Homeland Security spent $430M on radios its employees don’t know how to use

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/homeland-security-spent-430m-on-radios-its-employees-dont-know-how-to-use/

by Cbasedlifeform • 14 years ago

66 45 14 years ago

arstechnica.com

Cbasedlifeform• 14 years ago

Your tax dollars at work. Not.

aioprisan• 14 years ago

Can't wait to see the federal government run healthcare as well

danudey• 14 years ago

Except that the government already has a health care plan. And it's pretty amazing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-rosenbaum/why-cant-we-ha...

Fortunately the government isn't expanding that; it's just mandating that insurance companies give health insurance to more people, and that employers do the same. They're not providing a public option.

Aloisius• 14 years ago

Surely you've heard of Medicare?

polarcuke• 14 years ago

Yeah, this seems like pretty typical misuse of government money. Even if these radios are an effective investment why wouldn't they spend a couple million more and train the employees responsible for using them? It's pretty ridiculous in my opinion.

usea• 14 years ago

Because the official who gets credit for the bullet-point on some report doesn't gain anything from the training. The incentive is only to be able to brag about having led the initiative on communication in their department.

(100% cynical conjecture; I'm sure the reality is much more nuanced)

thechut2• 14 years ago

I wonder what lucky contractor supplied those radios... Surprised there is no mention of that in the article.

fotbr3• 14 years ago

Most likely it's Motorola Solutions providing the hardware, although there's probably some 8A business playing middleman to collect their guaranteed contracting dollars.

Everyone likes to bag on the big contractors, and not without reason, but if you really want to raise your blood pressure, look at the rules, laws, and entitlements regarding 8A contracting. We've had to deal with middlemen that took 10% simply to get a fax from the gov't, and pass it on to the hardware vendor (also on the GSA schedule), who then shipped directly to the gov't. 10% of a quarter million dollar order for receiving a fax, and faxing it onward, because as a small business who meets all the contracting requirements, they're guaranteed a certain amount of federal payola, simply for existing.

There was a lot of joking about forming our own businesses, BOFH style (translation: our fax machine and office is co-located at the local pub), to cash in on that gravy train.

hollerith• 14 years ago

Definition of 8A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Business_Administration#8...

thechut2• 14 years ago

Wow, thanks for the insight. Sounds like an 8A business could be lucrative...

nthitz• 14 years ago

Can you imagine 123,000 people all trying to converse on one common channel? Maybe this is for the better!

derleth• 14 years ago

> Can you imagine 123,000 people all trying to converse on one common channel?

Yeah, I can imagine AlohaNet and WiFi. ;)

hnriot• 14 years ago

It's not exactly rocket science picking the right channel, I am more disappointed that the people we hire for DHS jobs can't figure out how to work a radio. I would bet that the radios are commodity hardware and the manuals are online.

I'm also more than a little worried that each radio costs $3500 when even milspec radios don't cost that much. I'm sure a simple FRS/GMRS radio with scrambler chip would have sufficed, and those retail at around $30 each.

jacquesm• 14 years ago

Yes, but then there would be less pork to go around.

fotbr3• 14 years ago

They don't cost that much. The $430M covered a lot more than just the portable and mobile radios themselves.

And no, "a simple FRS/GMRS radio with scrambler chip" would not have sufficed. Public safety radio systems, even on a local level, to say nothing of a national agency's requirements, are a heck of a lot more complicated than most people realize, since there's a lot that most people, including most of their employees never see.

blhack• 14 years ago

How much do milspec radios cost?

I was pretty surprised to find out what "high end" walkie-talkies go for. This year at burning man, a couple of DPW girls were hanging out in our dome and one my my camp-mates started oggling their radios.

"Oh! Wow, I sell radios and those things are like $2000!" or something like that.

This is what a bunch of dirty hippies are using to talk to each other in the desert. I'd imagine what the Department of Homeland Security uses is probably even more expensive.

antidoh2• 14 years ago

"and the manuals are online."

Yeah, but probably not all of the people using the radios have access to computers connected to the internet.

Even at my company, they restrict flash over the internet, so people can't watch YouTube, but that means we can't access training materials provided by our vendors in flash.

Shooting our feet into the 21st Century, already in progress.

xradionut• 14 years ago

You have probably dealt with consumer or simple commercial systems. Military, government and even ham transceivers can be a maze of menus and modes. Not to mention the trunking, programming, dispatch, data modes, propagation, fading, interop, etc... One doesn't simply hand grunts and officers a COTS radio and expect success. Training is key.

mbrameld• 14 years ago

These PRC 152 radios are pretty common in the military, I imagine DHS folks have something comparable. I'd wager that you wouldn't be able to figure one out without training if it was just handed to you.

http://rf.harris.com/capabilities/tactical-radios-networking...

Add rotating encryption to the mix and I'm not surprised at all the competency level reported in the article.

majorlazer2• 14 years ago

And this is one of the reasons I laugh when people try to tell me how the "government" organizes all of those intricate conspiracies.

bcoates• 14 years ago

I love conspiracy theories because they give me the comforting illusion that someone is in charge of this mess.

guimarin• 14 years ago

It's a bit disingenuous to lump everyone in the 'government' together. It is perfectly reasonable for the NSA to be conducting a massive illegal wiretap of all digital communications for all persons on the planet creating 'profiles' for each digital communication and linking them together with a myriad of other systems AND for the DHS to not know how to communicate on their radios, let alone encrypted. You must consider the underlying competency of the group which could perpetrate a 'conspiracy' when considering the validity of that conspiracy. And the 'government' is little more than a feudal system that loosely works together sometimes.

majorlazer2• 14 years ago

I actually do agree with you, especially your last sentence. Certain groups in the government are very organized and they are definitely capable of some of the conspiracies that go around. The problem, in my experience, is most conspiracy theories/theorists accuse this non-existant, single entity called the "government," which is so organized and has control over everything that goes on. If you take 9/11 for example, how many different groups of the government would have to be involved to pull something like that off? I just don't see how it would be possible to have so many people keep their mouths shut, have different departments work together, while pulling off one of the most horrific attacks on the USA.

Wire-tapping and creating digital profiles on the other hand is something that I can totally see happening since nobody is really getting "hurt" and you can split up the work between different groups of people that really have no idea what they are working on. But I do not see something like that happening to satisfy some end-goal like gaining control of the public. I don't think we humans can organize that well. There are too many groups with their own interests in mind to be able to unite an entity as big as our government (or parts of it) to pull off most of the conspiracies that go around.

yen223• 14 years ago

"How do we know the government wasn't behind John F Kennedy's assassination? Because he's actually dead."

Zenst2• 14 years ago

Who buys that level of new equipment/technology without user training, just silly. Whoever sold it also probably should of sold training or bundled something in beyond the manual.

Now we don't know all the facts and probably what happened was they did put a tender for the radios and training to use those radios. One way or another be it budgets or somebody doing a cheaper training bid though starting later after the radios are delivered or whatever permutation of events. They ended up with radios there users are unable to use. Why they are unable to use them again is not detailed and I can imagine many on here who would love that challenge to work out how to use a new peace of technology.

There is also the prospect that they got training and it was either not very good or clearly not targeted at the level of customer understanding.

With all that if these chaps landed planes then it would get rather dangerous too fly. Worrying thought perhaps.

antidoh2• 14 years ago

Who buys that level without training? Someone who doesn't know what they're doing, doesn't care, and needs to check off a box to satisfy part of their yearly goals.

lostlogin• 14 years ago

It's not at anywhere near that level, but I've been involved in PACS (online radiology result viewing) rollouts across hospitals three times (or 2.5 depending on how you define it), and it doesn't matter how well you train people, or how clever they are. If they aren't interested, they won't learn. Even if the new system is quicker or faster or better. Until you throw the printer out, everyone wants film. The cynic in me sees people, broadly, as untrainable.

johnrgrace2• 14 years ago

I've seen two fortune 500 companies do exactly the same thing with ERP systems. The projects were over budget so they cut the user training, no one used the system beecause they didn't know how.

dm8• 14 years ago

Really? That lacks every bit of common sense. Also, how folks (in fortune 500 companies) justify these decisions to their bosses?

