 21).
4.10.8 Door Delay for Car Calls
The minimum time for elevator doors to remain fully open in response to a car
call shall be 3 seconds.
Based on posts from various elevator technicians, it's clear that these ADA
requirements have at least been widely interpreted as stating hard minimums
regardless of any user interaction. In other words, the ADA timing constitutes
the minimum door hold time which cannot be shortened. Based on the 4.10.7
rule, we can see that that time will be as long as ten seconds in fairly normal
elevator lobbies (16 feet, or about two elevators, from door centerpoint to
furthest button). We can read the same in a compliance FAQ from Corada, an ADA
compliance consulting firm:
User activation of door close (or automatic operation) cannot reduce the
initial opening time of doors (3 seconds minimum) or the minimum door signal
timing (based on 1.5/ ft/s travel speed for the distance from the hall call
button to car door centerline).
One point here can be kind of confusing. The minimum time for the door to be
fully open is 3 seconds, but the door signal timing is based on the time from
the indication of which elevator has arrived (usually a chime and illuminated
lamp) to the time that the doors start closing. This will be at least a couple
of seconds longer than the minimum door time due to the open and close time of
the door, but since it starts at 5 seconds and goes up from there it will
usually be the longer of the two requirements and thus set the actual minimum
door time. Where this is likely to not be the case are single-elevator setups
where the 5 second minimum timing will apply and the time from chime to door
open eats up the first two seconds... in that case, the 3 second fully open
time will become the limiting (or really maximizing) factor.
From some elevator manuals such as one for the Motion Control Engineering
VFMC-1000, we can gather that that the "minimum door hold time" and "door hold
time" are separately configurable. I have seen several mentions online that in
most elevators the "door close" button functions totally normally during the
difference between the minimum door hold time and the door hold time. In
other words, there may be some period during which pushing the door close
button causes the door to close, but it will be after the end of the
ADA-required minimum door time.
Here is the obvious catch: since reducing the door hold time will make the
elevator more responsive (less time on the way to a call spent waiting with
the doors open), elevator installers are usually motivated to make the door
hold time as short as possible. Since the ADA requirements impose a minimum,
it's likely very common for the minimum door hold time and the "normal" door
hold time to be the same... meaning that the window to use the "door close"
button is zero seconds in duration.
We can confirm this behavior by finding an elevator with a very long configured
door hold time. That seems pretty easy to do: visit a hospital. Most hospitals
set the door hold time fairly high to accommodate people pushing hospital beds
around, so the normal door open time is longer than the ADA requirement (the
ADA rules are of course written assuming a person can cover 1.5 ft/s which
isn't very fast but still seems hard to achieve when accelerating a heavy
hospital bed in a tight space). Call an elevator, step inside, wait for around
ten seconds from the chime for the minimum door hold to elapse, and then push
the "door close" button. What happens? Well, in my experience the door promptly
closes, although I admit that I've only tested this on two hospitals so far.
Perhaps your experience will vary: I can see the possibility of a hospital
setting the minimum door hold time high, but of course that would get pretty
annoying and probably produce pushback from the staff. In the hospitals where
I've studiously observed the elevators the normal door hold time was close to
20 seconds, which feels like an eternity when you're waiting to get up one
floor.
Another way we can inspect this issue is via door reopening rules. While older
elevators used a rubber bumper on the door called a sensitive edge, most
elevators you'll see today use a "light curtain" instead. This device,
installed between the hall and car doors, monitors for the interruption of
infrared light beams to tell if the door is clear. When the door is obstructed,
ADA 4.10.6 requires the door to remain open for at least 20 seconds. After that
point ADA just refers to the ASME A17.1 standard, which allows for a behavior
called "nudging" in which the elevator controller encourages people to clear
the door by closing it anyway (at slow speed). The light curtain can also be
used to detect whether or not a person has entered the elevator, which can be
used as an input to hold time. Some articles online say that you can "hack" an
elevator waiting at an empty floor (because someone called the elevator and
walked away, for example) by momentarily interrupting the light curtain so that
the controller will believe that someone has entered.
Indeed this seems to work well on some elevators, but the ADA requirements do
not allow an exception to minimum hold times based on light curtain detection.
This means that the light curtain trick is basically equivalent to the door
close button: we can expect it to, at most, shorten the door hold time to the
ADA minimum. Nothing is allowed to decrease the time below the ADA minimum,
except when the elevator is in a special mode such as fire or perhaps
independent service.
So it seems that the reality of elevator "door close" buttons is rather less
dramatic than Radiolab and the NYTimes imply: the "door close" button is
perfectly functional, but details of the 1990 ADA mean that most of the time
people are pressing it the elevator controller isn't permitted to close the
door due to ADA rules. As far as I can tell, outside of the ADA minimum door
time, door close buttons work just fine.
And yet tons of articles online still tell us that the button is installed as a
placebo... something that is demonstrably untrue considering its significance
in fire (and maintenance, independent, etc) modes, and shows a general lack of
understanding of elevator codes and the ADA. Moreover, it seems like something
you would find out is untrue with about five minutes of research. So why is it
such "common knowledge" that it makes the rounds of major subreddits and minor
local news websites to this day?
No doubt a large portion of the problem is laziness. The "placebo" theory has a
lot of sizzle to it. Even though the NYTimes is somewhat noncommittal and only
implies that it is the true purpose of the button, most of the online pieces
about door close buttons I can find appear to be based solely on the 2016
NYTimes article and actually repeat the claim about the placebo affect more
strongly than the NYTimes originally makes it. In other words, the "fact" that
the door close button is a placebo seems to mostly just be a product of lazy
journalists rewriting an NYTimes piece enough to not feel like plagiarists.
There is also a matter of aesthetic appeal: the placebo theory sounds great. It
has the universal appeal of mundane reality but also hints at some kind of
conspiracy to deceive in the elevator industry. And, of course, it makes
everyone feel better about the high failure rate of mashing the "door close"
button without the complexity of an accurate explanation of the 1990 ADA rules.
The NYTimes piece basically makes it sound like the ADA banned door close
buttons, and it's easy to read the ADA and see that that's not true... but it
takes some real attention and thought to figure out how the ADA really did
change elevator controls.
This type of phenomenon, a sort of "internet urban pseudo-legend," is not at
all unique to elevator buttons. In fact the very same 2016 NYTimes article
that started that year's round of elevator button "fun facts" is also to blame
for another widespread belief in placebo buttons: crosswalk request buttons.
The NYTimes article says that most crosswalk buttons do nothing, explaining
that the buttons were made non-functional after an upgrade to computer light
controls. What the article does say, but many readers seem to miss, is that
this is a fact about crosswalk buttons in New York City.
Many traffic lights operate in "actuated mode," where they base their cycling
on knowledge of who is waiting where. Older traffic lights mostly used buried
inductive loops under the lanes to detect lane occupancy (that a vehicle is
present), but a lot of newer traffic lights use either video cameras or compact
radar sets. Since they don't require cutting into the pavement and then
resealing it, these are cheaper and faster to install. Newer video and radar
systems are also better at detecting cyclists than pavement loops---although
earlier video systems performed very poorly on this issue and gave video lane
presence detection a bad reputation in some cities.
New York City, though, was a very early adopter of large-area computer control
of traffic lights. One of the main advantages of central computer control of
traffic lights is the ability to set up complex schedules and dynamically
adjust timing. Not only can centrally-controlled traffic lights operate in
sequence timing matched to the speed limit of the street, they can also have
the durations in different directions and sequence speed adjusted based on
real-time traffic conditions.
The problem is that combining central timing control with actuated operation
is, well, tricky. In practice, most traffic lights that operate under sequence
timing or remote timing control don't operate in actuated mode, or at least not
at the same time. What some traffic lights do today is switch: sequence timing
during rush hour, and actuated mode during lower traffic. Even with today's
developments combining scheduled timing with actuation inputs is tricky, and
New York City adopted centralized control in the '70s!
So New York's adoption of central control was also, for the most part, an
abandonment of actuated operation. The crosswalk buttons are actuation inputs,
so they became non-functional as part of this shift. The 2016 NYTimes article
explained that the city had estimated the cost of removing the now
non-functional buttons at over a million dollars and so decided to skip the
effort... but they are removing the buttons as other work is performed.
For the second time, this runs directly counter to the "mechanical placebo"
argument the article is based on. The buttons weren't originally installed as
placebo at all; when they were put in they were fully functional. A different
decision, to switch to centralized timing control, resulted in their current
state, and even then, they are being removed over time.
Moreover, the same does not apply to other cities. The NYTimes makes a very
lazy effort at addressing this by by referring to a now-unavailable 2010 ABC
News piece reporting that they "...found only one functioning crosswalk button
in a survey of signals in Austin, Tex.; Gainesville, Fla.; and Syracuse." It is
unclear what the extent of that survey is, and I lack the familiarity with
traffic signaling in those cities to comment on it. But in a great many cities,
most of them in my experience, actuated traffic signals remain the norm outside
of very high-traffic areas, and so the crosswalk buttons serve a real purpose.
Depending on the light configuration, you may never get a "walk" signal if you
don't press the button, or the duration of the "walk" signal (prior to the
flashing red hand clearing time) may be shorter.
Actually one might wonder why those crosswalk buttons have so much staying
power, given the technical progress in lane presence detection. Video and radar
options for waiting pedestrian detection do exist. I have occasionally even
seen PIR sensors installed for this purpose in suburban areas. The problem, I
think, is that detecting a pedestrian waiting to cross involves more nuance
than a vehicle. Sidewalks don't have lane lines to clearly delineate different
queues for each movement. A video or radar-based system can detect a pedestrian
waiting on the corner, but not whether that person is waiting to cross one
direction, or the other, or for an Uber, or just chose that spot to catch up on
Tik Tok. Video-based waiting pedestrian detection may be too prone to false
positives, and in any case the button is a robust and low-cost option that can
also be used to meet ADA objectives through audible and tactile announcements.
So there's a story about buttons: the conspiracy about them being placebos is
itself a conspiracy to get you to read articles in publications like "Science
Alert." Or maybe that's just an old tale, and the reality of content-farmed
news websites falls out of some implications of the ADA. It's a strange world
out there.
As we discussed previously,
the search for UAP is often contextualized in terms of the events of 2017:
the public revelation of the AATIP and alien-hunting efforts by Robert Bigelow
and Tom DeLonge. While widely publicized, these programs seem to have lead to
very little. I believe the termination of the AATIP (which lead to the creation
of TTSA) to be a result of the AATIP's failure to address the DoD's actual
concern: that UAP represented a threat to airspace sovereignty.
I just used a lot of four- and five-letter acronyms without explaining them.
These topics were all discussed in the previous
post and if you
are not familiar with them I would encourage you to read it. Still, I will try
to knock it off. Besides, now there is a new set of four- and five-letter
acronyms. The end of the AATIP was not the end of the DoD's efforts to
investigate UAP. Instead, military UAP research was reorganized, first into
Naval intelligence as the UAP Task Force, and later in the cross-branch
military intelligence All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO.
It is unclear exactly what the AARO has accomplished. As a military
intelligence organization, the DoD will not comment on it. Most of what we know
comes from legislators briefed on the program, like Sen. Gillibrand and Sen.
