FirstNet Must Look to Public Safety Standards, Cyberthreats, APCO Hears

FirstNet calls for a network built to rigorous public safety standards as well as full collaboration with state and local entities, said New York City Police Deputy Chief Charles Dowd, a FirstNet board member. During last year’s Superstorm Sandy, “clearly the commercial networks had their issues,” he said. “Public safety networks did not. Public safety networks performed.” It’s important to make sure board members “who come from the commercial world” know the significance of achieving public safety standards, he said. “This thing has to work in the worst of conditions.” He mentioned the recent bombing in Boston and the importance of “the ability to share information rapidly,” describing a scenario in which high-definition video could be shared by bomb squads throughout the country. Facial recognition technology may play a role, he said. The seven broadband public safety grantees, currently suspended and in negotiation with FirstNet, will be important for teaching FirstNet lessons, he said: “We don’t want to make a mistake across the entire country.”

Dowd defended the FirstNet board and said he believes the network will be a success. He called the board “a good mix” that will yield “positive results.” One “struggle” has been the lack of FirstNet staff until recently, he added. But he expressed satisfaction with the hiring of FirstNet’s general manager, Bill D'Agostino, who has “the public safety imperative in mind,” Dowd said. He stressed the outreach of the FirstNet board, set to occur in regional meetings starting this week. “It needs to be a full engagement,” he said. “It has to happen. Because otherwise we won’t be successful.”

Sprint Nextel’s network may be poised to help FirstNet, argued Greg Najjar, director of the carrier’s custom network engineering. “When you start fresh, it gives you a huge advantage,” he said, describing the telco’s plan to redo its more than 40,000 towers to combine 3G and 4G capacity. “The decision was made to match the evolution of technology with the evolution of our network.” Sprint has had a very strong public safety and solutions team for many years but has a team “dedicated to just the regulatory committees, FirstNet, anything to do with the groups that are being formed,” he said.

"In a world of limited dollars, where do you put your money first?” asked Vanu Bose, CEO of Vanu, Inc. “The backhaul and power are really where we have to focus first.” That was a lesson of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, he said, emphasizing the dangers simultaneous failures pose. A large number of lower-cost sites may lead to better network survivability, even if each site is less reliable, he said. He recommended minimizing power consumption at each site. Douglas Sharp, director of engineering at Oceus Networks, mentioned portable cells as one way to keep a network going. “We cannot possibly harden every node in the network,” he said.

Cyberthreats remain an important concern, speakers said. These public safety networks are “far more susceptible” to cyberattacks, said APCO Government Relations Manager Roger Wespe. He mentioned recent attacks on 911 centers. “More and more state-sponsored attacks -- no question about it,” said Dale Zabriskie, Symantec’s principal technologist. He told people to act like they're targets and said hackers are going after smaller organizations, too, as a way to get to larger organizations. Ideological dimensions have come to embody many of the attacks, said Don Hewatt, solution engineering vice president with Verizon Terremark Public Sector, describing the rise of hacktivism in recent years. VoIP “is not a bad thing” but can provide an advantage to attackers, Hewatt added. Innovation and regulation “don’t mix very well,” said AT&T Vice President-Public Safety Solutions Jim Bugel. “Secure innovation is really what needs to carry the day.” He called the problem “a holistic issue” that calls for many stakeholders, including the operating system companies.

"The average time [by which] a victim organization discovers they are attacked is over 240 days,” said John Facella, a senior vice president of RCC Consultants. “How much data do you think has been taken in 240 days? How much data has been changed that you might not notice? How many trapdoors have been put into your system in those 240 days? That’s a very scary thought.” FirstNet will remove the silos that isolate many first responders’ communications networks, he said. “What we've done is give a massive reward to threat actors.”

FirstNet needs a secure foundation, said Mark Adams, principal architect at Northrop Grumman Information Systems. “I feel like everybody’s forget that [broadband] needs to be secure,” he said. “When we do this, we need to do it right.” FirstNet can’t have “240 days of threat” to our national public safety network, he added. He stressed the need for trust and a proper identity management system.