Recent Events Point to Importance of NG-911, Simpson Says
Recent events point to the importance of 911 and public safety answering points, and the risk of cyberthreats, said FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson Friday at a meeting of the Task Force on Optimal PSAP Architecture. TFOPA is preparing a follow up to its report released earlier this year on how to speed the U.S. transition to next-generation 911 (see 1601290051). TFOPA has done a lot of work and has lots more to do, Simpson said.
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“You only have to look at just the events of the last week to begin to get a feel for the breadth of what we are talking about here,” Simpson said. In Louisiana, massive flooding meant interruptions to 911 and required changes on how emergency calls were routed, he said. Problems will be much easier to solve “when we fully arrive at next-generation 911 and can get to location-based routing,” he said.
In the Sept. 17 New York City bombing, “we saw video become a very important part of the city's rapid appreciation for what the issue meant from a first response standpoint,” Simpson said. Wireless emergency alerts contributed to the quick arrest of Ahmad Khan Rahami, accused of placing the bomb (see 1609220008), he said. Also, many cities are backing FCC-proposed enhancements to WEAs (see 1609230022).
Recent reports make clear how bad actors can “exploit vulnerabilities inherent in the legacy switching environment,” Simpson said. The reports are a reminder that “as we replace the switch systems, whether we go to next-generation 911 or not,” 911 call centers and consumers face 911 risks because of cybersecurity threats, he said. “We’re beginning to wrestle with that and there’s not a jurisdiction I’ve met with yet that says 'I’m really comfortable with where I am with cybersecurity.'”
TFOPA Chairman Steve Souder, director of the Department of Public Safety Communications in Fairfax County, Virginia, said progress is being made through a series of small steps. He said he attended a meeting in Baltimore Friday morning of PSAP directors from across Maryland. It was a leader when the nation adopted 911, he said. "They wanted to pick up where they had left off with basic 911 … and they want to now be a leader in the next generation of 911,” Sounder said. “It was very, very encouraging to me to see the strong desire on the part of the PSAP directors in Maryland to move forward.”
When Ellicott City, Maryland, was hit with massive flooding July 30, many in the downtown captured real-time videos on their wireless devices, Souder said. “It was really unfortunate that at this point in time” these videos couldn’t be sent to the PSAP or shared with first responders, who had no idea what they were facing when they arrived on the scene, Souder said.
TFOPA heard updates Friday from its three working groups: Working Group 1: Optimal Approach to Cybersecurity for PSAPs; Working Group 2: Optimal Approach to NG911 Architecture Implementation by PSAPs; and Working Group 3: Optimal Approach to Next-Generation 911 Resource Allocation for PSAPs.
PSAPs are headed into a transitional stage, said David Holl, chairman of the architecture working group and director-public safety for Lower Allen Township, Pennsylvania. “We are moving from a legacy stove-piped world to a new world order, so to speak, where it is now a system of systems and a systemwide approach.” Some PSAPs claim to have moved into an NG-911 world, Holl said. “Really, they are not a fully deployed system because some of the primary essential component parts are not yet there,” he said. “This is an evolution that continues.”
Congress defined in broad terms what NG-911 is through the 1999 911 Act, Simpson said. The FCC can “describe those obligations” in more detail as part of its regulation of the communications industry, he said. TFOPA member Laurie Flaherty of the National 911 Program Office said the federal government might not adopt a TFOPA definition of NG-911, but “this carries a lot of weight because of who’s sitting around the table.”
Simpson encouraged the working group to develop a “citizen-facing​” scorecard for helping to determine whether a PSAP has implemented NG-911: The scorecard should ask basic questions. “Can I text 911 in my city?” he said. “Can I send the video I’m taking in Ellicott City of the flood coming down my street to the PSAP? Can I stream live if I’m in the passenger seat of a car that’s just been pulled over along the highway and I’m concerned about the police officer’s response and posturing?”
Jay English of APCO, chairman of the cybersecurity group, said one focus is getting a better handle on the price of regional cybersecurity centers for PSAPs. “The high-level pricing that we put forth before was just that,” he said. “It was based on deployed sensors and some preset bandwidth costs and sort of a best guess on the brick and mortar costs.”