Rubio. In various interviews and statements, they have said that AARO's work is
underway but hampered by underfunding---underfunding that is, embarrassingly, a
result of some kind of technical error in defense appropriation.
Administratively confused as they may be, the DoD's UAP efforts have lead to
creation of a series of reports. Issued by the Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) at the behest of congress, the June 2021 unclassified report
appeared to be mostly a review of the same data analyzed by AATIP. The report
was short---9 pages---but contained enough information to produce a lot of
reporting. One of the most important takeaways is that, up to around 2020, the
military had no standardized way of collecting reports of UAP. Later
reporting would show that even after 2020 efforts to collect UAP reports were
uneven and often ineffective.
Much of the reason for this is essentially stigma: advocates of UAP research
have often complained that through the late 20th century the military developed
a widespread attitude of suppressing UAP incidents to avoid embarrassment. As a
result, it's likely that there are many more UAP encounters than known. This is
particularly important since analysis (including that in the 2021 report)
repeatedly finds that the majority of UAP reports are probably explainable,
while a few are more likely to result from some type of unknown object such as
an adversarial aircraft. In other words, the signal to noise ratio in UAP
reports is low. Taken one way this might discourage reporting and analysis,
since any individual report is unlikely to amount to anything. The opposite is
true as well, though: if most UAP encounters are not reported and analyzed,
it's likely that the genuinely troubling incidents will never be discovered.
The 2021 report broadly suggests that this is exactly what was happening for
many years: so few UAP incidents were seriously considered that no one noticed
that some of them posed real danger.
The 2021 report briefly mentions that some UAP incidents were particularly
compelling. For example, in 18 incidents the UAP demonstrated maneuvering.
This doesn't mean "shot into the sky as if by antigravity," but rather that the
objects appeared to be navigating towards targets, turning with intention, or
stationkeeping against the wind. In other words, they are incidents in which
the UAP appears to have been a powered craft under some type of control. Even
more importantly, the report notes that in a few cases there were indications
of RF activity. The military will never go into much detail on this topic
because it quickly becomes classified, but many military aircraft are equipped
with "electronic warfare" systems that use SDR and other radio technology to
detect and classify RF signals. Historically the main purpose of these systems
was to detect and locate anti-aircraft radar systems, but they have also been
extended to general ELINT use.
ELINT is an intelligence community term for "electronic intelligence." Readers
are more likely to be familiar with the term SIGINT, for signals intelligence,
and the difference between the two can be initially confusing. The key is that
the "electronic" in ELINT is the same as in "electronic warfare." SIGINT is
about receiving signals in order to analyze their payloads, for example by
cryptologic means. ELINT is about receiving signals for the sake of the signals
themselves. For example, to recognize the chirp patterns used by specific
adversarial radar systems, or to identify digital transmission modes used by
different types of communications systems, thus indicating the presence of
that communications system and its user. A simple and classic example of ELINT
would be to determine that an adversarial force uses a certain type of
encrypted digital radio system, and then monitor for transmissions matching
that system to locate adversarial forces in the field. The contents don't
matter and for an encrypted system may not be feasible to recover anyway. The
mere presence of the signal provides useful intelligence.
The concept of ELINT becomes important in several different ways when
discussing UAP. First, the 2021 DNI report's mention that several UAP were
associated with RF emissions almost certainly refers to ELINT information
collected by intelligence or electronic warfare equipment. These RF emissions
likely indicate some combination of remote control and real-time data
reporting, although a less likely possibility (in my opinion) is that it
reflects electronic warfare equipment on the UAP engaged in some type of
active countermeasure.
It's meaningful to contrast this view of the matter with the one widespread in
the media in 2017. A UAP that maneuvers and communicates by radio is not
exactly X-Files material, and almost by definition can be assumed to be an
sUAS---small unmanned aerial system, commonly referred to as a drone. Far from
the outlandish claims made by characters like Tom DeLonge, such a craft is
hardly paranormal in that we know such devices exist and are in use. What is a
startling discovery is that sUAS are being spotted operating near defense
installations and military maneuvers and cannot be identified. This poses a
very serious threat not only to airspace sovereignty as a general principle but
also to the operational security of the military.
Perhaps the component of the report that generated the most media interest is
its analysis of the nature of the reported UAP. In the vast majority of cases,
in fact all but one, the DNI report states that it was not possible to
definitively determine the nature of the UAP. This was almost always because of
the limited information available, often just one or two eyewitness accounts
and perhaps a poor photo and radar tracks. Most of these incidents presumably
do have explanations within the realm of the known that simply could not be
determined without additional evidence. On the other hand, the report does
state that there are some cases which "may require additional scientific
knowledge" to identify.
It is not entirely clear how dramatically this statement should be taken. It's
possible, even likely, that the phrase mostly refers to the possibility that
new methods of evidence collection will need to be developed, such as the new
generation of radar systems currently emerging to collect more accurate
information on sUAS with very low radar cross section due to their small size.
It's also possible that the phrase reflects the fact that some reported UAP
incidents involve the UAP behaving in ways that no known aerial system is
capable of, such as high speeds and maneuvers requiring extreme performance.
Once again, there is a temptation to take this possibility and run in the
direction of extraterrestrial technology. Occam's razor at the very least
suggests that it's more likely that some adversarial nation has made
appreciable advancements in aviation technology and kept them secret. While
perhaps unlikely this is not, in my mind, beyond reason. We know, for example,
that both Russia and China have now made more progress towards fielding a
practical hypersonic weapons system than the United States. This reinforces the
possibility that their extensive research efforts have yielded some interesting
results.
Following the 2021 UAP report, Congress ordered the DNI to produce annual
updates on the state of UAP research. The first such update, the 2022 report,
was released a few months ago. The unclassified version is quite short, but it
is accompanied by a significantly longer and more detailed classified version
which has been presented to some members of Congress. The unclassified document
states that the number of known UAP incidents has increased appreciably,
largely due to the substantial effort the military has made to encourage
reporting. To provide a sense of the scale, 247 new reports were received in
the roughly 1.5 years between the preliminary and 2022 reports. A number of
additional incidents occurring prior to the 2021 report also came to the
attention of military intelligence during the same period, and these were
analyzed as well.
Perhaps the most important part of the 2022 report is its statement that, of
the newly analyzed incidents, more than half were determined to be
"unremarkable." In most cases, it was judged that the incident was probably
caused by a balloon. While these are still of possible interest, they are less
interesting than the remainder which are more difficult to explain.
Intriguingly, the report states that some UAP "demonstrated unusual flight
characteristics or performance capabilities." This supports the more dramatic
interpretation of the 2021 report, that it is possible that some incidents
cannot be explained without the assumption that some adversary possesses a
previously unknown advanced technology.
While it already attracted a great deal of media attention, this entire matter
of DNI reports was only the opening act to the spy balloon. The airspace
sovereignty aspect of the UAP reports is not something that attracted much
discussion in the media, but it has become much more front of mind as a UAP of
the first kind drifted across the United States. This UAP was not unidentified
for long, with the military publicly attributing it to China---an attribution
that China has both formally and informally acknowledged.
Balloons are not new in warfare. Indeed, as the oldest form of aviation, the
balloon is also the oldest form of military aviation. The first practical
flying machine was the hot air balloon. While the technology originated in
France, the first regular or large-scale example of military aviation is
usually placed at the US Civil War. Hot air balloons were routinely used for
reconnaissance during the Civil War, and the slow movement and long dwell times
of balloons still make them attractive as reconnaissance platforms.
Military ballooning in the United States is not limited to the far past.
During World War II, the Japanese launched nearly 10,000 balloons equipped with
incendiaries. The hope was that these balloons would drift into the United
States and start fires---which some of them did, although a concerted press
censorship program largely prevented not only the Japanese but also Americans
learning of the campaign. Ultimately the impact of the balloon bombs was very
limited, but they are still often considered the first intercontinental weapon
system. They might also be viewed as the first profound challenge to US air
sovereignty, as the balloons required no nearby support (as aircraft of the era
did) and the technology of the time provided no effective means of protection.
Indeed, this was the calculus behind the press censorship: since there was no
good way to stop the balloon bombs, the hope was that if the US carefully
avoided any word of them being published, the Japanese might assume they were
all being lost at sea and stop sending them.
While the Cold War presented Soviet bombers and then missiles as top concerns,
it could be said that balloons have always been one of the greatest practical
threats to airspace sovereignty. Despite their slow travel and poor
maneuverability, balloons are hard to stop.
Balloons remain surprisingly relevant today. First, modern balloons can operate
at extremely high altitudes, similar to those achieved by the U-2 spy plans.
This provides an advantage both in terms of observation range and secrecy.
Second, balloons are notoriously difficult to detect. While the envelope is
large, the material is largely transparent to RF, resulting in a very low radar
cross section. Careful design of the suspended payload can give it a very low
radar cross section as well... often easier than it sounds, since the payload
is kept very lightweight. The sum result of these two factors is that even
large balloons are difficult to detect. They are most obvious visually, but the
United States and Canada have never had that substantial of a ground observer
program and the idea has not been on the public mind for many decades. Many
people might see a balloon before any word reached air defense.
On January 28th, a large balloon operated by China entered US airspace over
Alaska. During the following week, it drifted across the country until leaving
the east coast near South Carolina, where it was shot down with a Sidewinder
missile. Circumstances suggest that both the Chinese and US administrations may
have intended to downplay the situation to avoid ratcheting tensions, as the US
government did not announce the balloon to the public until about a day after
it had initially been detected entering US airspace. Publicly, China claimed it
to be a weather balloon which had unintentionally drifted off course. The New
York Times reports that, privately, Chinese officials told US counterparts that
they had not intended for the balloon to become such a public incident and
would remove it from US airspace as quickly as possible.
Modern balloons of this type are capable of a limited but surprisingly flexible
form of navigation by adjusting their buoyancy, and thus altitude, to drift in
different winds. Perhaps the balloon spent a week crossing the US by intention,
perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of weather created a situation where they
were not able to navigate it out more quickly, or perhaps some equipment
failure had rendered the balloon unable to change its altitude. I tend to
suspect one of the latter two since it is hard to think of China's motivation
to leave the balloon so publicly over the United States. In any case, that's
what happened.
We now know more about the balloon, not so much because of analysis of the
wreckage (although that is occurring) but more because the military and
administration have begun to share more information collected by means
including a U-2 spy plane (one of few aircraft capable of meeting the balloon's
altitude) and other military reconnaissance equipment. The balloon had large
solar arrays to power its equipment, it reportedly had small propellers (almost
certainly to control orientation of the payload frame rather than for
navigation), and it bristled with antennas.
This is an important point. One of the popular reactions to the balloon was
mystery at why China would employ balloons when they have a substantial
satellite capability. At least for anyone with a background in remote sensing
the reason is quite obvious: balloons are just a lot closer to the ground than
satellites, and that means that just about every form of sensing can be
performed with much lower gain and thus better sensitivity. This is true of
optical systems where balloons are capable of much better spatial resolution
than satellites, but also true of RF where atmospheric attenuation and
distortion both become very difficult problems when observing from orbit.