Hoff3• 14 years ago

Radio programming is almost always local to and customized for the department or agency or location, and the channel names and tags seemingly always vary.

Even in a system that's been architected with specific channel layouts, there's almost always some weirdness somewhere, and some differences, and some number of radios always seems to arrive mis-programmed and needs a trip back to the radio shop, and this if the folks receiving the batch of radios are paying attention and can afford the reprogramming. Not all do, or can, either.

Not all radio shops pay attention to what they're doing here, and even the good shops can be using radio service software most charitably described as atrocious.

And yes, anyone that thinks you can have everybody on one of the mutual aid frequencies is headed for trouble. The pile-ups are always massive. Add in encryption and tone squelch (CTCSS, PL) and you might be stomping on the other agencies without knowing it.

In a typical organization, you'd want your dispatcher(s) or communications officer(s) or (if not delegated) one of the senior officers on the shared channels.

Modern radios can be surprisingly complex tools, and the FCC migration to trunked radios and digital trunked radios, and adding inter-operations features (gazillions of channels, etc) and digital communications and deadspots, and the over-the-air rekeying and reprogramming, emergency button(s), and the seemingly obligatory remote kill can all combine to makes your average high-end radios hairy.

Certainly various radio users don't regularly train with and aren't familiar with the "odd-ball" channels; the "national" and mutual aide frequencies can have different names, or weird local oddities, and many of the end-user folks are often trained to stay off the other channels.

Training is certainly part of this, and of using the radios correctly. Conversely, you're probably not expecting the folks to be picking random channels. In the newer radio systems, you can be told (by dispatch or by your supervisor) which channel to use, or dispatch can reprogram your radio and your talk group(s) on the fly.

And as for training, every emergency services department I'm familiar with has been chafing under the political and technical and documentation requirements arriving from outside entities; blanket mandates requiring time and thought and budget for stuff that's probably never going to happen to a given individual or agency, but the obligatory training and documentation requirements pull the folks away from the stuff that they can and will be dealing with. Like dealing with their radios. And delivering whatever service the folks hired on to provide.

Yes, modern radios can be far more complex than it should be. So is the rest of the mess.

Startup ideas here? Sure. The two-way radio version of a ruggedized iPhone; a radio with a "modern" UI.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Do you think this would be the sort of thing that would benefit from having specialists?

Hoff3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure where you're headed with that.

In emergency services, specialists tend to be communications officers or dispatchers, or the radio shop, and variously assisted by the computers and the radio consoles that are increasingly supervising the radio networks.

To a reasonable degree, radios need to be useful and functional and understandable by everybody in the organization; to all of the users. It's this ubiquity that was at issue with the original article, and it's the radio's UI that tends to be inscrutable.

DTrejo• 14 years ago

The iPhone version is called http://Voxer.com :)

Hoff3• 14 years ago

"Ruggedized" gear is a requirement here. Emergency services radios need to be very solid, and very easy to use — you're always working on something else and quite possibly life-threatening, and the radio is a tool.

If you can drop it, slam it, whack it, rain on it or even dunk it, cover it with blood or vomit (and clean it), balance your weight on it on a stairway, use it as a wheel chock (unintentionally) and (depending on the particular users) operate it with your gloves on, then we'll talk.

For some users, you further need to allow for heavy gloves.

Or provide emergency buttons, or other features.

As great as it is, iPhone isn't close to providing this.

ck22• 14 years ago

Think of all the millions of people looking for jobs in this country, there might actually be some slightly more intelligent folks to replace that 120k or so.

But I guess the only good side of this is THEY WILL NEVER HAVE TO USE THEM, it's theater.

$430000000/123000 = $3,500 per radio, which is also insane.

fotbr3• 14 years ago

"The $430 million paid for radio infrastructure and maintenance as well as the actual radios."

It's not $3500 per radio.

ck22• 14 years ago

I wonder if you could buy your own encrypted mini-cellphone network for $430M

- given government markup, I have to assume the answer is "yes".

Homeland Security spent $430M on radios its employees don’t know how to use

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