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Monitoring Winlink Messages
To over simplify things a bit, there's a debate right now about Winlink with respect to our inability to monitor traffic between other parties. When someone sends you a message over the air, you receive it in your inbox, but other hams watching the exchange will only be able to see the callsigns involved, the subject line, and a few other things. The body of the message, though will appear as compressed mess of gibberish.
The petition to the FCC asks in part that:
The FCC should require all digital codes to use protocols that 'can be monitored in entirety by third parties with freely available, open-source software.'1)
That sounds very reasonable and in principle you can easily imagine that if a program like Winlink can easily decompress a message for one recipient, it could just as easily decompress all the messages it hears. It would simply be a matter of managing these messages in a way that is easy for the user to filter what is theirs and what isn't.
Well, it seems that there's been some progress in decoding over-the-air messages recently:
This is a reasonable step forward as proof of concept. [...] I hope to further the work to yield a functioning monitoring tool for those with interest in monitoring the Winlink system. [...] It’s clear to me this capability will be warmly received by all parties in the debate [...]
The Winlink monitorability nut is cracked. Privacy on radio Winlink no longer exists... and that’s a very good thing for all parties.2)