Researchers want to use your wireless router to improve wireless communication abilities of emergency responders.
Well-meaning proposals sometimes have a way of raising troubling questions. Case in point: A team of wireless researchers in Germany proposed a way to improve the communications abilities of first responders, the brave people who rush into disastrous situations to help save the victims.
But the proposal hinges on something many private citizens and privacy or security advocates will likely find uncomfortable: creating an “emergency switch” that lets government employees disable the security mechanisms in the wireless routers people have set up in their own homes. This would allow first responders to use all the routers within range to enhance the capabilities of the mesh networks that allow them to communicate with each other. In a mesh network, each node or device can route traffic to the other devices on the network through a series of hops. Adding devices (in this case wireless routers) thus improves the network's stability and performance.
The residents’ wireless traffic would still remain private, in theory. Wireless routers already support a technology that might make the idea feasible—the creation of guest networks that home owners can use to grant visitors access to the Internet. But the proposal—laid out in a new paper in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation—suggests allowing public safety officials the right to remotely activate an emergency mode making similar guest access available to them. The paper is also described in a press release titled “Your wireless router could save lives in an emergency.”
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