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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.
Wolf Wolf! Wolf!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I was surprised when the tornado warning alert went off on my phone last week here in Ohio. It was the second week that I have had the phone, a Galaxy S4. My Galaxy Nexus was more of a vibrate when one of the amber alerts or weather warnings went off. When the S4 fired, it was like a portable tornado siren. I kid you not, it rivaled the testing of the emergency broadcast system on televisions.
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.
So what have you done with the real Lord Apathy?
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".
Yeh, mine went off a couple of weeks ago for a flood warning. I was already in the office and my phone and a few others went off. They made strange tones as opposed to the normal email/txt/phone tones.
Meanwhile, my co-worker was still driving to work when his went off. He never heard it before, it apparently was piped through the car speakers via bluetooth, and scared the heck out of him. He joked that he could've had a crash/accident when it went off, but I don't think it's that far of a stretch to assume.
I got a new girlfriend, she is much easier to inflate, so I've been getting laid more. Mellowed me out some.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If it means I get jolted awake by my phone SHRIEKING at the top of it's volume setting every third day sometime between midnight and 3 AM when I have to go to work the next morning, then YES, my sleep is more important.
Waking up five million people from a sound sleep once a week or so just isn't feasible; it's crying wolf and people will simply turn their phones off (which defeats the whole purpose of it). And it's not something you can set to low volume; at least on a Verizon Droid 3, even if it's set on vibrate, an alert blares at maximum alarm volume and with a particularly annoying shriek and you CANNOT set it to a lower volume; there is only "SHRIEK" and "ignore".
Missing is a bit of a loose term the child was removed from a state facility by there mother during a supervised visit.
Sounds a lot more like the state having egg on it's face and trying to clean it up asap. This is also 12 or so hours after the fact.
No sir I dont like it.
Yes. My sleep is more important than getting woken up at 4am with an alert telling me about a missing child in a city the size of NYC. Who is going to be looking out their window at that time of the morning?
Let's think about the math. Add up all those minutes of missed sleep. Work out how that equates to minutes of life lost (people dieing earlier), add the car accidents because some people can't get back to sleep if woken up at 4am, and are drowsy when they drive/step off the curb.
Adds up to more than one child's life is worth.
Fuck the child. No wait. Forget the child, it's going to be fucked anyway (presumably that's why it got kidnapped?).
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
The Wireless Emergency Alerts system was intended mostly to be for major emergencies where everyone needs to be notified (e.g. there's a tornado coming your way seek cover). Sending an alert to everyone in the middle of the night to look out for a license plate number is a poor use of the system. The net result is that many people got annoyed and are now deactivating what could be a very important resource in the future. Information such as "look our for a Tan Lexus" is best directed at people in a position to make use of it... e.g., notifying those out on the road via electronic road signs and radio broadcasts. Waking a city of 8 million up to give them information that is totally useless will just annoy people.
Amber Alerts are worthless and do absolutely nothing in over 95% of cases. In the US, there were less than 400 reported stranger abductions, but over 40,000 amber alerts were issued.
Several police studies have shown them to be quite nearly worthless, but the economic cost of putting up thousands of road signs, deploying massive international tracking and notification systems has counted in the tens of billions of dollars.
You do realize how many MORE children's lives could be saved by $10 billion in health care and nutritional supplements... or even in mental health, considering the suicide rate amongst children is a factor of TEN higher than the abduction rate.
Holy crap....
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.
They're bitching because at 4AM in bed there's not a damned thing they could have done about it. Alerts should be confined to situations where being alerted is helpful.
In prior events, the amber alerts were simply displayed on street signs so that people who might actually have the possibility of spotting the car were told and nobody else.
To put it in perspective, as sad as it is, if they alert everyone for everything, it will be just one long uninterrupted alarm. people have to prioritize.
Too many custody battle child-nappings or teen runaways. When you get a rare stranger kidnapping, how would you know then?
Well yes it could.
People need sleep to function well in society. If you wake up a large portion of NYC and break their sleep. They could be less alert during the day where they may affect the lives of others.
The alert system really should be information that you really should get kicked out of bed for.
Tornado, Hurricane, Earthquake, Approaching Fire, Flood, Nuclear Explosion. You know stuff if you stay in bed and sleep in, you could be dead before your normal wake up time.
It isn't that Amber Alerts are bad, however it shouldn't be on the emergency, get the fuck out of bed alerts.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The police exist to handle such situations. I do not. There is probably nothing I can do to help, and certainly not while I'm trying to sleep. If this happened to me, I'd have to start turning off my phone at nights.
There are several problems with the alert as it was issued:
It conveyed information in an arcane, effectively incomprehensible manner.
People who were asleep aren't going to be useful for finding a car, and pretty much everyone at that particular time of day is going to be asleep, or on a night shift at work.
People who are driving a car will either have to ignore the message or endanger themselves and everyone around them. Or get shouted at by their car's speaker system, apparently, which is an accident risk itself.
There's a reason these alerts are traditionally issued via roadside signs and the TV/radio. This was stupid and whoever issued the alert should be fired, because now people are just going to turn off these alerts entirely rather than have to deal with useless, uncommunicative, and potentially dangerous alerts that they can't do anything about anyway.
Welcome to New York City, where it's somebody else's problem.
Exactly. It is someone else's problem.
People in a small town can do something useful. People in a big city are probably miles away from where they could do something useful. Sending out this kind of stupid message just encourages them to ignore all messages in future.
They are not asking you to look out the window at 4 am or go looking for a missing child.
Then what's the point?
They are putting the information out there so you will know a child is missing.
So why are they doing it at 4am? The breakfast news would be more effective.
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!
If you wake me up in the middle of the night to ask me if I've seen a car, my response is going to be a good solid "fuck off".
Bad things happen all of the time, I don't need a personal notice of every damned one of them -- and nowadays they'll trot out an amber alert if a kid is 10 minutes late getting home from school.
I'm not on the taskforce to protect children, and I'm not willing to be dragged into the weeping and gnashing which happens every time anything happens and people panic over it.
All I hear is "ZOMG, a child is missing, quick everybody stop what your doing and look for it". It might serve to keep the populace in near panic most of the time, but I'm betting it does very little else.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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").
So a child's life is less important to you then a few minutes of missing sleep?
"Every 40 seconds in the United States, a child becomes missing or is abducted".
Let me know when sleep becomes more important to you than every single one of those childrens' lives, so I can laugh heartily at you.
I'm with you on spending money on healthcare of all kinds, but the AMBER stats I'm finding are nowhere like what you're claiming. They look pretty effective from http://www.statisticbrain.com/amber-alert-statistics/ and http://www.chp.ca.gov/amber/ - do you have some sources for the stats and studies you're citing? It would be most helpful.
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?
My phone did it's first Amber Alert a few months ago.
It was screaming in a tone that I had never heard before, louder than any noise the phone had ever made. It sounded like the fire alarm, but it was coming from my pocket. Scared the crap out of me, could have caused an accident had I been driving. Fortunately it was during the day, not while I was asleep. Another one happened the next day, and then I figured out how to kill the alerts and did so. If I could make it a quiet tone, then OK, but this terror beep? No, and it didn't seem to be configurable.
As for a few minutes of missing sleep, let's say it's five minutes. Multiply that times four million, and that's 38 years lost for an action that probably won't do anything to actually find the missing child. It does add up.
Actually, the cost is greater than that, as disrupting people's sleep causes them to sleep poorly, and they may drive more poorly the next day, do their job more poorly, etc. It could possibly cause fatal accidents, etc. It's quite possible that by alerting everybody about this missing child, they've actually caused a few deaths.
There is something so compelling about a decision made in the interests of good, but so boneheaded and asperger's-style singlemindedness that it results in the exact opposite. Makes you just want to smack the person responsible until *you* get tired of it
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
Say what? Where are you getting those numbers? In all of 2011, there were a total of 158 amber alerts issued in the entire US. Of those alerts, 144 resulted in a successful recovery. 28 of the recoveries were a direct result of the alert
Where do you get your numbers? Because your number of amber alerts is off by several orders of magnitude, wherever you found them.
NCEMC, which administers the AMBER Alert program, reports that in 2011, there were 158 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States. (source)
13 of those alerts were hoaxes, 6 were determined to be 'unfounded.' 127 of the cases, the child (or children) were recovered within 72 hours.
