I just finished a course which covered various aspects of what is
called "Auxcomm," which is the system that Amateur Radio operators and
other volunteers can join if they want to help out during natural and
other disasters. Thinking about "EmCom," I asked my brother, who is a
retired Firefighter, what he could tell me about priority phone
service for First Responders: he told me there have been systems in
place for a couple of decades.

I just did a Google search for the phrase "telephone call priority
systems site:.gov" (without the quotes), and I was able to retrieve
the information on "GETS" and "WPS" that's shown in two of the other
messages I'm publishing today. My first search turned up a site at the
"Cybersecurity and Infrastucture Security Agency," which has the other
URL's I used to find out about GETS and WPS.

Now, I'm a Vietnam veteran and a Verizon retiree, so I don't come to
this issue without any prior experience. I'd bet that just about every
military veteran knows what "Flash Override," "Flash," "Immediate,"
and "Priority" mean when talking about military communications, and
I'd also bet tht just about every MD and local Mayor and Congressman
knew how to get priority dialtone on landline calls when POTS lines
were the norm. That's not secret, or even confidential, information.

There's one part of it that I don't get, though, and that's the reason
why the information about these capabilities isn't more widely
known. It reminds me of the reason that Blue Boxes worked:

Security through obscurity (STO) is a process of implementing
security within a system by enforcing secrecy and confidentiality
of the system's internal design architecture. Security through
obscurity aims to secure a system by deliberately hiding or
concealing its security flaws.

Original available at:
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/21985/security-through-obscurity-sto#:~:text=Security%20through%20obscurity%20(STO)%20is,or%20concealing%20its%20security%20flaws.

Let's remember that the information needed to create the first Blue
Box was published in the Bell System Practices, and IIRC in the Bell
system Technical Journal. I don't think there was ever any effort to
prevent it being available outside the Bell System: the reason Blue
Box users had such incredible access to the telephone network was the
same one that we now get spam emails. Long story short, it never
occurred to the engineers at Bell Labs or the designers of the
Internet that anyone would game their systems for commercial profit.

I haven't mentioned anything about the information that was in the
course I took, or the specifics of the other systems I've mentioned:
that information isn't germane. I am asking that we have a discussion
about whether systems like GETS and WPS shoud be concealed from public
view.

Bill Horne

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(Please remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly)