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Pre-Dawn Wireless Emergency Alert Wakes Up NYC
New submitter SkiTee94 writes "Many people, perhaps millions, in and around NYC were loudly awoken shortly before 4am this morning by an activation of the Wireless Emergency Alert system. As the New York Times is reporting, the alert was related to an ongoing search for a missing child. Given that the alert asked people to look out for a 'Tan Lexus ES300' with NY Plate 'GEX1377,' many New Yorkers are questioning the logic of waking up the whole city to ask them to look for a car. Normally such alerts are reserved for road-side signs. While emergency authorities have yet to give a precise reason for why the decision was made to wake up the city, many have taken the step of deactivating these alerts to avoid future jolting mid-slumber alarms (likely not the intended result of last night's exercise)."
The actual alert was even more cryptic due to texting truncation
"LIC/GEX1377 NY 1995 Tan Lexis"
Kind of a pre-dawn WTF. Told my wife it was my boss asking for directions to the strip club. Did NOT get a free massage.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
You would think in a city with thousands of cameras and surveillance assets, they could find a single car. It's not like the car could get very far, it's New York!
sudo make me a sandwich
I can barely keep track of the cars around me in some traffic patterns, much less take the time to read each license plate. And seriously, a tan Lexus? Here in Texas, it's inevitably "white Ford Explorer" or "Blue black Chevy pickup" or some other horribly common vehicle. Maybe if kidnappers start driving more distinct cars, like an old VW painted like a ladybug or something, I'll be a little more alert to it.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
While emergency authorities have yet to give a precise reason for why the decision was made to wake up the city, many have taken the step of deactivating these alerts to avoid future jolting mid-slumber alarms (likely not the indented result of last night's exercise).
I don't live in NYC, but my phone settings were recently updated by AT&T to display Amber Alerts and weather alerts. The very first moment one of these went off while I was driving, I decided to shut it off forever as a menace. After all, I noticed that I wasn't the only driver wobbling a little in their lane right after it happened.
If I was woken in the early morning by one of these things, I just hope I'd have the presence of mind not to throw the damned thing out a window!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Last week there was an Amber Alert in the Valley of the Sun. A bit later, I thought that such a system was too easy to abuse...imagine an Amber Alert that says it's for a kidnapped child but actually happens to be for a political dissident like Snowden...and that's when I turned off the Amber Alerts.
They've also been excessively over-zealous about thunderstorm alerts, but I'm not quite yet ready to turn those off. But if they don't clean up their act fast, I will.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
What kind of alert system has device access permissions that let it be loud enough to wake everyone up? When I get Amber alerts, it's just a text message with a momentary vibrate.
Wolf Wolf! Wolf!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The same thing happened in the Boston area within a week of the alert system going live; we got two alerts in 48 hours, one at about 11 PM and the other at 2 AM; the whole Boston area got jolted awake by their phones shreiking at full volume.
Next day, everyone and their brother was scrambling to figure out how to TURN OFF THE $($(#( alerts.
Net result is that we've lost a possibly-useful resource. What should have happened is that there should be an "I'm mobile" test in the chain; Amber alerts should shriek at you only if you're actively moving right then.
Well, they know it works and are now ready for the Zombpocalypse!
which will be reported on /. the day after it starts
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
or is there a way to add these to a block list?
Let me get this straight? People are bitching because an alert for a missing child woke them up? So a child's life is less important to you then a few minutes of missing sleep?
Wow. That certainly puts some peoples priorities in place.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Not only was it stupid to send this alert to everyone's phones, it was yet another example of Amber Alert scope creep.
Amber Alerts are meant to be restricted to cases where "the child is in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death."
This was just another case of a non-custodial parent running off with the kid. The child was not in any imminent danger. She lost custody because of violence in her home (none of which was ever directed at the child).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
likely not the indented result of last night's exercise
Really? People are getting all worked up over paragraph formatting when there's an emergency going on?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Please, at least take the time to read the summary. It clearly mentions an "indented result", so, naturally, the car must have crashed and thus been discovered as such.
