[Scan-DC] Despite kinks, digital radio supported investigation

[Alan Henney]

http://www.gcn.com/21_32/news/20409-1.html

Despite kinks, digital radio supported investigation
11/04/02
By Vandana Sinha,
GCN Staff
Last month's Washington-area sniper shootings forced Montgomery County, Md.,
police into an early launch of a digital, high-frequency radio system that
took eight years and $130 million to build.

The police had dozens of still-wrapped Motorola Inc. digital radios that
they handed out to members of an investigative task force, which seemed to
add a new jurisdiction almost daily.

In the end, catching the sniper suspects took the full-time efforts of an
unprecedented number of law enforcement officials from a half-dozen counties
and cities, two states, the District of Columbia and four federal agencies.
They kept in touch over a radio system undergoing a prime-time stress test a
month before its planned launch.

There were plenty of communications glitches, both human and technical.

Police radio interoperability, a pillar of homeland security efforts, was
not yet solid enough to connect federal, state and local officials
seamlessly. As Montgomery County's radio systems manager said, it was
"interoperability by the seat of our pants."

Different bands

Maryland state police worked over a low-band frequency. Virginia state and
Prince George's County, Md., police were on higher bands. Montgomery County
and about a dozen other jurisdictions around the state had converted to an
800-MHz digital system. Washington police were on a high band but planning
to move to 800 MHz. And federal investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms, FBI, and Marshals and Secret services operated on
their own bands, inaccessible to state and local authorities.

"The [new digital] radio system gave us a tool to unite the investigation,"
said Sgt. Bruce Blair, Montgomery County police radio systems manager. "I
wouldn't say it was key, by any stretch of the imagination. But it certainly
supported the whole operation."

In July last year, Montgomery County had begun fitting patrol cars with
digital radio consoles and mobile computer docking stations. Two months
later, the department was training SWAT teams, K-9 officers and special
operations investigators to use the digital equipment.
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When the feds joined last month's task force, they had no radios compatible
with those of local units. "You go the traditional way," Blair said. "You
hand them your radios."

Blair said Montgomery County handed about 130 digital radios to federal and
state officers on the rapidly growing task force.

About 30 units went to Maryland troopers, whose nondescript van next to the
task force command center sprouted antennas that could patch together
hundreds of different frequencies. Montgomery County hadn't yet put all the
pieces together to establish a dedicated circuit that could translate one
radio's output for another.

The shooting of a 13-year-old middle school student in Prince George's
County galvanized the task force. Dropping everything else, Montgomery
County slapped together a patching system to pull Prince George's police
into the fast-widening communications loop. Soon it stretched upward to
county and federal helicopters.

Patch work

Days later, when another victim-an FBI cybercrime analyst not connected with
the investigation-was shot in Falls Church, Va., Maryland and Virginia state
police set up a dragnet by patching into each other's radio systems.

Though swift, it was no secret. The plans could be overheard by anyone with
a Radio Shack police scanner.

"The oldest scanner in the world can pick up those signals," said Matthew
Snyder, technology administrator for the International Association of Chiefs
of Police in Alexandria, Va. "Those two channels are controlling the whole
Washington Beltway, and it's wide open. There needs to be secure
transmission."

Digital trunked radio systems such as Montgomery County's are more secure,
but in tactical situations, particularly the final arrest in Myersville,
Md., the task force turned to a more trusted technology-their wireless
phones.

"Quite a bit of stuff was accomplished through cell phones," said Michael
Bennett, director of Maryland State Police electronic systems.

Maryland troopers also borrowed about 20 text-messaging handheld devices and
rushed delivery of another 50 from Aether Systems Inc.'s Mobile Government
Division, bringing the total inventory to about 150. The state also bought
125 new digital radios to plug into Montgomery County's system. But the
sniper suspects were arrested before the extra handhelds and new radios
could be programmed for use.

A wider communications gap had nothing to do with technical compatibility.
Officers talked in familiar, but often conflicting, departmental codes such
as "10-50." To a Montgomery County officer, the phrase means a traffic
accident; to a Maryland state trooper, it means an officer in trouble.

"The radios work. The coverage is good," Blair said. "But something as
simple as using plain language when talking to different agencies became
important."

Blair said he felt the brunt of ensuring smooth task force communications.
Each borrowed radio had to be charged and accompanied by an extra battery.
He was pulled out of church early one Sunday so he could hunt down more
radios. Training, which was supposed to take almost three hours, had to be
condensed into 10 minutes for busy task force members.

Regional wireless

By spring of 2004, police, fire, park and transit police throughout the
Washington area hope to finish a $20 million regional wireless
intercommunications system with Justice Department funding.