Further, balloons are faster and cheaper to build and launch than satellites,
allowing for much more frequent reconfigurations and earlier fielding of new
observation equipment. The cost and timeline on satellites is such that newly
developed intelligence technology takes years to make it from the lab to the
sky... Chinese intelligence balloons, on the other hand, can likely be
fabricated pretty quickly.
It's useful here to return to the topic of ELINT. First, it's very likely that
ELINT was a major mission of this balloon. Sensing RF emissions from military
equipment at close range is invaluable in creating ELINT signatures for
equipment like radar and encrypted communications systems, which directly
translates into a better capability to mount an offensive from the air. SIGINT
was likely also a mission. One of the advantages of ELINT collection is that
the data acquired for ELINT purposes can typically be processed to glean SIGINT
information, and even provides valuable material for cryptologists attempting
to break codes.
ELINT is also relevant in the detection of the balloon. While the spy balloon
in the recent incident was detected by conventional means, the DoD has reported
that they are now able to assert that this is at least the fifth such balloon
to enter US airspace. For those not familiar with ELINT methods this might be
surprising, but it makes a great deal of sense. The fact that this balloon was
tracked by the military for days provided ample opportunities to collect good
quality ELINT signatures of the communications equipment used by the balloon.
The military possesses a number of aircraft dedicated to the purpose of ELINT
and SIGINT collection, such as the RC-135---a modified C-135 Stratolifter
equipped with specialized antennas and hundreds of pounds of electronic
equipment. These type of aircraft could orbit the balloon for hours and collect
extensive recordings of raw RF emissions.
ELINT information is also collected by ground-based and orbital (satellite)
assets, including a family of satellites that deploy large parabolic reflectors
to collect RF signals with extremely high gain. The data collected by these
platforms is likely retained in raw form, allowing for retrospective analysis.
Information collected by similar means has been publicly used in the past. And
this is most likely how the first four balloons were discovered: by searching
historic data collected by various platforms for matching ELINT signatures. The
presence of the same digital data modem as in the recent spy balloon, in US
airspace, almost certainly indicates a similar Chinese asset operating in the
past.
It's important to understand that the RF environment is extremely busy, with a
great deal of noise originating from the many radio devices we use every day.
It's simply not feasible for someone in some military facility to carefully
review waterfall displays of the RF data collected by numerous ELINT assets.
What is much more feasible is to develop signatures and then use automation to
search for instances of similar traffic. It's the practical reality of
intelligence at scale.
The discovery of the recent spy balloon has had an incredible effect on air
defense. I am of the general opinion, and have occasionally argued in the past,
that the US government has significantly under-invested in air defense since
the end of the Cold War. While we do need to move on from the hysteria of the
1970s, the lack of investment in air surveillance and defense over the last
fifty years or so has lead to an embarrassing situation: our ability to detect
intrusion on our airspace is fairly poor, and when we do it can take well over
an hour to get a fighter in the air to investigate it. The balloon brought this
problem to the attention of not only the government but the public, and so some
action had to be taken.
Primary radar [1] is quite complex. Even decades into radar technology it
remains a fairly difficult problem to pick objects of interest, such as
aircraft, out of "clutter"---the many objects, ranging from the ground to
wind-blown dust, that can produce primary radar returns. One of the simplest
approaches is to ignore objects that are not large and moving fast. This type
of filtering is usually adequate for detection of aircraft, but fails entirely
for some objects like balloons and sUAS that may be small and slow moving.
Further, the US and Canada are very large. Integrating data from the many radar
surveillance sites and presenting it in a way that allows an air defense
controller to identify suspicious objects in the sea of normal air traffic is a
difficult problem, and a problem that the US has not seriously invested in for
decades. The information systems used by both the FAA and NORAD for processing
of radar data are almost notoriously poor. In the wake of the spy balloon,
officials have admitted to the press that the military is struggling to process
the data from radar systems and identify notable objects.
Air defense is one of the oldest problems in computing as an industry. One of
the first (perhaps the first, depending on who you ask) networked computer
systems was SAGE: an air defense radar processing system. These problems are
still difficult today, but we are no longer mounting cutting-edge research and
development projects to face them. Instead, we are trapped in a morass of
defensed contractors and acquisition projects that take decades to deliver
nothing.
In response to the discovery of the spy balloon, NORAD has changed the
parameters used to process radar data to exclude fewer objects. They have also
made a policy change to take action on more unknown objects than they had
before. This lead directly to NORAD action to intercept several balloons over
the past two weeks. There are now indications that at least some of these
balloons may have been ordinary amateur radio balloons, not presenting a threat
to air sovereignty at all. Some will view this as an embarrassment or
indictment of NORAD's now more aggressive approach, but it's an untenable
problem. If China or some other adversary is sending small balloons into our
airspace, we need to make an effort to identify such balloons. But currently,
no organized system or method exists to identify balloons and other
miscellaneous aerial equipment.
One could argue (indeed, here I am) that up to about two weeks ago NORAD was
still looking for Soviet bombers, with a minor side project of light aircraft
smuggling drugs. Air defense largely ignored anything that wasn't large and
actively crossing a border (or more to the point an ADIZ). And that's how about
four large intelligence platforms apparently wandered in unnoticed... with UAP
reports suggesting that there may be much more.
My suspicion is that the coming year will involve many changes and challenges
in the way that we surveil our airspace. I think that we will likely become
more restrictive in airspace management, requiring more aircraft than before to
have filed flight plans. Otherwise it is very difficult to differentiate a
normal but untracked object from an adversarial intelligence asset.
And indications are that adversarial intelligence assets are a very real
problem. China's spy balloon program is apparently both long-running and
widespread, with similar balloons observed for years in other countries as
well. This shouldn't be surprising---after all, reconnaissance balloons are the
oldest form of military aviation. The US and allies made enormous use of
reconnaissance balloons during the Cold War, sending many thousands into the
USSR. It's likely the case that we only really slowed down because our modern
reconnaissance balloon projects have all become notorious defense contracting
failures. We're still trying, but projects like TARS have run far overbudget
and still perform poorly in operational contexts.
It might feel like this situation is new, and in terms of press reporting it
is. But we should have seen it coming. In an interview following a classified
briefing, Senator John Kennedy said that "These objects have been flying over
us for years, many years. We've known about those objects for many years."
Robert Bigelow got into UAP research because he was searching for aliens.
Maybe aliens are out there, maybe they aren't, but there is one thing we know
for sure: our adversaries are out there, and they possess aviation technology
at least as advanced as ours. For decades we ignored UFOs as folly, and for
decades we ignored potential aviation advancements by our adversaries along
with them. Now those advancements are floating across the northern United
States and perhaps worse---the DNI is hoping they'll find out, if they can just
get people to report what they see.
[1] Radar that operates by detecting reflections or attenuation of an RF field
by an object. This is as opposed to secondary radar, more common in air traffic
control, that works by "interrogating" a cooperative transponder installed on
the aircraft.
Over the last few weeks, there has been an astounding increase in the number of
objects shot down by North American air defense. Little is yet known about some
of these objects, but it is clearly one of the more dramatic UFO turns in
recent memory. Some of the mystery is simply the fog of war, and the time it
takes for defense organizations to collect and publicize information. I think
that much of it, though, is attributable to a few frustrating factors: the
limited familiarity most of the public has with the reality of military
operations today; the tendency of the most vocal parts of the public to attempt
to fit all events into a preconceived theory (often of the more
out-of-this-world kind); and the poor job the media has done of contextualizing
these events.
I have written once before
about UFOs, and I try not to do it too much for fear of coming off as a crazy
person. Still, though, UFOs and their colorful history are one of my greatest
interests. Over the last week I have done a lot of yelling at the television
and internet comment sections. So here, I am going to attempt something
ambitious. I would like to put together for you a possible, even likely, story
of the UFO news of the last two years: of AATIP, balloons, and how they all fit
together.
Most of what I am about to write is fairly well-established fact, but the way
that I connect these facts together is a matter of speculation and opinion.
Still, my knowledge of both the history and present of aerial phenomena and the
military and intelligence communities, with particular focus on air defense,
gives me a set of opinions on this topic that feel extremely obvious to me but
are seldom presented in the media or online discussions.
I can't promise I'm correct, but I do hope you'll consider the possibility that
the story I will tell here is indeed what has happened: that, far from
disclosure, we are currently living out the consequences of a sophisticated
adversary, government inefficacy, and one man's eccentric swindle.
And that's where we'll start: with one man.
Robert Bigelow made his wealth in the hospitality business. Budget Suites of
America is his marquee brand, but his empire spreads far beyond with a huge
hotel and multi-family housing portfolio. Through most of the second half
of the 20th century, hotels kept Bigelow busy and made him rich, but by the
1990s he turned towards his true passion: the paranormal.
Most reporting on Bigelow focuses on Bigelow Aerospace (BA). When he's
identified as an eccentric, it's usually in regards to BA's research into UFOs.
And yet, Bigelow's paranormal investigations begin years earlier: in 1995, he
founded the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDSci. NIDSci's
focus was not UFOs but paranormal phenomena more broadly, including
parapsychology. Bigelow was joined in this venture by his friend, journalist
George Knapp.
Knapp is perhaps best known in paranormal communities for his extensive
reporting on the claims of Bob Lazar [1]. In the mid 1990s, Knapp turned his
focus towards cattle mutilation and related phenomena, the same field of
inquiry that made Linda Multon Howe's fame. Cattle mutilation has a long
history and in the '90s was seen as one of the more credible forms of
paranormal activity. Quite a few paranormal researchers chased mutilated cattle
like ambulances, but Knapp had a remarkable lead on the topic: Skinwalker
Ranch.
Also known as the Sherman Ranch after the brief owners that first shared
stories of its haunting, Skinwalker Ranch is a 512 acre property in rural Utah.
It takes its common name from a frightening creature of Navajo belief, "yee
naaldlooshii." The Dine feel it to be unwise or at least improper to discuss
the Skinwalker, and so I will not dwell on it. We can avoid the topic quite
easily, as the relation of Skinwalker Ranch to the Skinwalker itself is loose
and a result of white settlers rather than anyone who would know better. What
we can certainly say about Skinwalker Ranch is this: it is popularly associated
with spooky shit.
Summarized briefly, the stories of Skinwalker Ranch encompass just about every
paranormal modality you can think of. Crop circles, mutilated cattle, strange
lights in the sky, footsteps heard at night, a quiet but disconcerting sound
that you cannot escape, bedroom doors locked at night to fend off something
that has been scratching at the walls, creatures that are felt rather than
seen, bright apparitions like spotlights chasing people on ranch roads, et
cetera.
Whether that spooky shit is the consequence of aliens, secret military
projects, Bigfoot, ghosts, or otherwise depends largely on who you ask. The
legends of Skinwalker Ranch also originate almost entirely with the Shermans
who owned it for only two years, which has produced some obvious questions
about their veracity. Still, it is one of the most famous sites of paranormal
activity and a household name among paranormal enthusiasts [2].