Either that, or Slashdot is having an unprecedented issue with proofreading the article summaries.
Right here on /. I predicted (and was shot down) that this alert system was going to be used badly. The simple reason is that every bureaucrat thinks their job is so very important. Thus any government weenie who got their hands on it would start sending out "helpful" messages. A missing child is not the worst use for this but per usual the government did it about as badly as they could; The message being basically useless.
What they need to do is to make an opt in system with levels that you can opt into. Level 1 would be for situations where nearly everyone's life is peril. Say a poison gas leak where going outside will kill you. The Boston bombers manhunt would not count as level 1. Level 2 would be a warning about something that could kill you such as to stay away from an area as there is a poison gas leak there. Level 3 would be Lost children who have been taken by bad people (not a custody case) Level 4 would be things like weather alerts.
But my guess is that the government is going to be captain obvious with most of their alerts and tell people that a storm is coming (that has been in the news for 3 straight days), then it will be political messages of grief and loss (i.e. "My heart goes out to those who...") , and eventually things like reminders to vote and recycle.
But being the government they believe that their mission is so very important that people should not be able to opt out of this crap. The key is that people need to not be treated like children and the government should not have any special rights. If people want to opt out then they are clearly stating "I don't want your crap".
So they're going to forcible alert everybody for everything now?
People will rapidly start tuning them out or finding ways to disable it.
Do not go straight to "notify everybody every time anything happens" -- because then you're just crying wolf.
What next, go beyond wireless and automatically phone every land line? This is so incredibly stupid it isn't funny -- if you have a missing child, don't call me about it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Citys / counties to big for the system?
I used deal with BS like this on cable floods and other stuff any where in the same big county used to trigger the sound cut off / on screen text. (added by the cable co and not the local tv channels)
Meany years ago and only on the SD channels. I have directv now so I don't get this stuffed added by the cable co.
But clearly the phones need to provide better software so that people can block alerts by time of occurence. e.g., all those naysayers could block alerts between 10pm-7am had the software allowed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This has happened at least four times in the last year or so in Atlanta. Amber alerts get treated by many phones as any other emergency alert, and they happen to go out between 1 and 4 am to the entire metro area, so the missing child could be up to 50 miles away. A lot of my friends have turned off emergency alerts completely because of this.
Too many custody battle child-nappings or teen runaways. When you get a rare stranger kidnapping, how would you know then?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not that I'm complaining, of course, but I never got the alert, and I live right across the street from NYC's Office of Emergency Management. I'm curious about why my phone never got the message, because who knows, I might want to get alerted the next time something like Sandy blows into town.
Speaking of Sandy, I did receive a text message alert or 2 during the storm, which presumably means my phone is capable of getting the messages. Could the reason be that I switched carriers around New Year's? (ATT to T-Mobile, if it matters.)
Sorry, I forgot there are ads on the Web; I use Lynx.
Or not, because moving often means driving and if I'm driving you really shouldn't encourage me to read my phone.
Amber keeps getting into strangers cars. When will she ever learn?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
There already are levels to the alert system. I wasted no time turning off Amber alerts after receiving one, but I'm leaving the the other ones activated for now. I think it's a bit stupid to use the EBS tone for Amber alerts, in any case; it should be reserved for things like severe weather, zombie apocalypse, etc. If a tornado is heading for my area at 2 AM, I want to know about it.
There's a "Presidential alert" that can't be disabled, though. Hopefully, it won't ever be used (because it's likely that it will mean that World War III has started).
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I thought it was the city that never sleeps.
Some alerts I want waking me up. Like tornado, hurricane, etc. Others, I do not. If I get woken up too many times by useless alerts, I'll turn off my phone. So will others. And then the system becomes useless. It needs some priority levels or message types upon which we can filter.
Oh and by the way: Stop recruiting me to help solve custody battles and other pissing matches between members of the Jerry Springer demographic.
Have gnu, will travel.
Several of the public schools around me have gotten new robocall systems, meant to be used to mass-alert all parents when something happens. School closings, emergencies, stuff like that.
Naturally, the school principals have been quick to send out mass calls for anything, up to and including announcing dates for sporting events. I hear quite a bit of grumbling from people about this.
Basically, if you give anyone a way to easily send a message to a large number of people, they will find an excuse to use it. Hell, we saw that with spam - it was so easy to send emails by the thousands that we had to pass laws against it, and we *still* haven't solved the problem.
That's what happened here. Someone found an excuse to use their shiny toy and feel important, and they used it, despite the fact that a) the circumstances did not really justify such a response, and b) the message sent was not even good at solving the problem.
In this case, a child was stolen away from child services by his mother in the middle of a supervised visit. While the woman was bipolar and could have been a theoretical risk to her child (why she didn't have custody in the first place), this is not the sort of child abduction scenario most people envisioned when the Amber Alert system was put into place.
Additionally, most of the people contacted were in no position to help. And I doubt the alert was timely since it's highly unlikely that this woman has given a supervised visitation at a social services facility just shy of 4:00 AM. This means that the situation most likely had been developing for hours, and the alert should have gone out when it was likely she'd still be driving with the child. That means the information was most likely useless to everyone who received it. Contacting them caused them harm with no benefit to the child.
I mean, really, what do you expect people to do? Get up, get out of bed, get dressed, and go hunting around their block for cars matching the description? At 4:00 AM? Or should they just lie there in bed, frustrated at their powerlessness to help a child that somewhere is maybe suffering?
What is the appropriate reaction in your mind that shows ones priorities are in place?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Which you'd have known if you had bothered to read some of the messages above you before whining to all of us about how you're an ignorant little git.
Wow, someone's cranky. Did you not get enough sleep last night?
(likely not the indented result of last night's exercise).
Likely not the intended spelling of "intended."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Alarm fatigue is what it's called. When there is simply one alert after another and becomes routine, then it really is not an alert after all (or at least how your brain will be conditioned).
mfwright@batnet.com
But the candy's so good!
-- Amber
Back in January, the ENTIRE state of Florida was awaken by an emergency Amber alert sent to their phones:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/early-morning-amber-alert-catches-florida-residents-by-surprise/1270496
T-mobile did the same thing here in WA 6 months ago, they started sending out an amber alert at 3am and we kept getting these alerts every 20 minutes for hours until we turned the phones off. We still kept getting them that night even 10-12 hours after the missing boy was found. Finally found a setting in our phones to disable all these alerts.
The "Amber alert" system was in response to a stranger kidnapping. They believed this boy was abducted by his mother. It shouldn't even qualify. But it did. If the police hadn't sent out all available alarms and they found the child dead as part of a murder-suicide (as they were fearing), the police would have been blamed. But send out an alert, and they are blamed. What would you have them do? And what should they do if many disagree with your opinion?
Learn to love Alaska
The same thing we did before the Amber alert system. The Police would do their jobs and put out an APB hit the streets and keep a lookout for a specific car. Alerting an entire city and "fear mongering" is apparently only a recent event.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
But send out an alert, and they are blamed.
Problem is they sent out a completely worthless alert to an incredibly broad group of people.
It's my alarm clock.
It's NOT the government's alarm clock for me.
I rely on my phone for an alarm clock (one that actually tracks the depth of my sleep and wakes me at the most appropriate moment), and I do not appreciate it being co-opted at that time of the night.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I don't know about the GP poster, but unless the weather's trying actively to kill me, I generally don't care enough to keep up with it. That's what we have buildings for -- to keep it away from us. Now when it gets good and angry enough to make an attempt on me and my neighbors, I do appreciate the warning.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There hasn't been a Presidential alert, but it's part of the EBS system for cases like World War III or Alien invasions.
