IPv6, Sensornets, and Interoperability for First Responders:
Federal Internet Leadership and Investment is Essential for Improved Response Capability at All Levels of Government
by Alex Lightman, CEO, IPv6 Summit, Inc.

“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability of all levels of government and to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong.” – President George W. Bush, Sept. 13, 2005.

During 9/11, a NYPD helicopter circling the World Trade Center warned that the South Tower was about to topple, but the report never got to the firemen – the radios were incompatible. Interoperability cost good men their lives, but the radios still aren’t compatible.

Four years and hundreds of billions of dollars of deficit spending, the situation nationwide has changed very little. Although considerable funding has been sent to many of the 60,000 first responder organizations in the U.S. as part of the massive investment in homeland security, those organizations have not managed independently to come up with a common communications protocol to share life-saving data, a common way to train and simulate events BEFORE they occur, or a common way for leaders to hook up in the crisis area and coordinate their efforts. The result is extra deaths, extra billions in disaster costs, and extra bad publicity for the U.S. in front of its allies and its enemies.

Some of the responders, such as Lt. General Russel Honore, the head of Task Force Katrina, have shown great leadership and have established informal communications lines by tirelessly traveling by helicopter around the area and personally keeping in touch with the many agencies that have gone into action. But the fact that, “The civilian infrastructure has been washed away,” according to Lt. Gen. Strock, the Commander of the Corps of Engineers, makes the communications task a very difficult one. There is no mobile system that could be quickly inserted to serve as a replacement and provide a common means to communicate for civilian and military first responders, and no provision at this time to develop or build one.

The path to communications interoperability, including mobile communications, is clear, and has already been chosen and mandated by the military – send all messages via Internet Protocol, specifically Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The European Commission and Japan, among others, have invested millions in testing IPv6 for emergency response, for building and infrastructure monitoring, and for ad hoc communication within a swarm of hundreds of vehicles. U.S. counterparts have not bothered to attempt our own similar studies, and so we lag behind. DHS, for instance, has done nothing with IPv6 to date, even if just to request the results from those nations that are speeding ahead of the U.S.

Why should first responders message via Internet Protocol, especially version 6? There are three strong reasons.

First, messaging via Internet Protocol over so-called “packets” is the most efficient way to send messages. The Internet has been effective in Homeland Security sponsored exercises in San Diego, where it was found that voice and other messaging over the Internet continued to work long after cell phones became overloaded and useless. IPv6 has further advantages that make it more efficient in transmitting multimedia content than today’s Internet standard (IPv4).

Second, using Internet Protocol has many secondary benefits. IPv6 in combination with GPS allows first responders to locate and find each other in an area – so that everybody knows where everybody else is. This is similar to a military situation, where a modern force such as a Stryker Brigade knows where all the Blue Force (friendly) units are. First responders need that same capability. The use of IP also means that widely available commercial software can now be used for a wide variety of tasks, such as finding resources, sending multimedia, and establishing electronic bulletin boards for posting priority requests and responses – tasks that are so simple to do on the Internet that you are more likely to find a 10-year old who would do this than one who would mow your lawn.

Third, the use of Internet Protocol enables first responders to use “tagging” for a wide variety of applications. For instance, body bags are currently not allowed to be moved by order of the Coroner in New Orleans – instead, first responders have to anchor each body bag where it is found and send in a message with a description and approximate location so the coroner can later try to find and process them. The use of Internet Protocol could have enabled the first responders to put an RFID tag with an Internet address on each body bag to allow it to be easily located wirelessly – as well as enabling the tagging of functioning field hospitals, dangerous intersections, homes with people that needed saving, or the location of precious resources. Each of these could have been assigned an IP address and logged in and tracked and updated with standard software no harder to use than the screen and keyboard by which a police officer calls up a license plate in his or her squad car.

There are many other benefits to using Internet Protocol, including common means of training – and sharing the results of that training, instead of today’s practice, where the lessons learned quickly evaporate over time, and are limited to the area within which the training took place. There are also many Internet-based collaboration tools for leaders that are used by large businesses – many of these would also be usable by first responders to determine how best to work together and which team should do what by when.

