Why does emergency communication need to be encrypted? If you place yourself in a situation where ham radio would really save the day, the last thing you would want is *less* compatibility with other stations and agencies.
All this will do is allow commercial users to encroach onto the ham bands unnoticed because illegal encrypted traffic is indistinguishable from legal encrypted traffic.
I think it's already questionable why local police departments would use encrypted P25. If the last few months of newsworthy police activity are any hint, we need more opportunities to observe law enforcement, not fewer.
Why the heck does an ambulance need to use ham radio frequencies? Why would they need it encrypted? This argument is simply nonsense. If its an emergency, sorry, loose some privacy in place of saving your life. Hams have enough trouble setting up a PL on a radio, can you imagine them trying to coordinate encryption over the air? In emergency situations, communications networks like ham radio work because they are SIMPLE. They can spring up spontaneously out of nowhere and don't require anything more than a radio, antenna, and battery. This is why ham radio has been helpful in times of emergencies when complex cellular and digital trunking systems fail. There is an elegance to the simplicity of analog.
And if the DOD needs to transmit encrypted information using a ham radio, then can't they just do it anyway?
Furthermore, digital communication does not "need" to be encrypted as some posters here have stated. The protocol needs to be documented and standardized. Encryption doesn't help. Error correction does though, and these are totally different things. WiFi, for example, does not *need* to be encrypted.