At my place of work, we normally reserve emergency alerts for real emergencies like "Active shooter" or "Hurricane bearing on city, seek shelter". Then last year, someone decided that sending notifications about free flu vaccinations would be a good use of emergency alerts, so I got a text message, two phone calls, and two emails about availability of flu vaccine.
..... including the person driving the Lexus in question.
When Mount St. Helens blew nothing happened announcement wise, and there were a lot of complains about it.
A few days (week?) later Mount St. Helens burped, the local radio advised everybody about it, giving all sorts of
useless information. then the emergency broadcast was set off, it was the same lines word for word of
the news alert yet not a recording. Local station didn't want to be scooped, and the ones that activate the alert.
I was on my back repairing the car yet still floored over it.
And the burp? Didn't do anything or bother anyone not on the mountain itself.
and report on your neighbour when we text you.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Everyone was aware of the impending Mt St Helens activity... for about sixty days, including a state of emergency declared over 30 days before the main event...
20th March, 1980
Moderate earthquake under volcano signified rising magma.
25th March
Mountain closed to climbers.
27th March
First eruption in 123 years. Ash emitted to 3 km into the air and a small crater formed on the summit.
30th March
Sightseers flocked to area.
3rd April
State of emergency declared.
17th April
Risk of landslide recognised on the volcano north flank.
22nd April - 7th May
Volcano stopped erupting but bulging continued. By 27th April the bulge measured 2.5 km across and protruded 80 m.
7th May
Large earthquakes under volcano. Ash and steam emissions resumed after two weeks of quiet.
12th May
A larger than normal earthquake caused a one kilometer long avalanche down the north slope.
14th May.
Only small eruptions.
15th May
No eruptions.
17th May.
30 car loads of residents enter the restricted zone to gather possessions.
18th May 1980
The large eruption began at 8:32 am.
An earthquake shook loose the upper northern flank of the volcano. About 3 cubic km of of the mountain slid down in a massive avalanche at 250 km/hr.
The avalanche released pressure on the volcano and unleashed a huge explosion. A 300-500 km/hr blast of hot gases and fractured rock covered 600 sq km in minutes. 30 seconds after the initial blast the volcano released a Plinian eruption column of ash which rose to a height of 25 km in 15 minutes. The ash reaches Spokane 430 km away in 3½ hours. From noon until 5:30 pm nuee ardentes swept 8 km down the northern slopes of the volcano at 300 km/hr. Mudflows raged down the side of the volcan and were caused by melting of the snow on the mountain.
Effects of the eruption.
57 people were killed.
400 m lost from the height of the mountain.
Total damage bill one billion dollars.
http://www.volcanolive.com/sthelens.html
The WTC Tower attacks that happened in 2001 - since those were so well covered by news media - the Presidential Alert System /EBS wasn't even activated...
"many have taken the step of deactivating these alerts to avoid future jolting mid-slumber alarms"
The system is a very bad idea - no matter whether it is texts, phone calls, emails or what ever. Abuses like this will push people to turn off their links to the system. Justifying such systems is mere fascist totalitarianism.
But the candy's so good! -- Amber
I always thought Amber was the one with the sweet, sweet candy. Huh. Mixed that up somehow.
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
It has never been used. Remember this is all just part of the Emergency Alert System, the thing radio and TV has had forever. It is just integrated in to phones now, since more people are using those. The president has always had the ability to issue an alert on radio and TV. The FCC 'owns' the public airwaves, they can demand their use, if needed.
So far, even during 9/11, there has never been a presidential alert. So clearly they save it only for the really, really, big things, hence why you can't turn it off.
It's true, nobody's been named (at birth) "Amber" since some time in 1989.
+1 Disagree
The TNG episode where suddenly everyone is jacked into a google glass like "game", and wesley crusher and i believe ashley judd are the only ones immune. Only instead of a game, it is now a smart phone, and I am wesley crusher without a smart phone or ashley judd.
That's what I am thinking reading all these comments. Seriously, does everyone have a always on internet connected smartphone these days??