In 1996, Knapp joined with Bigelow and biochemist Colm Kelleher to resolve the
mystery of Skinwalker Ranch once and for all, or at least publish a book about
it. That year, NIDSci bought the ranch. A small staff of scientists and
paranormal enthusiasts was recruited to perform research on the site, and it
was otherwise closed to access. It has remained privately owned and guarded
since then, perpetuating its paranormal associations.
Bigelow owned Skinwalker Ranch for about twenty years, but serious
investigation seems to have only occurred for the first half of that period. In
2005, Knapp and Kelleher published a book, "Hunt for the Skinwalker,"
presenting their results. The results are, well, minimal. The book is mostly a
recounting of the legends told by the Shermans, along with similar encounters
during NIDSci's tenure.
In any case, the details of Skinwalker Ranch are not all that important to the
story I am telling here. The reason I bring this whole thing up is because of
what it tells us about Robert Bigelow. Bigelow is fascinated with paranormal
phenomena and has the wealth and connections to bring journalists and
scientists into his projects. His projects do not necessarily produce results.
Most of all, remember this: Bigelow has done this before.
George Knapp had another friend of note: the late Harry Reid, a long-serving
senator from Nevada. In fact, Knapp and Reid were in conversation on the topic
of UFOs the same year that Bigelow bought Skinwalker Ranch. I do not know to
what extend Reid was aware of NIDSci's efforts, but I think it must have been
at least a bit, as Reid writes in a New York Times
editorial
that Knapp had invited him to a conference in 1996. In any case, Reid found
Knapp credible, and became the principal congressional advocate of serious
investigation of UAPs. Reid was quite clear about his interest in UFOs, and
while he viewed extraterrestrial origin as only one possibility, he felt it to
be a possibility worth investigating.
Here I should discuss terminology. I tend to use the term UFO, or unidentified
flying object. The problem with "UFO" is that it is widely understood to refer
specifically to phenomena of ostensibly extraterrestrial origin, and it's
closely associated with conspiracy theories and loons. In modern government
research, the term UAP, for unidentified aerial phenomena, is preferred. This
is indeed mostly a matter of optics. I do think the distinction is important,
though, as even within the UFO community "UFO" tends to have an alien
connotation, and "UAP" is not intended to. The term UAP allows us to be a bit
more flexible in our thinking by not assuming the existing body of
extraterrestrial-oriented UFO research. From this point on I will prefer the
term UAP for consistency with reporting on the topic.
In 1999, Robert Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace (BA). The history of BA is
confusing in some ways. On the one hand, it seems that Bigelow was genuinely
interested in developing aerospace technology, perhaps particularly for the
purpose of space tourism... right in line with his history in hospitality. On
the other hand, BA was founded right in the middle of the Skinwalker Ranch
project, and it's hard to imagine that it wasn't related. BA has held various
contracts in space systems development but has never had a very large staff. It
is mostly known today for the way that it, too, interacted with Senator Reid:
the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP.
AATIP, by Reid's own account, started in 2007. It was a highly secretive
program and so the early details are somewhat obscure. The main gist of AATIP
was to collect reports of UAPs and then analyze those incidents to develop a
possible explanation. Like many military projects, AATIP was contracted out to
private industry. Also like many military projects, the AATIP contract was
awarded to the same person who had lobbied for the program's creation: Robert
Bigelow, through a division of BA called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space
Studies or BAASS. Reid makes it fairly clear that AATIP started and ended with
Robert Bigelow.
Many aspects of AATIP are unknown or questionable. Perhaps most notable is the
question of AATIP's leadership. Long-time military intelligence analyst Luis
Elizondo claimed, after his 2012 separation from the military, to have been
AATIP's director. The Pentagon denies this, and journalists have questioned
various aspects of Elizondo's story, but he has a notable supporter: Senator
Reid concurs that Elizondo lead the program. As a general matter it seems
fairly certain that Elizondo was at least a senior leader of AATIP, but the
confusion underscores the uncertainty around the history, mission, and outcomes
of the DoD's UAP efforts in the late 2010s. One gets the impression that no one
is telling the whole story, probably because everyone is trying to make
themselves look good.
What we do know about AATIP is that the program ended in 2012, and that BAASS
produced a lengthy report on its findings. This report has never been released
to the public, but it is thought to be largely similar to more recent reports
from the DoD's in-house UAP program, mostly summarizing BA's conclusions after
attempting to identify the cause of a large number of individual UAP incidents.
Various parties involved in AATIP, from Elizondo to Reid, have made large
claims about AATIP having identified possible extraterrestrial technology, but
nothing has emerged to substantiate these claims. I find it most likely that
they were exaggerations of more commonplace anomalies in AATIP data.
This is where I will diverge somewhat from undisputed history and share my
opinion. AATIP demonstrates that at least a few in congress and likely some
individuals in the DoD had a genuine interest in UAP. I believe, though, that
most journalists have been entirely too credulous in their reporting on AATIP.
While the DoD's and likely Reid's interest in the topic were more out of
concern for national security, BAASS had something else in mind. One thing we
know about Bigelow is that he is fascinated by the paranormal and can spin very
little evidence in to a huge story, as he did at Skinwalker Ranch. Moreover,
there are clear indications that AATIP did not exactly operated as planned.
Besides the general confusion around the exact operating details of AATIP,
which suggest that the program operated with very little DoD oversight, I find
it likely likely that AATIP diverged entirely from its original purpose.
AATIP was originally funded as a research program into possible advanced
weapons systems possessed by adversaries, but it ended as a research program
into extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Multiple journalists report that this
change in focus occurred at the behest of Bigelow himself, and the Pentagon's
awkward termination of the program in 2012 suggests that it did not occur with
DoD approval.
I believe that Bigelow won the AATIP contract more by connections and luck than
competence, and that AATIP went "off the rails" essentially from the beginning.
Bigelow was hunting for aliens and the powerful Senator Reid shared this
intention. Through confidence and political savvy, hanging mostly off of
Senator Reid's considerable influence on defense spending, Bigelow was able to
separate the pentagon from some $22 million to fund his personal hobby. While I
believe his passion was real and his intent good, AATIP was largely Bigelow's
flight of fancy and was not aligned with actual DoD interests in the topic. As
senior leadership in the executive branch and Congress became more aware of the
situation, AATIP was quietly ended. To support its own interest in adversarial
systems, the Pentagon replaced AATIP with an internal program: the UAP Task
Force, later reorganized as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
The former members of the AATIP did not take to this change well and attempted
to pivot their work from government funding to the private sector. These
efforts eventually reached wealthy UFO enthusiast Tom DeLonge, of Blink-182
fame. DeLonge had by this point connected with Hal Puthoff. Puthoff is an
electrical engineer, former Scientologist, and paranormal researcher long known
for his research into psychics and remote viewing. Puthoff worked in these
fields in an opportune time: most who are familiar with the concept of remote
viewing know of it because of the military's efforts depicted in "The Men who
Stare at Goats." Puthoff was directly involved in these programs as a
researcher at Stanford University spinoff and defense contractor SRI, which
administered some of the military's psychic research on contract. After these
efforts, Puthoff founded EarthTech International, which continues research in
parapsychology, cold fusion, and other fields which can be generally
categorized as "woo."
DeLonge, Puthoff, and former CIA agent and UFO experiencer Jim Semivan founded
an organization called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA) in
2017. TTSA was somewhere between a spinoff and new parent organization for a
media company called To The Stars that had distributed records and books for
Tom DeLonge. Through an odd series of announcements, TTSA basically transformed
from DeLonge's private record label to a rough continuation of AATIP, but one
that would be publicly funded through the sales of media. While TTSA has made
claims to extraterrestrial technology and breakthroughs in UAP research, almost
nothing that they've put out has ever made any sense, and unsurprisingly the
organization has faded into obscurity. TTSA's ambitions to original UAP
research basically disappeared by 2018, and today TTSA is little more than
DeLonge's online merch store. Given the questions around Elizondo's history,
it's unclear how much TTSA had to do with AATIP in the first place, but it
certainly didn't amount to anything.
This whole matter of AATIP and TTSA is sort of a flash in the pan, but it set
critical context for events to come. The DoD had invested real money and effort
into the question of UAPs. The organization that spent that money, AATIP/BAASS,
and its loose successor TTSA, seemed to very openly consider UAP research to be
research into extraterrestrial presence and other paranormal phenomena. The
media, for the most part, has not differentiated between Bigelow's interests
and the Pentagon's interests in this regard. I believe that Bigelow was
very much hunting for aliens, but the Pentagon was not... the Pentagon was
looking for explanations for UAP, and aliens were probably not high on the list
of expected outcomes. It does not help matters that Senator Reid seems to have
been more on Bigelow's side of this divide.
The real crux of the contemporary UAP issue is that UAPs returned to public
attention due to Bigelow's eccentric goose chase and DeLonge's self-promotion,
but Bigelow's DoD contract and Elizondo's military past gave these otherwise
incredulous stories the imprimatur of government. The media's unquestioning
reporting on AATIP and even, to some extent, TTSA gave the impression that
these were sophisticated programs endorsed by the government. In fact, they
were haphazard efforts by just a few people with long histories in quackery.
AATIP was public knowledge years earlier but became a major news item in 2017
due to DeLonge and Elizondo's promotion of TTSA. Bigelow, DeLonge, Elizondo,
and even Senator Reid openly spoke about AATIP's ostensible extraterrestrial
research, while the DoD declined to speak about an apparently classified
program. In fact, it was not until some time later that it became evident that
DoD had continued UAP research at all after 2012, and that research was done
under conditions of secrecy as well.
What the public heard is that the Pentagon was hunting for UFOs. How that
related to actual DoD interests or programs was irrelevant, because the
Pentagon wouldn't talk about it and the media didn't particularly care. The
UFOs made headlines. Pentagon UAP reporting procedures and incident databases
were boring details.
This particular outcome of the 2017 news cycle, a series of crazed front-page
articles that I believe to have been nothing but Bigelow and DeLonge promoting
their own business ventures, massively influenced the way UAPs are viewed by
the public today. What was really Bigelow's personal lark enabled by his Senate
connections became a new MKULTRA but less sinister. No one took it seriously.
Well, except for people who thought UAPs were definitely aliens, who took it as
seriously as they do Bob Lazar.
What about the Pentagon's side of the story, though? Why was the military
interested in UAPs, and why did it continue UAP research (and, it seems, expand
it) after Bigelow's involvement ended? I believe that we recently saw the
answer floating eastwards across the northern United States.
The thing is, aliens are one of the less likely explanations for UAPs, and to
be honest they are one of the less interesting. Most UAPs, it stands to reason,
originate here on earth. And that is very much a military concern.
Foo fighters, strange aircraft reported by military pilots, are just about as
old as military aviation. The term "foo fighter" comes from WWII, and indeed
WWII was lousy with strange aerial encounters. It has always been assumed that
the vast majority of foo fighters were mistaken perceptions, but they have
always been of interest to military intelligence because of the possibility
that they were simply misidentified enemy aircraft. From this perspective the
strange, otherworldly behavior of foo fighters is all the more interesting:
they might represent enemy aircraft of a novel kind.
The mass publicity around UAPs in 2017 spurned a great deal of public interest
which resulted in some media reporting on UAP incidents as they happened. The
Drive's Tyler Rogoway has perhaps become today's Linda Multon Howe but more
credible, as he has repeatedly written some of the most detailed analysis of
UAP incidents. Put together, Rogoway's articles on UAPs from 2017 to the
present don't come together into any particular narrative except for the broad
one of challenges to airspace sovereignty.
Airspace sovereignty is a general term used to describe a state's control of
its airspace. The United States exercises air sovereignty through the civilian
operations of the FAA and the military operations of NORAD, a joint US-Canadian
command that shares the FAA's radar network to observe for Soviet bombers and
other aerial threats. Obviously Soviet bombers are no longer a great concern,
but the technical and bureaucratic infrastructure of NORAD are still mostly
organized around that threat.
The FAA-Air Force Joint Surveillance System consists of radar instruments that
are about 30 years old at the newest, with some equipment dating back to the
'60s still in use. It is a common misconception that the FAA, NORAD, or someone
has complete information on aircraft in the skies. In reality, this is far from
true. Primary radar is inherently limited in range and sensitivity, and the JSS
is a compromise aimed mostly at providing safety of commercial air routes and
surveillance off the coasts. Air traffic control and air defense radar is blind
to small aircraft in many areas and even large aircraft in some portions of the
US and Canada, and that's without any consideration of low-radar-profile or
"stealth" technology. With limited exceptions such as the Air Defense
Identification Zones off the coasts and the Washington DC region, neither NORAD
nor the FAA expect to be able to identify aircraft in the air. Aircraft
operating under visual flight rules routinely do so without filing any type of
flight plan, and air traffic controllers outside of airport approach areas
ignore these radar contacts unless asked to do otherwise.
The idea I am trying to convey is that airspace sovereignty is a tricky
problem. The US and Canada are very large countries and so the airspace over
them is very large as well. Surveiling that airspace is expensive and complex.
Since the decline of the Cold War there has been no interest in spending the
money that would be required for complete airspace awareness, and indeed the
ability of the FAA and military to field airspace surveillance technology seems
to have declined over recent decades rather than increased. We don't really
know what's out there all the time, and it seems very possible that a
determined adversary might be able to sneak in and out of US airspace largely
undetected.
There are incidents and accidents, hints and allegations, that suggest that
this concern is not merely theoretical. In late 2017, air traffic controllers
tracked an object on radar in northern California and southern Oregon. Multiple
commercial air crews, asked to keep an eye out, saw the object and described it
as, well, an airplane. It was flying at a speed and altitude consistent with a
jetliner and made no strange maneuvers. It was really all very ordinary except
that no one had any idea who or what it was. The inability to identify this
airplane spooked air traffic controllers who engaged the military. Eventually
fighter jets were dispatched from Portland, but by the time they were in the
air controllers had lost radar contact with the object. The fighter pilots made
an effort to locate the object, but unsurprisingly considering the limited
range of the target acquisition radar onboard fighters, they were unsuccessful.
One interpretation of this event is that everyone involved was either crazy or
mistaken. Perhaps it had been swamp gas all along. Another interpretation is
that someone flew a good sized jet aircraft into, over, and out of the United
States without being identified or intercepted. Reporting around the incident
suggests that the military both took it seriously and does not want to talk
about it.
This incident is not unique. Over the last few years there have been multiple
instances of commercial aircrews reporting unidentified aircraft, which were
sometimes fantastical and sometimes quite mundane. Fewer incidents of radar
contact with unknown aircraft are known, but these are less likely to make it
to the press. Moreover, air traffic controllers with the FAA and, apparently,
military air defense controllers both have a tendency to filter their radar
scopes to hide objects that are not "of interest." Several aviation accidents
in the last five years have resulted in investigations that found that radar
did detect concerns such as flocks of birds but those contacts were not
displayed due to the configuration of the radar scope. This suggests that
controllers may have been willfully ignorant of some oddities, not
unsurprisingly since they are focused primarily on the aircraft with which they
have contact.
All of this sounds a little bit wild, and a little but unbelievable, right?
That's one of the biggest problems that DoD seems to grapple with. As long as
military aviators have been seeing strange things, they have been laughed at
for it. Skeptical reactions are not at all undeserved, but the DoD has
communicated that a major motivation of current UAP efforts are to encourage
people to report strange things in the sky, instead of staying quiet for fear
of sounding crazy.
To be clear, the vast majority of these incidents are almost certainly mistakes
of some kind. Perceptual effects can make stars appear to move strangely,
atmospheric phenomenon can appear as solid objects, and sometimes you just get
disoriented and something very ordinary looks very strange. But there is a
matter of baby and bath water. Even though the majority of UAP sightings amount
to nothing, it is possible, even likely, that a few of them were sightings of
real objects. Real objects which were not tracked by air traffic controllers or
air defense. Real objects which represent a challenge to airspace sovereignty.
And that brings us up to a few weeks ago: there was evidence, scant evidence
but still evidence, that unidentified objects were operating in US airspace.
Troublingly, these objects were sometimes reported close to military
installations, and even dwelling near them for extended periods of time. The
DoD, I believe, was deeply concerned that at least some of these reports might
be indications that an adversary was successfully placing aerial surveillance
equipment over the United States undetected. And that's why the Pentagon has
spent years encouraging military personnel to report UAP sightings, and
analyzing those reports for plausible explanations: not because they might be
aliens, but because they might be the enemy.
And then, something happened with a balloon. What's up with that?? We'll talk
about it next time, in part II.
[1] I will not expand on the story of Bob Lazar here, but for those not
familiar it is useful to know that Lazar's stories of secret underground alien
bases and military collaboration with aliens are both completely discredited
and extremely influential on modern UFO thought.
[2] Here I will caution you that the horror film "Skinwalker Ranch" is both
almost entirely unrelated to the real story (or even doubtful claims) about
the place and, well, bad.
I have always found the term "homelab" a little confusing. It's a bit like the
residential version of "on-premises cloud," in that it seems to presuppose that
a lab is the normal place that you find computer equipment. Of course I get
that "homelab" is usually used by those who take pride in the careful
workmanship of their home installation, and I am not one of those people.
Welcome to Computers Are Bad - in color.
Note: if you get this by email, the images may or may not work right. We're
going to find out together! I don't plan to make a habit of including images
and they don't look that good anyway, so I'm not too worried about it.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I think often mere
desire will suffice, and I am sort of particular about how I want things to
work. Perhaps the bigger problem is that I started my career in technology
in a way that was both mundane and hands-on: in high school I found a
poorly paying job as a sort of technical jack-of-all-trades for a local
managed service provider (MSP). The term MSP is not even that familiar to many
in the technology industry today. This was the kind of company that would set
up and maintain Microsoft Active Directory for businesses that were big enough
to have ten computers but not big enough to have an IT department. The owner,
though, was a wheeler-dealer if I ever knew one, and generally jumped into
whatever line of business he thought would make some money.
I was hired ostensibly as a computer technician, repairing laptops as a Lenovo
contract warranty service center. Then I was repairing photocopiers, then I was
selling them. Not long after I was running common-spaces WiFi for a fairly
large office tower (the World Trade Center... of Portland, Oregon). Along with
some video surveillance installation, I developed the kind of addiction that
doesn't pay well enough to be a career unless you are smart enough to go to
trade school instead of a university: cabling.
And I think that's how I became the person I am today: I want computer networks
to operate in as straightforward and tangible a fashion as they did in 2009.
And I want a lot of cabling.
I don't have a large house, and I do have a lot of stuff. Most equipment is
crammed into a 14U wall-mount rack in the upper part of the office closet. Two
sets of fan grilles, in a push-pull arrangement, ventilate the top of the
closet and as a bonus circulate air from the office to the laundry room.
Closet shelving stands in for things that are not amenable to rackmounting,
such as my "breadbox" form factor AT&T Merlin model 206 KSU. This
small-business telephone system dates back to around 1985 but still operates
well after a repair to the power supply. It supports 6 extensions (conveniently
connected by 8P8C cabling, ethernet-compatible) and 2 outside lines, which are
provided by an ATA connected to the Asterisk server I run "in the cloud." It is
one of two phone systems in the house, the other being all IP.
I installed the Merlin instead of the significantly more capable, late-'90s
vintage Comdial PABX I have (with voicemail!) because it is incredibly
fashionable and because I love the simple logic of key systems. I do also love
the Comdial for how over-the-top complicated its hybrid PABX/key system design
is, complete with text messaging, but it just doesn't have the charm of a
system where phones were offered in a color called Cinnabar. Unfortunately I
don't have any phones in Cinnabar; they've proven very hard to find on the
second-hand market.
Also on the shelf, due to lack of motivation to mount it more neatly, is a
PiStar/MMDVM hotspot. While it is configured for DMR (I sometimes monitor the
Southwest and New Mexico Brandmeister groups, AE5JL) I use it mostly as a
POCSAG pager transmitter. A simple daemon I wrote bridges messages from MQTT to
the MMDVM remote control interface, notifying me of various events like
violation of the IR optical fence across the end of the driveway via the finest
communications technology of the '80s: a beeper. I have started acquiring
hardware to replace it with a 35 watt transmitter which will properly introduce
DAPNET amateur paging to Albuquerque, but I only have so much free time and
money.
I take great pride in my work, but no one pays me for this, so I try not to
consider it work. About once a year I make a sincere effort to tidy the patch
cables but it never lasts.
An Arris cable modem is where The Cloud arrives in my home. I am fortunate
enough to have slightly faster than gigabit internet service, although I
haven't bothered to set up link aggregation so it is de facto 1gbps. It's okay,
the router doesn't really make 1gbps in some scenarios due to PPS performance
limitations anyway. I am unfortunate enough to obtain that internet from
Comcast, which means that it is expensive and the upstream only hits 45mbps on
a good day. My favorite feature of this Arris modem is that no matter how many
times I reset the password for the management interface I can never get back
into it later. I'm pretty sure this is my fault, but cable modems are loathsome
so I'll blame it on Arris anyway. The city recently completed a franchise
agreement with an FTTH provider out of Texas and it is possible I will be able
to get service from them inside of the next six months. Given the history of
new ISPs in this area I am not holding my breath.
Because of my strident objection to Comcast's existence, for about the first six
months after I bought this house I obtained my internet connection only via
LTE, using a used Cradlepoint and roof-mounted diversity antennas. The
performance was actually quite good at night, but it was very poor during the
day. I live very close to downtown and so I assume this was determined mostly
by the occupancy of the office towers. The bigger problem is that the tiny MVNO
I used, on a grandfathered contract with AT&T that had exceptionally good
terms, was also one person with a FedEx Office mailing addresss that was not
very good at subscription management. Every couple of months the internet would
stop working and I would have to call them to nag them to update the expiration
date on my service plan in their provisioning system, which was of course not
at all integrated with their billing system.
From the modem, bits flow downstream to a PC Engines APU4D4 SBC running
Opnsense. This is one of two APU4D4s that sit side-by-side in a very tidy 1U
enclosure I imported from France at a completely exorbitant price. Why I spent
something like EUR 150 on getting this nicely silk-screened front panel for the
APUs only to Tetris most of the rest of the equipment onto a rack shelf is a
mystery to me as well.
I am mostly pretty happy with Opnsense except for all of the ways I hate it.