The Capital Wireless Integrated Network "hopefully can coordinate much
better than we have done in the past," CapWIN project manager George Ake
said.

In addition, Project SAFECOM, one of the Bush administration's 25
e-government projects, will set the stage for wireless interoperability
among federal, state and local governments. But some believe these efforts
are Band-Aids, not the long-term surgery needed to get regional police onto
one compatible system.

"These voice systems are incredibly expensive. It's going to take a while,"
Snyder said. "I don't even know if we'll ever see it."


� 2002 PostNewsweek Tech Media, a division of Post Newsweek Media



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Police agencies start on long road toward shared radio systems
11/04/02
By William Jackson,
GCN Staff
"Nine out of 10 police radios out there have the same brand name on them,
but they don't communicate," according to Jeff Logan, head of government
relations for M/A-COM Inc. of Lowell, Mass.

The brand name on those nine radios is Motorola.

Chuck Jackson, director of systems planning for Motorola Inc. of Schaumburg,
Ill., said the situation stems largely from the way the Federal
Communications Commission has assigned frequencies over the past 70 years.

FCC gives nonadjacent bands to neighboring police and fire departments to
prevent interference, and their analog radios cannot access multiple bands.

"Almost all police departments have some limited connectivity with their
neighbors, however," Jackson said. Some share mutual-aid channels and
patching systems, "but those have a very low capacity. They are not designed
to handle large events."

Potomac crash

Most cooperative communications systems grow out of some sort of
catastrophe. Before the Washington-area sniper shootings last month, the
area's defining catastrophe was the 1982 crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into
the Potomac River, in which 74 people died.

Afterward, the Virginia counties of Fairfax and Arlington and the city of
Alexandria linked up on an 800-MHz Motorola trunked digital system along
with the District of Columbia fire department and the Metropolitan
Washington Airports Authority. Authorized users can roam and communicate
with each other much as they can on a cellular telephone system.

Montgomery County, Md., has installed, but hasn't yet officially cut over
to, a similar trunked digital system. It was pressed into service after the
Pentagon attack on Sept. 11, 2001, and again this year for the sniper task
force (see accompanying story, this page).

Trunked systems work only when departments share the same vendor. Other
approaches try to integrate existing multivendor systems. For example,
M/A-COM in August introduced NetworkFirst, which connects legacy radio
systems to an IP WAN. Voice gateways change audio to IP packets that can be
routed over a regional or statewide network. The gateway supports up to 12
legacy radio channels, trunked talk groups or console positions.

The Association of Public Safety Communications Officials in 1993 developed
the so-called Project 25 standard for interoperable digital radio in the
800-MHz band. Compliant products began to appear about three years ago but
are not yet common.

Interoperability does not necessarily require choosing one technology over
the other. Indiana and four surrounding states-Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and
Illinois-have formed the Midwest Public Safety Communications Consortium to
unify public-safety communications from the Appalachians to the Mississippi
River and from the Canadian border to the Tennessee line. The group held its
first meeting in October.

"It's unprecedented," said Scott Smith, an executive assistant at Indiana's
Integrated Public Safety Commission. "There has never been that big an area
coming together."

Each of the five states already was planning to build a public safety
network. "We thought, why stop at the state line?" Smith said.

Budget delays

But the consortium cannot yet make things work together. The states use two
different Motorola 800-MHz systems. The roadblocks to hooking the systems
together are not primarily technical. "There are some technical
 limitations," Smith said, "but not a lot."

The real delays come from different budgets and priorities. Michigan has
rolled out its system, Illinois is about a third of the way through and Ohio
is about a quarter of the way.

Indiana has 959 fire departments and more than 600 police departments, and
participation in its Astro system is voluntary, Smith said. The system
proved itself when powerful tornadoes struck Johnson and Marion counties in
September. For the first time, nine fire departments and four police
departments were able to communicate.

"They were ungodly happy with it," Smith said.

Project SAFECOM, an Office of Management and Budget e-government initiative,
eventually could link more such wireless projects into a nationwide public
safety internetwork. SAFECOM will encourage federal, state and local
cooperation and provide funding for interoperable communications systems.


� 2002 PostNewsweek Tech Media, a division of Post Newsweek Media


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Sniper Hunt: Debriefing
11/04/02
By Wilson P. Dizard III,
GCN Staff
What worked, what failed in pressure test of intergovernmental cooperation

Amid all the tools available to investigators pursuing the Washington area
snipers last month-such as fingerprint databases and high-bandwidth
communications networks-some users of the FBI's Rapid Start case management
system had to rely on a sneakernet to exchange information.

Because the case involved numerous federal, state and local law enforcement
agencies, users of Rapid Start had to download updates onto CDs and
hand-deliver them to other locations.