The possibility of a common digital language is here; it has already been mandated for use by the Department of Defense and most of the federal government. The need for the benefits arising from that common language certainly exists, as has been shown again and again, most recently by Katrina. There was hope in some quarters that local communities could come up with their own disaster response, if only they had the funding. This is proving untrue – it is becoming apparent that effective response needs leadership and help from Washington, because, in the end, that is where cities that are in crisis will be looking to for relief and help. A key ingredient of that needed leadership is in setting technical standards – for how to communicate, how to train, and how to enable leaders to collaborate quickly and efficiently in response to a crisis.

The costs for developing and fielding the equipment to enable this digital language of the New Internet are not trivial. But the costs of not doing so are proving to be far higher. It would seem to be far cheaper to show leadership and coordinate and fund the need for communications compatibility – at a national level – and save the misery and the huge loss of lives and money that could result from having our first responders hamstrung by the lack of communications like they are today. This is the new calculus of emergency response management for the U.S.

As I write this on 9/12, millions of people in Los Angeles are without power, and vast sections of one of the largest urban areas in the world (400 square miles) are dark as the sun goes down. The newspapers are showing photos of 9/11, the sunken city of New Orleans, the Malibu fires, the St. Francis dam collapse, and the Northridge Quake, and ask in an unusually long headline, “On the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, Southern Californians need answers to this question: ARE WE READY?” The consensus answer appears to be “No!” and another headline is, “DISASTER PLANS FALL SHORT.”

In an interesting confluence of events, my favorite elected official, the only leader in U.S. politics to ask whether the U.S. should lead in the Internet, Congressman Tom Davis (R-VA), will chair hearings into government response to Hurricane Katrina and its terrible aftermath. Congressman Davis (the Chairman of the Government Reform Committee, who also chaired the recent and highly productive IPv6 hearings) will have some interesting opportunities. In case chance he or one of his talented advisors reads this newsletter, I want to share an observation that has completely escaped all commentary that I have seen: government support and leadership for the Internet, and government reform to improve disaster preparation, response, and reconstruction, are not just complementary, but IPv6 funding is an essential and core part of disaster response improvement.

Just as the $50 million in federal funding for the NCP and TCP/IP (IPv4) Internet has provided the best Return On Investment (ROI) in history (by enabling the creation of thousands of companies and millions of jobs), federal support for IPv6 beyond the (pathetic) $10 million to date would not only add jobs – I believe that American lives would be saved, in multiple ways.

One example: for a few tens of thousands dollars a month, a wireless network of sensors, a sensornet, could have been linked to the levees that stood between the city below sea level, New Orleans, and the three bodies of water around it: the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, and Lake Pontchartrain. The levees are metal walls, and before they broke, they bent. As hard to believe as this may sound, even small deformations – on the order of centimeters change in distance between sensors – could be picked up by satellite. I wrote about this in GPS and the Width of Nations three years ago. Here are two excerpts from the article, which is about Dr. Yehuda Bock of Calit2, based at UCDA:

I wrote the article because I hoped that other places would adopt these advances. Unfortunately, because the federal government did not fund such capabilities for national use, they were not available to New Orleans. Sensornets and interoperability could have made a difference.

I believe, more strongly than ever, that the U.S. federal government should spend at least $10 billion over time to accelerate the diffusion and adoption of IPv6 into every area of American society. As part of this, I believe that at least $1 billion of this should be spent on sensornets that would wirelessly convey data on the state of critical infrastructure, starting with dams, bridges, levees, overpasses, and buildings in areas at risk of floods, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, or attacks from hostiles. Another $1 billion should be spent to support interoperability in the first responder community.

Americans suffer from crime, disasters, terror attacks and other plagues whose effects could be reduced by negating many of the delays and screw-ups caused by a lack of interoperable communications systems – not only between federal, state, local and tribal responders, but even between groups within these levels of government, such as fire, police and rescue. IPv6 would allow interoperable IP-based communications that were secure and end-to-end (traceable, to see where each message really came from); interoperability with older systems can be assured by the use of “programmable” RF radios that can interface between IP-based and analog sets in the system.

The combination of mobility and auto-configuration would be powerful here, as the situation is very similar to combat environments faced by the U.S. military. The need to be able to move and stay connected – or automatically reconfigure the network based on changing location or connections – becomes critical.

Different locales have such as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have started to install sensornets for high priority security applications. Such networks should be IPv6-based, as there is no really feasible method to deploy, configure and manage these globally using the IPv4 protocol. In the absence of a federal directive to use IPv6, we will end up with a crazy, non-interoperable patchwork quilt of soon-to-be-obsolete analog, IPv4, x.25, and other systems that will be peculiar to specific locations – and will be difficult to monitor from a central location.

The combination of GPS, GIS, and IPv6 could also be used for the dynamic deployment of scarce professional resources (medical, constructions, law enforcement) based on need. New Orleans had police and medical professionals wasting time wandering around looking for where they could go to be useful, when they could have been strategically directed to their task sites. Mobile platforms using IPv6 and auto-configurable clients could have helped reestablish communications at a much quicker pace within the impacted areas.

I would encourage Chairman Davis during the Hurricane Katrina hearings to ask the Dept. of Homeland Security questions about its willingness to take a leadership role in the deployment of communications compatibility. DHS is supposed to be an integrator of fragmented systems of response. Why else were 50 agencies combined, if that wasn’t part of the goal? Yet DHS appears to be the only major federal agency, out of around 150, to reject the Office of Management and Budget’s very reasonable request for each government agency to follow OMB’s guidance to start to move toward IPv6.

To put it bluntly, whether DHS embraces compatibility (via IPv6) or not could be a life or death decision – more people could die, in more places, because DHS did not take a leadership role to embrace, apply, and improve the Internet as a core tool to share information between people, places, and things.

Does this sound too harsh? Today’s resignation of the horse-minded head of FEMA followed increasing public dissatisfaction with several of the components of DHS and their lack of leadership and cooperation. However, the technical fixes for at least some of these shortcomings are at hand. One is the need to emplace sensornets in major strategic and vulnerable areas, and make them accessible through an array of different devices, by hundreds or even thousands of different organizations, with mobile capability – all of which points to IPv6.

A second technical fix is for communications interoperability. Given that the Dept. of Defense has mandated IPv6, and that the National Guard is deployed alongside the regular military units in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as in New Orleans at this time), the DoD communications and messaging platforms need to be fully interoperable with the National Guard systems, and the National Guard also needs to mandate IPv6. Given that the National Guard is also deployed along with police, fire, EMT, HAZMAT, Center for Disease Control and other emergency response personnel, all these local and state units also need to mandate IPv6. The agency that should be leading the charge toward IPv6, and (and pressing the DoD to accelerate its adoption) is the Department of Homeland Security.

It is to be hoped that DHS has been shocked by Katrina into reconsidering its role in coordination and leadership; its CIO may yet lead the charge to inspire first responders at all levels to adopt IPv6 as a common digital language – a task that could, admittedly, require more energy for cultural and bureaucratic changes at all levels than for the actual technological v6 adaptations..

It is time for every American to better understand the vulnerabilities in our country, and the investments necessary to ameliorate them – and how large the ROI can be when lives are saved and massive property damage is averted. Of course no amount of investment can ever bring total safety, but I hope we see a sea change in the level sophistication about the fundamental ways that technologies such as IPv6 can help us, protect us, and open new doors of possibility.

In conclusion, I reaffirm what I testified before Committee on Government Reform hearing on IPv6 chaired by Congressman Tom Davis: we must create a Federal IPv6 Transition Office, and give it the resources, authority, accountability, and responsibility that it needs. Among those responsibilities should be an action plan for complete interoperability via IPv6 between all levels of government by June of 2008.

If you have ideas or comments on any of the above, including your own article(s) about how IPv6 could be used for disaster response, please write me at alex@usipv6.com .