Priority no. 1: Homeland Security: federal agencies and the military are using wireless communications more for homeland security applications such as surveillance.(National Security Agency)

Wireless Week, August, 2005 by Smith, Brad

During a recent homeland security conference, an official of the National Security Agency (NSA) outlined the agency's plans to build its own secure wireless handset capable of voice and data communications over public networks, including CDMA, GSM and Wi-Fi. The handset, which the acronym-loving NSA calls a "secure mobile environment portable electronic device," or SME PED, would have to be capable of the kind of secure communications that falls under the agency's Type 1, or secret, security level.

But according to NSA technologist Robert Nowak, it also would be interoperable with non-secret communications networks. On the plus side, the NSA's interest in such a device shows the importance that wireless communications holds in the minds of the...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.