I hear this argument a lot, but it feels like a weird back-justification for the restrictions imposed by the government.
Yes, encryption would make some enforcement actions slightly harder, but we tolerate it in plenty of other settings where you have a constrained, shared resource. Wifi comes to mind. Nobody gets upset that you can't examine your neighbors' packets to make sure they're following the law or not using the spectrum for a purpose other than "bona fide" home wifi. Even though the wifi spectrum in urban areas is far more crowded than ham frequencies.
For much of the hobby's history, the government was deeply distrustful of amateur radio. They flat out banned all operations during WWI and WWII. And a lot of ham radio folks reminisce about the good old times when the government had listening stations and amateur radio enforcement operations throughout the country, and would knock on the doors of any amateurs who did anything wrong. Well, they funded that not because they shared your passion, but because they wanted to keep Soviet spies at bay.
The ban on encryption was supposed to serve the government's interests, nothing more. If you worry about corporations misusing the spectrum, it's sufficient to require identification in plain text; if somebody is using amateur callsigns but sending 9-to-5 chatter on a fixed frequency every day, and you pinpoint it to a local warehouse, that's more enough for enforcement action, right? Except... there is almost no enforcement these days, because the Cold War is over and the government lost all interest.
Ham radio getting "banned in unstable countries" seems like a whimsical concern, too. First, many other countries do not restrict encryption the way US does. Secondly, in the era of the Internet, mesh networking, ubiquitous smartphones, etc, ham radio hardly registers on the radar for most governments. Maybe in North Korea... so let's ban encryption domestically, including in the short-distance VHF/UHF band, to stay on Kim's good side?
It's not just that.. The thing is also that if everyone starts using encryption the community is gone.
Right now at night we turn on the radios and check the local repeaters for activity and whatnot. Hear some interesting QSOs. If everyone is chatting encrypted this won't work.
It also would enable people to use it as a free alternative for a commercial license - after all when it's encrypted we can't check that it's not used for such a purpose anymore. Using locations as you suggest isn't enough as it will need really targeted surveillance. Also, for a warehouse any of the free radio modes are more than sufficient in range.
The ban on encryption isn't really much to do with espionage. Spies don't need a license.
I think I addressed your second point above; for the first one, I think the ham community is largely gone at this point.
As you note, there are something like 700,000 licensed people in the US, but if you tune in to your local repeater and listen for a month, you will hear the same 2-8 people, typically in their 70s - and that's about it. They're there due to force of habit, and when they die, they're not going to be replaced. The same demographics can be observed for most ham clubs, maybe outside the SF Bay Area (where the median age is closer to 50).
So what are we really protecting here - a "community" representing and speaking on behalf of maybe 0.1% of all licensed individuals? Is this something to treasure, or should we bite the bullet and instead encourage a larger group of people to build something new?
And I hate to say this, but I think this situation is of their own doing. The old-timers wanted all the newcomers to follow in their footsteps and get excited in exactly the same things. As evidenced in the community-developed ham exam, which deals with such exciting and timely topics as tuning vacuum tube amplifiers, receiving analog slow-scan TV signals, memorizing Morse code shorthands, and DX contests that lost most of their "oomph" when the Internet showed up.
Meanwhile, VFH / UHF handheld-to-handheld messaging is still an elusive technology, and many old-timers don't consider anything above HF to be "real ham".
Analog slow-scan TV is cool as hell. I got a freakin' image transmitted to me by the international space station?! Nothing "old-timer" about that at all, and was one of the most interesting things I found as a newcomer to amateur radio :)
> As evidenced in the community-developed ham exam, which deals with such exciting and timely topics as tuning vacuum tube amplifiers, receiving analog slow-scan TV signals, memorizing Morse code shorthands, and DX contests that lost most of their "oomph" when the Internet showed up.
That's a lot of text to just tell everyone you made up a bunch of shit. None of that shit is on licensing exams. What is on the exams are things demonstrating you've got enough knowledge to not electrocute yourself, not get RF burns, not turn your radio into a jamming device, and understand the etiquette for sharing very limited bandwidth available to amateurs.
Vacuum tube amplifiers are still current technology for the high power folks, especially home builders.
Some morse shorthand is useful. CQ for instance. QRM, QSO and many more are all used for voice as well.