Since 2005, the number of alerts nationwide has declined from a high of 275 (involving 338 children) to 2011's total of 158 (involving 197 children).
That's a far cry short of "40,000 amber alerts issued," even if you look at the lifetime of the program, unless 2012 and 2013 saw literally tens of thousands of amber alerts issued every year.
And bear in mind, an AMBER Alert activation in California isn't going to be broadcast to the people in NYC, and vice versa. The number of AMBER alerts any person is likely to see in a given year tops out at 10-15 for people living in California, where the highest number was seen.
Protip: A city the size of New York, there is always a child missing.
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.
You mean in places where you wouldn't get fired because you skipped work that day? and you wouldn't get arrested for interfering with the police? and the guy who found the child and walked him back to his parents wouldn't end up with his face plastered on TV with the caption "Child Molester?" for the next week?
That information is useless. A user needs to be able to turn this off on a stock cellphone.
In my country, we would then have a Royal Commission into wells, with broad terms of reference, headed by an eminent QC or ex-judge and who would report to Parliament in 3 years.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
So, 28 of the amber alerts resulted in successful recovery and something else was responsible for the other 116.
Now, to determine the actual effectiveness, we have to figure out how many of those 28 would have been recovered by some other means had the alert not done it sooner.
nevertheless, I believe OP wasn't aware that most of those signs and such were there anyway for other purposes and so don't really count towards the cost of the amber alert system.
I know this may be difficult to wrap your head around, but a significant number of people are up and starting their day between 4 and 5 am.
Then they can see it on the TV news before they go to work.
I see no reason not to set off an alert every 40 seconds on the phones of the asshats who think this alert was appropriate.
That and city living is just plain different. Where I grew up, there were only a few hundred people and so you greeted every single person that you met on the street, even if you didn't know them.
If you tried that in NYC, you'd go nuts on the first block. Small town behavior simply doesn't scale to Manhattan.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
..... including the person driving the Lexus in question.
I see you like inventing numbers. Try these actual ones for a change: if each of those five million people finished just 1 minute less worth of work the next day because of their interrupted sleep, the collective loss would be equivalent to killing someone who still had 30 years left in the workforce. 2 minutes each and you're killing time that's equivalent to someone who has 60 years of work ahead of them. I.e. They're effectively sacrificing one lifespan in order to try and gain back another, except in this case they had little reason to expect it to work, since the alert came 12 hours after the child was kidnapped (i.e. enough time to have already driven to Chicago from New York). It was a bad trade.
Or how about the fact that your best chance for success is in reaching the most people? Ideally they would have posted the alert before people were asleep, but since they were already 12 hours late and a good chunk of people don't start their day off by checking their phone for things that happened in the middle of the night, they may as well have waited another few hours so that they could reach more than just 10% of the city (to use your number). If 10% of the city is reachable at 4am, how many do you think are reachable at 7am? 50%? More? And that would also be at or shortly before people get on the road, which means it'd be a good time to ask people to be on the lookout for a car, since it would be fresh on their mind (not to mention that they wouldn't resent it for waking them up).
Even more importantly, this entire system is predicated on the good will and volunteer participation of those involved. Every time they cry "Wolf!" like this they piss on that good will and give people a reason to change their mind. Once you lose those people, you won't be getting them back. How many thousands of people do you think turned off their alerts forever last night? One person's sleep may be a small sacrifice for a life, but taken collectively their choice to post that alert decreased the odds of the system working in the future with alerts that are actually decent.
But hey, at least an Anonymous Coward on the Internet thinks it was a good idea, so I'm sure they're patting each other on the back.
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...
Camping that weekend, breakfast heard an explosion and I joked Mount St. Helens blew. Packed up
and left the valley about 5:00pm when we saw the sky. Living in Texas I've seen tornado clouds and what it looked like.
Stopping in for more beer I asked whats with the weather, and told it was Mount St. Helens.
No emergency devices, no radio alerts nada thus the first part of the sentence
"When Mount St. Helens blew nothing happened announcement wise,"
Now build up, and afterwards there's lots of stats and stuff; but it was the evening news on T.V. we learned anything of the event itself.
Second part of the first sentence "and there were a lot of complains about it." brought about this radio alert of something that
mattered little to anybody outside of a very small radius.