Exploring the legal situation of disaster communications networks

I'm currently based in Darmstadt, Germany for a few months with the nice folks in the Secure Mobile Communications laboratory (SEEMOO) at TU-Darmstadt.

One of the main things that we are looking at while I am here, is to better understand the current legal situation facing networks like Serval.

This is important, because the telecommunications laws in most countries were made before such networks were beginning to be widely considered.  As a result, the particular characteristics and requirements of these networks are typically not accommodated in the telecommunications regulations of most countries (or at least the ones we have looked at so far).

So we are hoping over the next month or so to compare the situation here in Germany with Australia, and perhaps a few other countries, to see what road-block might be there, and perhaps to propose how such legislation could be amended to better facilitate them.

As a result I have spent much of the last week reading through the EU Directive 2014/53/EU (in both English and German), as well as draft legislation to implement it in Germany and Austria.

There are some points of concern that we have, particularly that open-source development using wireless routers and SDRs would effectively be outlawed, if the legislation is not carefully worded.  This would be a very unfortunate outcome, not just for the open-source communities who volunteer their efforts and donate the results of their efforts to the common good, but to society as a whole, who would be denied the benefits of these activities (most wireless routers are based on a version one of the open-source projects, very often OpenWRT) because modifying the software on a router to patch a security fix would also be illegal, and router vendors could be required to lock down firmware on the routers to prevent it being patched, updated or replaced in the first place.

This all echoes some of the same problems that are coming up in the USA, with the FCC's proposed rules to require firmware-lockdown on routers.

As we have seen with the confusion there, including TP-LINK being fined for locking down router firmware by the FCC, the matter is not a simple one, and certainly it is one that there still seems to be an understanding gap that we need to help regulators bridge, so that they can be enabled to enact regulations that protect these important rights, while addressing other legitimate social and political concerns.