“The Internet Broke Emergency Alerts

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 11:21 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Internet Broke Emergency Alerts
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


The Internet Broke Emergency Alerts
America’s emergency notification systems were first built for war, and then
rebuilt for peace. A false alarm in Hawaii shows that they didn’t
anticipate how media works in the smartphone era.
By IAN BOGOST
Jan 13 2018
<
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-internet-broke-emergency-alerts/550520/
>

It’s hard to imagine a worse way to be awoken on a Saturday morning in
paradise than with a blaring klaxon accompanying a government alert about
an inbound ballistic missile attack. But that’s exactly what happened to
more than 1.5 million people in Hawaii this morning.

“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII,” the emergency alert read, in
all-caps, on smartphones. “SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
Hawaii residents tuned-in to television or radio heard an even more
threatening message, made worse by its monotone, computer-synthesized
delivery. “The U.S. Pacific Command has detected a missile threat to
Hawaii. A missile may impact on land or sea within minutes. THIS IS NOT A
DRILL.”

Except, it was indeed a drill—there was no missile threat, and the alert
had been sent in error during what the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency
called a “regular system drill.” Easily screencapped, the mobile alerts
spread like wildfire within minutes. On Twitter, Tulsi Gabbard, who
represents Hawaii’s second district in the U.S. House of Representatives,
sent her own all-caps alert, desperately trying to assuage citizens and
visitors that the message was erroneous: “HAWAII - THIS IS A FALSE ALARM.
THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE TO HAWAII.”

War and politics notwithstanding, what makes such a false alert possible in
the first place? Most Americans don’t know how emergency alerts work. Both
the infrastructure for sending these notifications and the media ecosystem
into which they arrive have changed substantially since the Cold War, when
the shadow of nuclear annihilation last felt near.

* * *

In 1997, the Emergency Alert System (EAS) came online, replacing the
Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), which had been in place since 1963. To
those old enough to remember broadcast television and radio, the EBS was a
ubiquitous part of media life during the Cold War, which was also the era
of television as a predominant information-delivery mechanism. Like every
system, the EBS issued regular tests, and every 20th-century American
citizen associated the television or radio voiceover “This is a test of the
Emergency Broadcast System” with the ubiquitous shadow of global
catastrophe.

Both EBS and EAS were designed to allow the president of the United States
a channel to communicate quickly to the American public in the event of
national crisis. That mostly meant war in the early days of EBS. Later, the
system was used to provide notice about other sorts of emergencies,
including natural disasters, severe weather, and other local civic
emergencies. EAS formalized that function, which had become the primary
purpose of EBS before its retirement. EAS also addressed the profusion of
broadcast channels present in the mid-1990s, as compared with the 1960s:
not just AM and FM radio, and broadcast television, but also cable, fiber,
digital, and satellite television, satellite radio, and more.

In 2006, after criticism surrounding government preparedness and response
during Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush established a new
program, the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). IPAWS
integrated EAS and the other government warning systems, including National
Warning System (NAWAS), an automated telephone warning system; the
Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS), a warning system for mobile devices;
and the National Weather Service’s Weather Radio system.

IPAWS remains in place today, and it is the service used to send the
erroneous missile alert to everyone on the islands of Hawaii today. The
whole system is managed by FEMA, which authorizes individual local agencies
to send emergency messages. In Hawaii, there is only one authorized agency,
the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

* * *

With such sophisticated and time-tested systems behind the scenes, how
could that agency make a mistake like this one? The simple answer is human
error, which is how the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency spokesperson
Richard Rapoza characterized the incident in an interview with my colleague
Adrienne LaFrance. That explanation serves up cold comfort to the Hawaii
residents who thought they faced possible obliteration this morning. “My
10-year-old said, ‘I thought we were going to die,’” tweeted Chris Gaither,
who is on vacation in Hawaii.

But beyond a bad look, human error is also not a terribly informative
explanation for the spike in anxiety the message created. That’s largely
because emergency notifications have become so efficient. Too efficient,
maybe.

In 2013, FEMA replaced the Commercial Mobile Alert System with Wireless
Emergency Alerts (WEAs). These are the messages you receive on your
smartphones today. They include AMBER alert notices for child abductions,
government emergencies including weather and, God help us, ballistic
missile attacks, and direct messages from the president. If you look
carefully at your smartphone’s notification settings, you’ll see that you
can disable the first two kinds of alerts, but not the third—which has
never been used since the conception of all these systems in the mid-20th
century.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20180114163853:4EED2CC8-F973-11E7-987B-95985473FBC8
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com