You have internet at work, internet at home. Do you really need it while you are traveling from work to home as well? Do you really need internet access when you are out supposedly spending time outside, away from the internet? or is that not an acceptable thing anymore. Smart phones drive me crazy, but everyone seems to have them!!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
"time to steal a new car..."
Unequivocally the realest of the realz...
When they don't alert everyone with radio broadcasts and children are later found dead, the police is asserted to be ineffective and bumbling Keystone Cops.
Learn to love Alaska
Alerting an entire city and "fear mongering" is apparently only a recent event.
Not that I don't disagree this text was probably overkill, but "fear mongering" might be the wrong phrase to describe a text trying to locate an actually missing girl.
They didn't steal the one in question. Unlike the movies, people don't steal cars every 2 blocks to ensure they aren't followed. She was a mentally ill person who kidnapped a child they weren't allowed to be alone with for the safety of the child, not an international criminal mastermind with 30 years training in stealing cars.
Learn to love Alaska
Unlike the movies, people don't steal cars every 2 blocks to ensure they aren't followed. ...not an international criminal mastermind with 30 years training in stealing cars.
Right. 30 years of training to bash/coathanger a window, and pop the ignition. More like 10 minutes. Only did it once, to my own vehicle. 10 minutes. I think *you* watch too many movies... Plus you wouldn't do it every 2 blocks. Just every time the Wireless Emergency Alert went off. LOL, that was the post I was responding to.
Unequivocally the realest of the realz...
EAS alerts can be helpful, but they have become so abused that 90% of the alerts are not actually emergencies, and most frequently are not even close to being emergencies worthy of alerting everyone with a cell phone.
A confirmed tornado is an emergency. Doppler readings favorable for tornado formation are not.
An amber alert is not an emergency, let alone activating EAS for the initial alert and every 10 minutes thereafter with a repeat of the original message.
A fast-spreading wildfire is an emergency for the people in the affected area. A car fire on the interstate is not.
A suspicious person in the area is not an emergency.
I've gotten alerts for all of these. I ultimately just turned them all off. If I hear thunder, I check out my Weatherbug Elite. If I smell smoke, I look outside for the fire. I quite frankly no longer care if some negligent parent failed at their duty to protect their child.
I don't see how they expected any other outcome when they started expanding the scope of what constitutes an "emergency."
I use to watch TV at night but now I dont. If I fall asleep that damn alert wakes me. I cant opt out so I pitched the bedroom tv. I might bring it back with a ruko box to watch and ditch cable.
Or it could just be silent. If I'm sleeping, I'm not about to go looking for a suspect automobile, anyway.
So... all these people could have gotten a message or phonecall from just anyone during the night? Then what are they bitching about?
Where I live, AMBER alerts are normally sent only between 6 AM and 10 PM. You have to take action yourself to enable receiving messages during the night. That's not such a strange thing to implement. Why hasn't NYPD implemented that? I'm sure the technology is sophisticated enough that you should also be able to specify an interval where you don't want to receive alerts yourself.
Was there any indication at the time through the alert system that this was just a missing child case?
Using something like this system to find a car, especially at 4am but without providing any context would immediately have me thinking that the car was a serious threat, on a city wide scale. Using such overkill without providing context would make me immediately think the car was needed to prevent a very large terrorist attack.
Fear Mongering seems to be the right phrase in this case.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
I thought amber alerts were referring to the color
Please note: I'm a Brit. That nation that Americans love to berate as the 1984 of the modern world. I live in London, the most populous city in the country, 33 times more population dense than New York.
THE VERY FIRST TIME that a government (or organisation) sends an emergency alert to my phone that isn't related to a DIRECT DANGER that I am LIKELY to need to avoid, the system used to send it goes in the bin. Smartphone, email, web-interception, text message, phone call, whatever.
Solicited or not. Decreed from the top or not. Turn-off-able or not. As you can probably tell from my attitude - it has NEVER happened in 20+ years of me owning a mobile phone, or my lifetime of owning a landline. Not during bus bombings. Not during IRA attacks. Not during attacks on airports. Not even school attacks with guns.
If a child goes missing, put it on the news, with photos of the suspect and child.
If there's a tornado or fire that might burn my house down, send the police around to inform residents and evacuate them. Don't rely on the little old lady having a cellphone and answering it at 4am and evacuating herself.
If there's a chemical leak or terrorist attack that covers a huge area and endangers thousands of lives, sure. You can send a text message to **local** cell masts AND send round the police then.
If a school is taken hostage by a gun-toting maniac - quite what do you think a message that targets ANYONE but those on the school premises is going to do apart from incite panic and worsen the situation? Campus alerts? Never even HEARD of such a thing over here (I work in schools!), but we probably do have them in some places if you look hard enough even if they are never used.
But, hell, the very, very, very first time I ever get a text from an official source about an emergency where my life is not - in all probability - in danger, complaints will be made AND the device will go in the bin.
Emergency alerts to everyone in the middle of the night for a missing child? Sorry, with all the sympathy in the world for the parent's plight, you simply cannot do that on the scale of even a small city.
Plus, we've seen the hackability of these alerts already. How long until some rogue element tells people of an emergency, informs them to gather in the street at point X and then blows them all up / incites a riot / raids the bank vault while everyone is away?
Yet again, the US has accepted something as necessary and "the norm" that other countries would recoil in horror at the mere suggestion of putting the concept to the populous. I have no doubt we do have an emergency broadcast system of some kind. The fact is that we've NEVER used it, and certainly not for missing children.
We don't have as many natural disasters, granted. We have, however, had more terrorism against us in the last 100 years than the US has. Just the IRA bombings in London alone were so frequent and deadly that they lost all effectiveness in terms of "terror" ("What was that?" "Oh, probably just the IRA again - going to have to check the bloody Tube timetable again now to get to work on time..."), and the IRA eventually became politicians and rioters instead.
But missing-person alerts? Rogue nutters? Probably we have our fair share on the same scale. Hell, a soldier walking along a street in London was beheaded for no reason only the other day and the guy who did it gave interviews to the camera. It was a news story for a day. The funeral was a news story for a day. End of.
God, we'd jam our phones solid worrying about that kind of shit.
So sleep is more important than finding an abducted or missing child? What kind of self absorbed useless garbage inhabit NYC? Reminds me of the opening scene in Boondock Saints when nobody would help a screaming murder victim. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwIJ9pRWBpo
While NYC was at fault here, why sleep with a potential wake-up-machine next to you? Next time it won't be an Amber alert, but a drunk buddy who's lost track of the time. Why risk it?
I have a weather radio and the only alerts you cannot shut off are warnings for hurricane, tornado, fire, and some BS National Emergency. Seems a rational approach for mobile as well.
And yes, Amber Alerts are now also broadcast on 'weather' radios (thankfully they can be shut off too).
The same thing happened in Atlanta about three weeks ago. An Amber alert went off at 2:44am on the Emergency Broadcast Network.
More like an alert that there's been a serious attack on our country or a major natural disaster. It's pure wingnut derp to suggest that it would be used to track the ignorant teabaggers.
Because they waited hours and hours until they decided to send the alert, and for some reason couldn't wait a few hours more. It's a shame, because they just forced a ton of people to opt out of the alerts.
that the kid was found and it was because of the alert and yes, they had been kidnapped. no, not everyone is asleep at that time, so he missed that point. plus, normal people turn off the ringer when they're sleeping, otherwise you get what's coming to you.
I have many interests of my own, too, sure. Doesn't mean anyone else should care.
These alerts come from a system controlled by FEMA and less than 200 local governments are currently using that system. So here's a way to get better, more relevant safety alerts and still get a good night's sleep: sign up for your local emergency alert service. Thousands of counties and cities across the US have them. And you can sign up for yours at http://www.usnear.org./ Choose "text messages" and they will come in like normal texts (not a 3 alarm fire alert!). Which means they won't override your DND settings.
by using it once like this.