However, I will not defend the old guard too far. I get tired of the right-wing boomer conversations pretty quickly. Everything was better in the past....blah blah
"I hear this argument a lot, but it feels like a weird back-justification for the restrictions imposed by the government."
I continue to be amazed at what I consider to be a very unexpected cultural intersection:
Technical, do it yourself, nearly exclusively male, out-hacking one another with radio bits ... but simultaneously vehemently defensive of, and slavishly adherent to, arbitrary government regulations that strictly limit what they can do with their hobby.
The deference to arbitrary authority in the HAM community is really jarring ...
This is an extremely ignorant position to take. For starters amateur licenses have mode and modulation restrictions in certain bands and power output limitations in all of them. Secondly despite far higher power privileges than unlicensed users amateurs have to keep their power output appropriate for their use. They can't just crank the output up to 11. Third, amateurs are prohibited from commercial communications and broadcasting on amateur bands.
Everyone with some sort of radio license from commercial broadcasters to amateurs have some sort of legal limits on their operation. Radio is a shared medium and being an asshole can ruin the medium for other uses over a huge area.
When it comes to encryption, good encryption is little different from noise. I also have no idea what you're doing on the band. Do you just have a mistuned radio? Are you overdriving your transmitter? What I do know is you're raising the noise floor on whatever band you're on and keeping me from using it.
Your WiFi being encrypted is a much different situation. Best case propagation is hundreds of feet and the PEP is so low that beyond a relatively short distance your transmissions literally blend into background noise for me. So your WiFi doesn't affect me too badly unless we're in adjacent apartments and you've got your output power maxed out.
Your encrypted transmissions on the rarified space available for hams ruins it for a lot of users over a wide area. That is why hams are fine with no encryption for amateur operation.
I know people that would gladly use ham bands for business uses, and with encryption allowed it would be "just another encrypted QSO". And the ham bands would slowly fill up with non-ham use.
I know these people too, and its a little odd since commercial/business licenses in the VHF/UHF part 90 bands are dirt cheap - a few hundred dollars for a ten year license, and no need to pass a test.
Yeah, usually. It's a common trope, but also a pretty tired one.
We have a pretty long history of plague, famine, war, and other "apocalyptic" scenarios, and in almost all accounts, people tend to help each other, and most would die of hunger rather than steal from an innocent person.
The main problem is that what we are very good at is building narratives that portray some class of "others" as not-so-innocent, and therefore, deserving all the pillage, rape, and murder we can muster. That's variously the neighboring nation, some minority ethnic group, political opponents, the rich, the clergy... you name them, there's some brutal revolution or war targeting 'em.
So, basically, the worst-case scenario is ending up on the wrong side of the pitchfork if / when the revolution comes. Something that, quite frankly, the Silicon Valley should be mindful of.
Yes, encryption would make some enforcement actions slightly harder, but we tolerate it in plenty of other settings where you have a constrained, shared resource. Wifi comes to mind. Nobody gets upset that you can't examine your neighbors' packets to make sure they're following the law or not using the spectrum for a purpose other than "bona fide" home wifi. Even though the wifi spectrum in urban areas is far more crowded than ham frequencies.
For much of the hobby's history, the government was deeply distrustful of amateur radio. They flat out banned all operations during WWI and WWII. And a lot of ham radio folks reminisce about the good old times when the government had listening stations and amateur radio enforcement operations throughout the country, and would knock on the doors of any amateurs who did anything wrong. Well, they funded that not because they shared your passion, but because they wanted to keep Soviet spies at bay.
The ban on encryption was supposed to serve the government's interests, nothing more. If you worry about corporations misusing the spectrum, it's sufficient to require identification in plain text; if somebody is using amateur callsigns but sending 9-to-5 chatter on a fixed frequency every day, and you pinpoint it to a local warehouse, that's more enough for enforcement action, right? Except... there is almost no enforcement these days, because the Cold War is over and the government lost all interest.
Ham radio getting "banned in unstable countries" seems like a whimsical concern, too. First, many other countries do not restrict encryption the way US does. Secondly, in the era of the Internet, mesh networking, ubiquitous smartphones, etc, ham radio hardly registers on the radar for most governments. Maybe in North Korea... so let's ban encryption domestically, including in the short-distance VHF/UHF band, to stay on Kim's good side?