It replaced a Unifi Security Gateway which replaced an old Sonicwall, so I
figure I am at least moving upwards in usability. My favorite thing about
Opnsense is that it brings me the warm comfort of using BSD. My least favorite
thing about it is how many clicks it takes to get to the DHCP lease table,
which I am constantly looking at because I do not keep the internal DNS records
up to date at all.
The core switch is a TP-Link 24-port PoE switch. It's Omada-manageable, along
with a couple of other TP-Link switches elsewhere in the house, and I figure I
will eventually buy into Omada when I get tired of mapping VLANs by hand. This
switch does have fans but is very quiet, an impressive feat in a PoE switch. I
am only using around 50W of its 250W capacity, if I ever go for that PoE++
troffer lighting I like to window shop for it might end up a whole lot louder.
Currently the PoE load is mostly the result of infrared illuminators in
exterior surveillance cameras. The SFP cages will be much appreciated when I
finally lose my mind and run fiber to the shed.
Next to the router, the second APU4D4 runs Pihole, Home Assistant, and Plex
Media Server in Docker containers. I run Plex in a docker container because
they only build it for ARM as a Debian package, and I'm a Red Hat person. Well,
Red Hat in the streets, Fedora, erm, at home. It's also a Tailscale subnet
router, although I haven't really bought into Tailscale that much yet and still
have a lot of manually-configured Wireguard tunnels.
Home Assistant is perhaps the most complicated thing here. I am not as bought
into Home Assistant as I maybe should be, and so I make extensive use of
various homegrown services that speak MQTT. I have, at times, been tempted to
improve performance and "simplify" (for select definitions of "simplify") by
writing my own simple logic engine to implement automations, but I'd probably
just end up creating a bad version of Home Assistant with fewer features. A
chintzy USB Z-wave stick is a major bridge to the Real World, and I am
particularly fond of the Zooz multi-relays as a practical way to handle various
physical inputs and outputs. A Philips Hue hub tidily slapped on the side of
the rack controls most lighting, though, besides a few Z-wave wall dimmers for
integral LED fixtures.
My latest home automation achievement is something I call "Giant Voice" after
the historic Altec outdoor address system once popular on military bases. It
receives simple commands via MQTT and plays back audio clips and speech
synthesis via Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Speech (a Microsoft product
name if I have ever seen one). So it's sort of like a doorbell, and basically
functions as one, except it plays clips of Star Trek computer beeps and
announces which part of my small lot a visitor has intruded on. It's not at all
reliable because, for reasons of being built out of things I had on hand, it's
running on a Pi Zero W connected to a cheap Bluetooth speaker. Trying to keep a
reliable connection to a Bluetooth audio sink on Linux without X running may
actually be impossible.
Pihole forms part of a split-horizon DNS arrangement on the top-level domain I
use, which is such a nice name I made it available on FreeDNS where it is used
by a dozen poorly run Minecraft servers. This introduces an interesting set of
DNS hijacking and misconfiguration hazards, which I find aesthetically
pleasing. Systemd-resolved machines, for example, are prone to acting up due to
resolved's well-known oddities around split-horizon systems. Of course, in all
truth I completely agree with Poettering that split-horizon DNS is sin, but why
live if we can't sin a little?
On a rack shelf below is a 5-bay NAS made by company called Kobol that doesn't
exist any more. I like it because it's a simple arrangement of an ARM SBC
(running Fedora of course) with a lot of SATA controllers and yet they made an
unreasonably nice aluminum enclosure for it. I use btrfs because every time I
use ZFS I end up having to tune it, and for how much I appreciate the inanities
of computers tuning ZFS is actually somewhere near dental surgery in my list of
favorite activities. I follow btrfs development just closely enough to figure
that there is about a 10% chance of massive data loss, which is why I back the
entire thing up to a cloud provider. What I really want is to back it up to LTO
tape, just for appearance, but LTO drives stay expensive until they're several
generations old and I have a hard time getting excited about LTO7 when I know
that LTO9 exists.
One day the NAS will probably die or I will get annoyed with how slow it is
CPU-wise, but I really don't know what I'll do to replace it. Maybe the NVR
is an omen of things to come.
And right, the NVR, or network video recorder, which records the surveillance
cameras. It's a small-form-factor Dell workstation I bought used off a friend
to replace a failed NUC. Neither the NUC nor it have reasonable internal
storage capacity (on account of their small size), so it has most of its
storage in a Startech 2-bay USB3.0 enclosure that I am surprisingly in love
with. It's fast and reliable, and has no-fuss RAID0/1 in hardware. It even
comes apart to install the drives in a pleasing way. It has 8TB of storage
which is enough for around a month of history. I do have 2TB of SSD storage in
the NVR which is used for live recording so that a less performance-sensitive
batch job can move older recordings to the slow platter drives in the
enclosure.
When it comes to software, the NVR runs a commercial package called Blue Iris
on Windows. I am not particularly interested in defending this choice, other
than to explain that I have been using Blue Iris for years. Well, I will be a
little argumentative. Open-source NVR packages suck. All of them are just
incredibly bad. For some reason all of the replacements for Zoneminder either
almost single-mindedly target Raspberry Pis with barely the performance for a
single UHD camera or are nodejs monstrosities. Most are both. If you get
cameras on the cheap and sometimes from surplus auctions like I do, you need
support for a lot of video and PTZ protocols, and Blue Iris is mature enough to
have out-of-the-box support for every bit of hardware I've come up with. It
has both a reasonably good web interface and the ability to run the full
desktop console remotely. Although it's not open source, it has simple but
functional HTTP and MQTT APIs that have made it easy to integrate with my
broader tangled mess, and CodeProject AI server support for object
classification to boot. It definitely seems like there should be a suitable
open-source replacement at this point but I just haven't found one. Maybe
growing up on Milestone VMS just ruined my taste the way growing up on Perl
did.
Jammed below the NVR and next to its drive enclosure is a NUC. This is the
warranty replacement for the one that failed. There's a whole story here, I
wasn't expecting to get a warranty replacement, but then it showed up in the
mail. I hooked it up so that I can WoL it when needed to run longer, more
performance-intensive tasks like video encoding that I don't want to have to
keep my laptop plugged in for. In this regard it replaces my old laptop, which
used to be shoved into the rack with its screen always on for some reason.
Also sharing the lower rack shelf is an HDHomeRun TV tuner cabled to a nice
active antenna on the roof. Would you believe that I can get some 60 channels
of infomercials and televangelism, completely free? My favorite part is just
how heavily compressed it all is, now that DTV broadcasters realized they can
cram something like eight SD channels onto one carrier. There's also a Davis
WeatherLinc back there somewhere, it's sort of an IP gateway for Davis Vantage
weather instruments also mounted on the roof. A small service I wrote on the
Home Assistant machine loads data from it into Prometheus for use elsewhere.
There's also a second, separate wireless weather instrument system elsewhere in
the house that also goes into Prometheus. That one is by Ecowitt and it's just
for temperature and soil moisture sensors in the small heated greenhouse (Home
Assistant controls the heater and irrigation via Z-Wave).
At the bottom of the rack is a not-great-but-okay Cyberpower UPS. I have a
slight bias against Cyberpower because another of their products I own has
twice taken down the computer plugged into it due to what seemed to be a
software bug that could only be resolved by leaving it unplugged for long
enough for the battery to die... a long time since it stops producing output in
that state. Admittedly it's done this twice in about five years and that issue
hasn't stopped me from buying a new battery for it occasionally. This rackmount
one doesn't seem to have that problem, or at least hasn't so far, but it's
really just the cheapest rackmount UPS I could find with readily replaceable
batteries.
On the left side, a Ubiquity AP-AC-Lite. This thing, along with its compatriot
in the living room, is showing its age. The problem is that I have been holding
out for TP-Link to release their Omada-managed WiFi 6E AP in the US, which
keeps getting pushed back. I own three of these total, and one of my favorite
things about them is that one of the three is an older hardware revision that
only supports 24v PPoE, and the other two support 802.3af. Guess how good I am
at not mixing them up.
To facilitate all this junk, I have installed a power outlet in the closet and
ethernet runs from various parts of the house and exterior. Most of the
ethernet runs land at the patch panel at the top, but not all of them for
reasons of laziness.
Most ethernet is run through the attic, although the extremely low overhead in
the attic (due to a very shallowly pitched roof) makes many areas difficult to
access. For this reason I own my friend, Mr. Longarm, a 35' telescopic
fiberglass pole. I have found that a great many practical problems in cabling
can be solved with the use of a long enough pole. Fiberglass pushrods and a
magnet fishing set are invaluable. In some cases I have had to open sections of
wall, but I try to avoid it because drywall repair becomes tedious. An
inventory of "installer bits," semi-flexible drill bits several feet long, can
minimize the need for opening drywall but come with hazards when used blind.
Sometimes you can achieve a medium of drilling small pilot holes into each stud
bay, inspecting with a borescope to locate electrical wiring and whatever else,
and then driving an installer bit through several stud bays at a time. The
exploratory holes are fairly quick to repair and paint.
Some aspects of my home technical infrastructure are more whimsical, or perhaps
more directly reflect my personal neuroses. I have always been tremendously
frustrated at the lack of time synchronization in modern clocks considering the
several different technical approaches available. I run an NTP server on one of
the APU4s and all of the wall clocks in the house synchronize to it. For the
most part these are used/surplus clocks from Primex's now discontinued SNS
series, which used to be easy to get in both battery-powered analog and
mains-powered LED versions. The supply of these seems to be drying up, but the
Primex OneVue series is also NTP-over-WiFi capable. Unfortunately I'm less
confident that the OneVue clocks can be configured to use a local NTP server
without the Primex enterprise management system, which makes them less
appealing for small systems.
Personally I prefer the LED versions for their over-the-top size, although
unfortunately the six-digit (seconds-indicating) version seems hard to get in
the larger 6" digit height option. This one, a 2.5" model in the bedroom, has
had a couple of layers of neutral gray theater gel added to the lens since the
lowest brightness setting will still illuminate a room in red.
I have a similar bent when it comes to "smart home" control. I find the
industry's focus on phone apps and voice controls infuriating. It's nearly
always faster and more convenient to press a button, but the industry as a
whole has apparently deemed buttons to be too expensive. Architectural lighting
controls used to universally offer "scene controllers," panels with a few buttons
that each select a scene, but these are oddly hard to find in the modern home
automation market. I make my own.
This is a programmable keypad scanned by a little Python program running on a
cheap SBC with WiFi. Right now it actually hits the Hue controller API
directly, but I have been planning for months to re-implement it to send MQTT
messages instead. The most obvious (and probably best) choice for a keypad
would be X-Keys, but this Genovation ControlPad is popular in warehouse and
picker automation so there's a good supply of used ones on eBay. The major
disadvantage to Genovation is uglier programming software and no backlighting
(the X-Keys models have individually-addressable two color backlighting). I'd
highly recommend everyone try these out and help bring physical buttons back to
the industry. You could even make it look a lot nicer if you put in even
slightly more effort than I did.
