I'm issuing new orders...

[chrinFinity]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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Hell, for safety sake it should probably monitor their vital signs at all times and sound an alarm in sickbay whenever any of them have a problem.

Now THAT is a damn good idea!

Officer level thinking, Crewman newtype_alpha. Do you have any medical training? We have a job opening in sickbay.

[Timo]

that's where my order to secure external communications during battles comes into play

Since when have they not been secured anyway? Uhura caught all the illegal transmissions in TOS; all the ones that evaded the attention of Picard's crew were on obscure alien channels, meaning it took even Data quite a while to pin them down - or were performed by personnel with legitimate access, such as Lore-posing-as-Data.

There are *so* many examples where this happens... Power Play and Dramatis Personae spring to mind immediately as good examples.

In both cases, killing all the heroes would have been an effective countermeasure. Raising an alarm when they separate themselves from their commbadges would have accomplished nothing.

Another GREAT example where this would come in super-handy.

Way too many false positives. It would take more than a department to keep track of where Dax goes in privacy. Perhaps that's why Lt. Primmin gave up his job?

But we don't throw away security precautions just because they wouldn't work on Q.

The catch is, they also would only work on Q. There isn't a competing scenario where an enemy would be capable of abducting a Starfleet officer in such a way that a "separated from commbadge" alarm-and-track would be the only or best countermeasure - and not be capable of defeating the countermeasure with ease. A quick in-and-out job involving teleportation of some sort is the one working scenario, and reaction time issues would thwart all tracking-based solutions.

Any enemy stupid enough to attempt the abduction without evoking the counter-countermeasures would be too stupid to care about commbadges in the first place; removing those already tells the audience that the enemy knows what he's doing.

Yes, but usually that decision is based on being possessed by an evil alien, or trying to sabotage something, or to evade security, or because the wearer of the badge is having the uncontrollable urge to murder Duras or Gowron. This is what I'm saying.

And said evading security, murder etc. should be allowed to happen, because the officer in question does know what he or she is doing. If he or she does not, then removing privacy is nowhere near a sufficient measure - what should be removed is Starfleet rank and privileges and personal freedom. Mind you, most of the above cases panned out very well indeed in the end; interfering would have led to a less desirable outcome.

for crying out loud, Starfleeters are members of a military organization. They have a uniform code, and the badge is a very important part of that code.

Exactly. If they can't be trusted to follow the code, tracking can't be considered even a half-hearted measure; it's more like sixteenth-hearted. What should be built into the badge is a poison dart that kills the wearer if removal is attempted!

Timo Saloniemi

[Crazy Eddie]

Pavonis wrote:

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Are kidnappings of officers and officers gone rogue such common occurrences on starships and starbases that continuous monitoring is warranted?

Odly enough, yes.

[Crazy Eddie]

chrinFinity wrote:

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Now THAT is a damn good idea!

Officer level thinking, Crewman newtype_alpha. Do you have any medical training? We have a job opening in sickbay.

Actually, it's ADMIRAL newtype. And no, my area of expertise is information technology.

Speaking of which, it occurs to me Starfleet's information warfare systems (along with electronic warfare in general) are slipshod at best. I've recently encountered a mission log from the USS Voyager where the ship's operations officer was successfully and repeatedly overridden by a two year old girl working on a keypad she barely knew how to read. In a way this turns out to be a GOOD thing since the operations officers were under alien influence at the time, but it mirrors a similar incident where an angry Hirogen was able to access the ship's comm system using a keypad in the mess hall and actively prevent the Ops officer (the SAME ops officer) from blocking his access. That also mirrors incidents on the Enterprise-D where a 20th century stockbrocker was able to not only access a comm panel to harass the ship's command officers, but was able to gain access to the bridge -- during a yellow alert, no less -- and stand there for several seconds without anyone noticing him.

Simple access controls are called for. I wouldn't advocate anything so mundane as a login name and password (although that would certainly help) but it occurs to me that shipboard sensors and user interfaces are sophisticated enough to obtain biometric data from anyone attempting to use them to confirm that they really ARE authorized to access those systems. Something as simple as a fingerprint or voiceprint analysis would at least force would-be hackers to obtain and then spoof those signatures in order to gain access, which if nothing else would give security teams a few minutes to react to potential breaches. Just for starters (of course, simply locking doors to sensitive parts of the ship is a long overdue security measure, especially for ships with children aboard).

The other side of this is that we either need operations officers who have at least basic training in information technology (or at least, enough knowledge of their own systems that they will not be locked out by children and/or aliens who otherwise have no knowledge of their systems), and as a backup, subroutines for the main computer that would allow it to automatically intercept such hacking attempts before they can interrupt bridge control.