Comment by dcow

Why does the FCC even care so much? What nefarious things can the average consumer possibly do that a motivated attacker can't already do? A motivated attacker who wants to change all the street lights to green will have hardware that lets them do whatever they want. The other 99.999% of people will just use their system as configured by their software vendor, legally. Why do we need hardware failsafes? Why do we need certifiably absurd things happening at the driver level like AFC? It's not like this is a health and safety issue--these consumer devices shouldn't be capable of transmitting that much radiation regardless. So why does the FCC care so much? Is there a history of disaster related to consumer radios operating illegally that I'm unaware of?