And I think that's the grand tour. I'm not sure that I would say that I am
completely proud of any of this because it is all so cobbled together and I
change things frequently, but that's kind of why I wanted to respond to the
genre of "my homelab" or "my home network" posts. I always sort of cringe at
these because the focus on aesthetics, with modified Ikea furniture or
whatever, is going to make modification down the road much more difficult.
There is a big advantage to the 19" rack as a form factor, and wall-mount units
are easy to come by. If you're especially space-constrained you might even
consider a swing-down vertical one. Whatever you do, just make sure you run a
lot of cables. Cables everywhere!
Very nearly a year ago, I wrote a popular article about secret military
telephone
buttons.
To be clear, the "secret" here was a joke and these buttons are in fact well
documented. The buttons I was talking about were the AUTOVON call precedence
buttons, used for a five-level prioritization scheme within the AUTOVON
military telephone network. The labels on these buttons, FO, F, I, P, for Flash
Override, Flash, Immediate, and Priority, directly reflected the nuclear C2
scheme at the time. The AUTOVON telephone network is long retired, but military
telephone systems continue to provide a call precedence scheme today,
admittedly usually without dedicated buttons.
Well, the idea of call precedence without the priority buttons leads naturally
to a followup that I promised: government and defense call prioritization
schemes on the general, civilian telephone network. It has long been recognized
that in the event of a national emergency, many people involved in the response
would not have access to a dedicated government telephone network. This is
particularly true when you view civil defense as a wider remit, beyond just
military reprisal. Recovery from a disaster of any type will involve federal,
state, and local government leaders, as well as staff of response organizations
like critical utilities, hospitals, and disaster relief organizations. Not all
of these people can realistically be furnished with a phone on a dedicated
network. The only way to practically ensure prioritized communications in a
disaster is to provide that capability as a feature of the public switched
telephone network.
It is perhaps useful to provide a little bit of background on the need for call
prioritization. In the landline phone network, the major limitation on capacity
is long-distance trunks. Particularly in the era before the TDM digital
telephone network, long-distance trunk capacity was relatively expensive. In
the 1950s, a small city might have only one or two dozen trunks for outbound
long distance calls. This means that only one or two dozen simultaneous calls
outside of the city could be connected. By the mid-1960s, rapid expansion of
the Long Lines microwave network had dramatically increased long-distance trunk
capacity (in part through added routing flexibility), so it was no longer
necessary to request most long-distance calls in advance. Still, into the '90s
it was not unusual for long-distance calls during peak periods like Christmas
to result in an "all trunks are busy" intercept message.
The need for some sort of emergency prioritization of traffic on the landline
network has long been known, but solutions have been uneven, at least in the
US. In the UK, where telephone service was a state enterprise until 1984 and
the first and second World Wars created a more expedient need, some type of
basic telephone prioritization scheme has long been in place. Through WWII
and the Cold War it was a simple one: in cases of emergency, all local loops
not flagged as being required for emergency service would be disconnected.
This had the dual benefit of freeing capacity for government traffic and
denying an invading enemy the use of the telephone network. A somewhat more
sophisticated version of the same idea, called the Government Telephone
Preference Scheme, remained in service until 2017.
In the US, though, there was little effort towards such a system during WWII
and the Cold War. It's hard to know what exactly to make of this situation.
First, the situation has always been a little different in the US than in the
UK: during WWII, Great Britain was the target of ongoing bombing campaigns.
Excepting mostly minor terrorist attacks (such as during the Escobar Rebellion
in Mexico), the US has not suffered a military assault on its homeland since
the Civil War. During the Cold War era, an attack on the US was assumed to be a
nuclear one, and most likely an all-out nuclear campaign. The end result is
that civil defense in the UK tended to be viewed as a practical system oriented
around sustaining operations during an attack, while civil defense in the US
was viewed as more of a theoretical exercise in preparation for reconstruction.
This is all just background to explain that part of the reason the US did not
have a telephone prioritization scheme through most of the Cold War is simply
because the US is historically pretty bad at deploying civil defense
infrastructure.
But that's not the whole story, there are other, more positive, reasons as
well. For one, since WWII AT&T had operated a dedicated telephone network for
military use (known as AUTOVON for most of the Cold War) and it was relatively
large in scope and well-hardened against attack. For the most part, the
assumption was that all emergency traffic would be on AUTOVON, not the PSTN.
Another factor is the government's close relationship with AT&T. Despite AT&T
being a private entity, it was exceptionally close to the federal government
and provided many government services in secret. It is possible, even likely,
that AT&T had arranged for some sort of emergency call prioritization scheme
that wasn't discussed in public.
The cellular network faces similar problems but at a different point. In the
landline network, it is possible but rare for a local exchange switch to become
overwhelmed by the number of phones off-hook. Conventional telephone switches
use a relatively low "oversubscription" ratio from local loops to call-processing
elements (the nature of which depends on the switch architecture) and are often
designed so that most components of the switch are only in use during the setup
stage of the call, and are disconnected once the call is established and made
available to process additional calls. This means that overwhelming a telephone
exchange to the point that it can no longer offer dial tone and accept dialing
from telephones requires picking up a significant number of the connected
telephones at the same time. In practice, the long distance trunks were virtually
always the bottleneck. The cellular network is not so lucky.
Before data became the major driver of cellular network architecture, cellular
carriers used a much higher oversubscription ratio. Cell phones spend only a
very small portion of the time connected to calls, less than landlines early on
due to the higher pricing, and so cellular base stations were designed to track
associations with far more phones than they could actually handle call traffic
with. In an emergency that affected even a small area, it was very easy for
enough people to make cellphone calls that the tower hit its capacity limit and
began rejecting additional calls. Since the limitation was often in the actual
bandwidth on the radio side, this limit applied to all simultaneous calls, not
just calls in setup. Some freeway accidents were dramatic enough emergencies to
cause cellular calls to fail.
This problem, in the case of civil emergencies, is not at all far-fetched. We
will refer to 9/11 repeatedly because it is main origin of modern emergency
telecommunications programs. On 9/11, Verizon reported a 1.5x to 2x increase in
national call volume. Cingular a 20% increase. Nextel, a carrier that I will
write a whole article on eventually because of the interesting technology they
employed, saw an increase of several hundred percent in the hours immediately
following the first attack. These statistics, though, reported at a national
level, understate the impact. There was a problem nationwide, but there was a
far greater problem in New York City, where local cellular base stations became
so overwhelmed that the call completion rate in the Manhattan area is thought
to have dropped to a few percent for some time. Normal cellular service to
Manhattan was not restored for several days.
And during that same time period, basically the entire government and
commercial disaster response capability was attempting to communicate plans...
via cell phone. 9/11 is currently the most memorable event demonstrating the
need for a call prioritization system, but it is only one on a string of
incidents both before and after where emergency response was significantly
impeded by capacity limitations in the PSTN.
As you would expect from a federal emergency preparedness initiative, the
government set out to address the problem of limited telephone network capacity
through a confusing maze of several separate programs, administered by separate
organizations, and accessed by separate means. Without a clear place to start, I
will choose the best-known of these services: GETS, the Government Emergency
Telecommunications Service.
The history of GETS is surprisingly obscure, perhaps because it has been tossed
like a hot potato between a good half dozen executive branch agencies over the
last few decades. Here's what I have put together from various archives and a
helpful former AT&T source: the story of GETS starts with the National
Communications System, or NCS, established by Kennedy in response to the Cuban
Missile Crisis. NCS had an objective of ensuring reliable communications for
the civilian government during nuclear conflict, and seems to have started down
the path of developing a civilian version of AUTOVON. This would be essentially
an independent, parallel telephone network employing dedicated resources
engineered for survivability.
This program, called the National Emergency Telecommunications System or NETS
at least late in its life, faltered mostly due to cost. AUTOVON had been a
tremendously expensive project that went through mostly because of the
military's tremendous budget. To save money, NETS was re-imagined as an
"overlay" network built on top of the PSTN. Conveniently, this later version of
the proposed NETS is detailed in a 1987 National Research Council report
evaluating the plan on the request of NCS.
The 20,000 federal government users of NETS would each be issued an Access
Security Device, which would use some sort of digital signaling to authenticate
itself to a device called a Call Controller integrated into (or attached as a
peripheral to) a telephone switch. The NETS Call Controller would then
communicate with other call controllers to attempt to establish a route to the
dialed number. This is the real magic of NETS: the telephone network at the
time, organized largely around hierarchical long-distance routing, had fixed,
pre-planned routes in place between tandem switches. If the configured route to
a destination was damaged, the call would fail---there was no self healing the
sense we expect from modern networks. NETS implemented self-healing as a
feature of the CC, which would initially attempt to establish the call via a
default route, check for the ability to communicate with a CC at the other end,
and give up and try a different route if the remote CC didn't respond. This way
NETS CCs should be able to "discover" a working route even with appreciable
damage to the telephone network.
NETS, according to the National Research Council report, had numerous
shortcomings. For one, the proposal dealt almost purely with federal
employees, even though it was clear from NCS's objectives that many
non-government users would need access in an emergency (hospitals and
infrastructure operators, for example). This was an especially large problem
because of the seemingly over-paranoid design of the "access security device,"
a piece of hardware which would apparently have to be stockpiled in various
federal offices to be issued in the event of an attack. The report recommends
eliminating the ASD and replacing it with a dialed PIN code, a far simpler
arrangement that didn't seem much worse considering that the ASD didn't
implement encryption of the call contents but instead just a challenge-response
authentication process.
Further, unlike AUTOVON which provided dedicated service all the way to the
user, NETS was essentially a feature of the long-distance network only. In an
emergency when a local exchange switch was overwhelmed and unable to service a
newly off-hook like, NETS would be of no hope. Still, the report finds that
this is a relatively small problem, and although users might have to wait a
while it is expected that after taking their phone off-hook they would get a
dial tone eventually. Because the telephone switches of the time worked by
fabric-switching digit receivers to off-hook phone lines, each person picking
up a phone was essentially placed in a queue to receive dial tone. Normally the
queue was empty and so this happened instantaneously, but during especially
busy calling periods it was not all that unusual for their to be a very brief
delay.
Finally, the NETS proposal included not only voice but fax and data. Because the
"damage-avoidance" routes developed by the NETS CCs would often be longer than
typical long-distance phone routes, the connections would be of relatively poor
quality. This required additional electronics at the ends of the call, and
potentially integrated into user PBXs, for line conditioning. It seems like the
use-case for the data mode wasn't very well established, and so the report
recommended dropping the requirement for additional line conditioning.
The conclusions of the report seem to have been influential, because most of
the features the report identified as problematic disappeared from later
consideration. Unfortunately, some of the beneficial features did as well. NETS
had included a call preemption system, for example, which did not make it past
the end of the NETS project. The use of additional dedicated controllers for
routing also seems to have been abandoned, but on this issue we must consider
that in the late '80s computer-controlled switches were becoming the norm and
were capable of much more complex routing logic. This may have just eliminated
the need for an additional control system dedicated to routing emergency calls.
The evolution of NETS, now called GETS, launched in 1994. Contemporaneous
reporting supports the odd lack of historical information on GETS. A 1996
Chicago Tribune article about the 710 area code (see, people have been bringing
up 710 as a weird area code for a long time!) says that while GETS was never a
secret, it also received very little promotion even within the government. As
of that article, the director of the NCS said that GETS would be "fully
operational" in 2001... an auspicious date in emergency telecommunications.