That's one example of how investigators had to make do under a sudden mix of
personnel and technologies. The shootings, in which 10 people were killed
and three others injured, cast a spotlight on nascent efforts within the law
enforcement community to work together across jurisdictional lines. Many of
the efforts initially were propelled by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Lessons learned

Now that the sniper suspects have been moved into the criminal justice
domain, law enforcement agencies from the federal to local levels are
reviewing what worked and what didn't during the intense investigation. And
they are laying plans for improving future cooperative efforts.

The FBI is working on upgrades to the Rapid Start system that would
eliminate the need for physical disk delivery and improve coordination among
law enforcement agencies, a senior systems official for the bureau said.

Task too tough

But in the sniper case, as in previous cases such as the 1995 bombing of the
Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma and the investigation of the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Rapid Start was not up to the task, sources
said.

Rapid Start "was something developed to work in a single FBI office. It was
not designed to work in a task force environment," said one local government
IT official involved in the case. "It was not coordinated with other
agencies' systems."

The FBI is planning to eliminate that problem through its upgrades. The
first, dubbed Icon for information coordination, will provide "more of an
FBI look and feel to Rapid Start," said Tom Hansen, chief of the bureau's
Rapid Deployment Logistics Unit in Stafford, Va.

A subsequent upgrade, Icon Plus, will synchronize Rapid Start's Microsoft
Access database across a WAN to give state and local agencies access to
continuous updates of lead information. Rapid Start currently uses a
client-server architecture and can be linked across a LAN.

If Icon Plus had been available for the sniper case, law enforcement
officials would not have had to field five versions of Rapid Start in the
Washington region. Officials deployed Rapid Start systems in Richmond,
Fredricksburg, Prince William County and Fairfax County, Va., and in
Montgomery County, Md., Hansen said.

At times, law enforcement officials updated the local Rapid Start systems by
downloading data from the Access database to a disk and physically
transferring it to remote Rapid Start locations, Hansen said.

LEO network

"In the sniper case, a couple of venues were able to transfer the database
using the LEO [Law Enforcement Online] network, and refresh it twice a day,"
Hansen said. "There were a couple of venues that could not utilize LEO in
that manner so we copied the database on a disk and hand-carried it to those
locations." Hansen said Icon Plus will have a central Access database linked
by a WAN for continuous updates.

The FBI is creating the graphical user interface for Icon and has hired High
Performance Technologies Inc. of Arlington, Va., to create Icon Plus and
develop the WAN connectivity it needs. The bureau plans to field Icon early
next year and Icon Plus after May 2003.

Shortly after the sniper case began, FBI agents, trainees, analysts and
other employees staffed a call center that the Montgomery County Police and
the county's Information Systems and Telecommunications Department set up in
rented space adjacent to police headquarters in Rockville.

The center used 123 PCs running Microsoft Windows 98 and XP to support Rapid
Start and other systems.

Rapid Start, which has been in service since 1992, acts as a front end to
the FBI's trouble-prone Automated Case File System, sources said.

Perfect world

"Rapid Start is a case management tool," one FBI source said. "It is used to
manage leads, and it was developed in-house. But it is still a practice to
use binders for [paper] lead slips.

"In a perfect world, Rapid Start would be more integrated with our other
systems," he said. "Using Rapid Start doesn't solve the underlying problem,
which is that it is difficult to get the information out of ACS once you get
it in. It is very difficult to manipulate it, process it and get it out,"
another FBI source said.

The Justice Department's inspector general detailed Rapid Start's
shortcomings in a report in March, "An Investigation of the Belated
Production of Documents in the Oklahoma City Bombing Case."

The report explained how FBI computer systems contributed to management
problems that delayed and could have derailed the prosecution of Oklahoma
City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

According to the report, the bureau used Rapid Start to help track leads in
the probe. "Even for tracking leads, Rapid Start had its limitations,"
according to the report.

Because the system was not integrated with other systems in other FBI
offices, field offices' reports would not be tracked automatically by the
Oklahoma City task force.

"Accordingly, the task force would not know what locally generated leads the
field offices had failed to pursue or if they had failed to submit
documentation after submitting the lead," according to the report.

The Oklahoma City investigators, just like their counterparts in Montgomery
County seven years later, used binders to track leads in the case.

History repeated

Justice Department officials reported that FBI personnel supervising the
lead management section of the Oklahoma City investigation did not trust the
output of the system.

Because Rapid Start was not integrated with other FBI systems, the Oklahoma
City investigators were not able to make sure that documents entered in
Rapid Start were reflected in the databases used for discovery, according to
the IG's report. That problem contributed to the document foul-up that
jeopardized the McVeigh prosecution, according to the report.


� 2002 PostNewsweek Tech Media, a division of Post Newsweek Media