Cellphones Get Government Chips For Disaster Alert

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said the Commercial Mobile Alert System that Congress approved in 2006 will direct messages to cellphones in case of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other serious emergency. There will be at least three levels of messages, ranging from a critical national alert from the president to warnings about impending or occurring national disasters to alerts about missing or abducted children. The alert would show up on the phone's front screen, instead of the traditional text message inbox, and arrive with a distinct ring and probably a vibration. People will be able to opt out of receiving all but the presidential alerts."

Comments

Re:No Texting While Driving!

[billstewart]

More seriously, it's kind of annoying that the system for telling you to turn around and run away because of tornadoes or nuclear explosions or big car accidents or whatever requires you to read texts while driving. (I can't do that - I need to wear my reading glasses to read texts, and need to not wear them to be able to drive.) I hope they'll also use the Emergency Broadcast System if they're playing games with texts. And it's annoying that you can turn off local emergency alerts (which you might actually need to receive), but can't turn off texts from the President (which are either about Nuclear War, in which case a text message is rather too late, or else they're political spam.)

you'll find out a lot more than you bargained for

[Lead Butthead]

actually, I fully expect the system will be hijacked to disseminate spam within hours after going live.

Disable it

[sv_libertarian]

Wonder if there will be an easy way to disable the chip without ruining the whole phone, or perhaps in Android at least a software hack to completely turn it off. I don't want to get messages from .gov on my hardware without consenting to it.

I hope it is a good design

[wkk2]

The messages need to be digitally signed or we are going to get spam claiming to be from the president. It also needs to be better designed than weather radios. For example, I can turn off thunderstorm watch alerts but not tornado watch alerts. I might understand requiring warnings but not watches. It cries wolf, in the middle of hot muggy nights, so often it gets turned off.

No legitimate use

[The Man]

Can anyone come up with an example of a "national disaster" (i.e., a disaster affecting most or all of the contiguous United States) in which any significant part of the telephone network would still be functioning? Because I can't. All sub-extinction-level disasters are inherently regional and nearly all are local. As an example, Japan just suffered a colossal earthquake and 15-meter tsunami... and yet despite the catastrophic loss of life and property, nearly all major damage is confined to a few prefectures; many parts of the country didn't even feel it. And Japan is about the size of California.

But go ahead, prove me wrong: come up with a disaster that takes out Miami and Seattle but leaves the phones intact.