Indeed, the events of September 2001 lead to a massive federal reconsideration
of continuity of government, emergency communications, and emergency
preparedness in general. To make a long story short, the attacks of 9/11
immediately prompted an almost complete failure of federal emergency
communications systems. Everything from complex continuity of government plans
to the phones in the White House basement were found to be completely
nonfunctional, the result of decades of under-investment in an increasingly
incompetent civil defense apparatus [1]. In the year after 9/11, federal
bureaucrats found themselves blowing the metaphorical dust off of a number of
half-finished or half-forgotten communications programs, GETS included. It
seems that in the 2001-2002 time period, NCS launched sort of a public
relations program to promote GETS not just in the federal government but across
state and local governments and industry. While GETS is technically a Gulf
War-era program, for most purposes it is a post-9/11 program.
GETS is perennially discussed in telephone arcana circles, including Computers
Are Bad, because it has the distinction of being the sole use of the "federal
government" 710 area code. GETS is accessed by dialing 1-710-NCS-GETS, where
NCS is left over from the former National Communications Service. Amusingly,
the special nature of the 710 area code poses a challenge: 710 is so rarely
used (to the degree that it is sometimes listed as a "reserved" or unused area
code) that some phone systems with trunk routing logic, like larger corporate
PBXs, will not route it correctly.
The decision to put GETS in the little-used (at the time, entirely unused) 710
area code was probably more practical than whimsical. GETS is expected to work
across the entirety of the landline telephone network, which in 1994 contained
a lot of legacy switching systems. Trunk selection based on area code would
have been nearly universal at the time (I say "nearly" because dial service was
not yet universal in 1994), so it would have been relatively easy to configure
older switches to direct calls to the 710 area code via dedicated trunks.
Basically, the prioritization of GETS could be implemented as a special case in
the "LERG" routing table used to connect long-distance calls. On the other
hand, as a workaround for phone systems that do not handle the 710 area code
correctly, GETS also offers toll-free access numbers as an alternate. These
were likely put in place later on, when more flexible 4ESS/5ESS or DMS-100
switches had become the strong majority of the telephone network.
GETS users, after completing an application, are issued a card with the GETS
access number and a frustratingly long 12-digit PIN. They call the GETS access
number, enter the PIN, and then dial a phone number. While GETS looks a lot
like a prepaid calling card to the user, internally the telephone network
prioritizes calls from and to GETS to ensure a higher chance of completion.
Perhaps more importantly, at least early on GETS calls were routed using more
complex logic than normal calls so that---similar to the original goals of
NETS---GETS calls should automatically route around unavailable trunks. Today,
with a higher degree of automation in traffic engineering, it's unclear how
much of a difference that functionality would make.
GETS achieves the goal of call prioritization on the landline network, but it
hits its limit when it comes to cellphones. The typical capacity problem with
cellphones is not long distance trunks, but local tower capacity. GETS won't
help with completing a call when your phone isn't able to set up a voice
session in the first place. Well, in practice, some cellular carriers do seem
to use more flexible modern GSM baseband capabilities to automatically
prioritize GETS calls at the cellular network level as well, but this isn't
universal and wasn't even really possible with earlier cellular standards.
So, for cellphones, we have a separate system: WPS, the Wireless Priority
Service.
To use WPS, you have to apply to DHS to get an authorization letter and then
set up WPS service with your cellular carrier. Once enabled for your line, the
dialing prefix *272 will cause your call to be prioritized within the cellular
network. WPS explicitly does not provide preemption, so you might still have to
try multiple times, but you will have a higher chance of getting through
eventually.
Internally, WPS is implemented as a vertical service code, a generalized
capability of phone switches that allows codes prefixed with * and # to operate
special features. The GSM specification also has extensive treatment of
vertical service codes, making WPS prioritization easier to implement in the
cellular network layer.
Like how GETS doesn't (necessarily) affect the cellular network, WPS doesn't
affect the landline network. To ensure end-to-end prioritization of a call made
on a cellphone, it's necessary to use both. For example, if I needed to reach
Comcast in a genuine internet emergency, I would dial
*2721710627438712345678901218009346489. This is so incredibly convenient that
the government offers a phone app for WPS/GETS users just to do the dialing for
you.
Neither GETS nor WPS addresses the actual availability of a working telephone,
though. For this, there is yet another program, but one that is less technical
and more bureaucratic. The Telecommunications Service Priority program, or TSP,
is an FCC program that allows government and infrastructure users to receive
higher priority on telecommunications requests. This mostly means that TSP
telephone services will be the top priority for repair after damage to the
telephone network, but it also means that TSP users can order new service with
higher priority as well. Like GETS and WPS, TSP starts out with an application
form to DHS, and it's available to all government agencies and to industry in
recognized critical sectors. TSP seems to have been formally created in 1988,
indicating that it may be a result of the same NCS efforts that lead to GETS.
All of these services might seem somewhat antiquated and, well, they are, with
even 2001 being quite a ways in the past now. As an effort to modernize
emergency telecommunications, the First Responder Network Authority was
established in 2012. Ultimately part of the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration (NTIA) rather than DHS, the Authority is commonly
referred to as FirstNet. This can be a bit confusing since the term FirstNet
also refers to the actual service, delivered by AT&T.
This public-private situation can be a bit confusing.
While FirstNet is a government agency that includes a technical board and
policy efforts in multiple areas, the bulk of FirstNet was contracted to AT&T.
The objective of FirstNet in this sense is to develop a nationwide broadband
network for emergency communications. AT&T, being a cellular carrier, is
currently implementing this vision using cellular technology. In many practical
senses, FirstNet is just a tier of AT&T cellular service that comes with
prioritization.
It didn't totally start out this way. The original goal on FirstNet was more
like a unification of the existing public safety communications systems across
the US. These systems, based primarily on the APCO P25 trunking radio protocol
but with increasing use of private LTE, are mostly operated by states and
municipalities and could not easily be counted. FirstNet proposed to build new
state-level unified networks or to integrate networks developed by the states.
NTIA reserved a substantial federal radio spectrum allocation for this purpose,
one that was suitable for broadband radio protocols like LTE. States were given
the option to develop their own FirstNet access layer for integration into the
nationwide system, or to allow the national FirstNet operator to do so. In
practice, AT&T proposed to build out the new state network in each state and
all 50 states accepted this proposal.
AT&T developed their access network mostly by addition to their existing
cellular sites. FirstNet deployment started properly in 2017, and FirstNet now
covers pretty much AT&T's entire network footprint with LTE service. FirstNet
is being upgraded to 5G along with the broader AT&T network. AT&T handles the
entirety of FirstNet administration, and you get FirstNet service simply by
applying to AT&T for a FirstNet cellular plan. Many FirstNet users have their
personal phones enrolled in FirstNet for the cost savings compared to a
dedicated phone, so it really does look and feel like normal cellular service.
Much of the FirstNet product is really just a matter of configuration (FirstNet
provides prioritization to users an will even preempt non-FirstNet traffic when
needed), but the dedicated bandwidth set aside by NTIA is still around in the
form of band 14. Even this detail of FirstNet is confusing when it comes to the
lines of AT&T vs. government services. Band 14 is dedicated to emergency
communications, but as part of its deal with the NTIA, AT&T is allowed to use
band 14 for their other customers as well, as a means of defraying their cost
in deploying band 14 access points. So band 14 really consists mostly of plain
old AT&T customers, but with the expectation that they will all be booted off
the band when FirstNet traffic requires the bandwidth.
FirstNet is sort of a complex creation, heavily promoted by AT&T for reasons of
their own profit motive, and supported by billions in government funding. As
you would imagine, it has not been without controversy. The program has been
expensive and slow to roll out, even with the significant advantage of mostly
just using AT&T's existing network. Even after all that time and money, the
original vision of unifying first responder communications hasn't really been
achieved. While FirstNet is broadly used by groups like firefighters for
cellular service, states and municipalities continue to operate their existing
radio networks alongside FirstNet. Most of this is attributable to the high
cost of FirstNet devices with ergonomics similar to existing systems (e.g. PTT)
and the complexity of deployment relative to the land-mobile radio (LMR)
systems public safety agencies are familiar with.
The issue of PTT is worth dwelling on. Users with a great degree of telecom
nostalgia probably fondly remember Nextel, the short-lived cellular service
provider that used the Motorola trunking-radio protocol iDEN. Nextel
aggressively advertised the key advantage that iDEN held over the CDMA and
3GPP standards: with roots as an LMR protocol, it offered excellent support
for PTT conversation between groups of phones. This made Nextel extremely
popular with businesses like towing companies and the trades, where easy PTT
communications between the office and employees in the field was convenient
but did not justify the cost of an LMR system. Unfortunately, cellular PTT
technology largely died with Nextel, replaced by IP-based systems that failed
to offer the low latency and reliability of iDEN.
The concept of cellular PTT is not dead forever, though. The lack of good PTT
support has long been seen as a critical deficiency of FirstNet and probably a
complete blocker on its regular use by most first responders. Fortunately, AT&T
has been an ongoing proponent of the 3GPP MCPTT or Mission-Critical PTT
standard. MCPTT employees IP quality of service and multicast technology in the
access layer to provide IP-based PTT that still mostly performs as well as
radio-based systems. MCPTT in the form of AT&T FirstNet PTT (registered
trademark) has been included in the FirstNet offering for just a couple of
years now, and MCPTT-capable "LTE radios" like the Sonim XP5plus are now
available (at a steep cost) to FirstNet users. These devices are essentially
phones, some feature-phones and some just Android devices, but have a physical
form factor more like a handheld radio including a large PTT button and top
volume/channel controls. They may change the fortune of FirstNet in years to
come.
On a more personal level, there seems to be a (probably justified) degree of
mistrust when it comes to AT&T's performance in a severe emergency. Much of the
US is now covered by a state-run shared public safety radio system. These
systems usually use well-established technology (APCO P25) over state-owned
microwave and fiber networks. Since they are relatively isolated from
non-government traffic, they don't require any potentially complex
prioritization schemes to ensure reliability in an emergency. Because they're
state-owned, they're often easier for states to expand and modify. This gets at
perhaps the most significant criticism of FirstNet: it's just so complicated.
It's technically complicated, but moreover it's bureaucratically complicated,
offered as a joint venture of a private company and a semi-independent
government authority to user through several degrees of contractual separation.
Today, between GETS, WPS, PTS, and FirstNet, it is now hopefully possible for a
government or critical infrastructure user to reliably make a phone call in
some cases some of the time. It took decades to get here, and there remain
questions about the actual reliability of the service, but massive contracts
with AT&T to deliver critical services of questionable quality has become a
fine American tradition since divestiture. I saw post-divestiture because I
feel like prior to that point even more massive contracts with AT&T usually
delivered services that actually worked, and on schedule even, but maybe I'm
just being nostalgic.
[1] I may be inserting some amount of opinion here, but honestly, the situation
does not allow much room for debate. 9/11 made it extremely clear that the
federal government had no meaningful civil defense capability.