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First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts Are a Mess
Mark Gibbs writes "AT&T's implementation of the FCC's Emergency Alerts System provides minimally useful information in an untimely fashion with little geolocational relevance. ... Yesterday California got its first AMBER alert and my notification arrived at 10:54pm. It came up as panel over my lock screen and here's what it looked like on my notifications screen: 'Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE: LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door.' The problem with this it that's all there is! You can stab away at the message as much as you like but that's all you get, there's no link to any detail and considering the event it related to occurred over 240 miles away from me near to the Mexican border, the WEA service seems to be poorly implemented. Indeed, many Californians were annoyed and confused by the alert and according to the LA Times 'Some cellphones received only a text message, others buzzed and beeped. Some people got more than one alert.' I got a second copy of the alert at 2:22am and other subscribers reported not receiving any alert until late this morning."
It seems to have gone down about as well as New York's.
Earth to submitter: AT&T is a mess.
Remain calm! All is well!
People on Verizon and T-Mobile got the same message. But sure, just blame AT&T for it anyway.
All services implemented the same feature and sent the EXACT same nearly useless message (which was written by a CA agency and approved by FEMA before being sent out).
Makes no sense to single out "AT&T's implementation"... it's mostly the cell phone manufacturer's implementation, and the govt's decision to send it out to the entire state in the middle of the night...
I live in Illinois and didn't watch the news tonight so I wasn't aware of the Amber alert in California. However, from the message you posted, here is what I got:
AMBER ALERT
Location: Boulevard, California
California License Plate: 6WCU986
Car Make: Nissan
Car Model: Versa
Car Color: Blue
Other Attributes: 4 door, not 2 door.
I received the message via Sprint, despite being 400 miles from the affected area. I guess this is one way to make sure people start ignoring these messages.
There WAS NO USEFUL geographic info'.
I got the same message as the submission on Virgin (Sprint). Where the hell is "Boulevard, CA"? California is a big state; more than a day's drive NS for most people.
If I'm driving, the alert is on the big orange-text signs every couple of miles, and I'm NOT supposed to be taking text messages while driving.
If I'm home, in bed (or, in my case, watching a movie), how much good does it do to wake/text me?
As to "what more do I (you) need?": tell me if it's a custody dispute or a "stranger" kidnapping. In the former case, I don't care, while in the latter, I do. The custodial parent isn't always the more fit, they might just have better lawyers, 'specially abusive, wealthy fathers/husbands.
I got the same alert four times in the last 24 hours, several hours apart. And I was just in a night class with 100 other people, and four separate times during the class somebody's phone (including mine, once) started blaring the alert at max volume. My phone was on vibrate. One person couldn't figure out how to silence their phone, and ended up running out of the room with phone still blaring. After 3 seconds, if you don't silence it, the phone starts reading the alert text at maximum volume too (using TTS). I have an HTC One, which has incredibly loud speakers, so this is not cool. Of course, Amber Alerts are now disabled on my phone, which reminds me of the stupidity of Windows User Account Control popups -- people click on them just to get them to go away, so they lose their value. Incidentally, Presidential Alerts may not be disabled on Android. I just hope the US President never has a good reason to ring every phone in the nation at full volume.
Don't blame (only) AT&T for the terse message. The WEA system limits messages to 90 characters:
http://www.fema.gov/wireless-emergency-alerts
WEA will look like a text message. The WEA message will show the type and time of the alert, any action you should take, and the agency issuing the alert. The message will be no more than 90 characters.
I can't believe the government asked for such an arbitrary and small limit on message size, so I'm assuming that the carriers said that's all they could provide, probably because a 90 character message fit into some control message they were already sending to phones.
Alerts don't sell phones or services, so it's probably funded, staffed, and supported like anything else that doesn't contribute to profits: poorly.
Expect it to either be pwned after a few times, or "This important message is brought to you by General Motors"
I do wonder how long it will be until someone figures out how to hack the system and uses it to send out repeated "Presidential Alerts" in the middle of the night -- those alerts can't be blocked by any phone settings. Worse if the alert says "Incoming nuclear missiles. Evacuate your town immediately. Don't trust radio or TV."
The radius needs to be quite wide, because a person can travel a great distance in a car in a short period of time. 800 miles would not be unreasonable depending on when the missing child was reported.
Abducted children are often taken quite far away.
The fact it was an Amber alert tells you a child is involved, and the alert had all other information needed to report something, basically the plates and make/model of the car.
I guess the different times of reception are an issue but something is better than nothing, and it takes time to work through a list of many cell phone numbers to send out an alert... obviously they do need to improve on the speed of that, and try to remove duplicates.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First, I was watching cable tv when the show was interrupted by the EBS (with a computer synthesized voice, no less, yet it still sounded like a bad CB radio). My cable box inexplicably returned to some random channel that I wasnt watching. Thanks Time Warner and Motorola, your cable box SUCKS in yet another aspect. Then, hours later (at like 10pm or so), all three t-mobile cell phones got the alert. We got the alert yet again the next day. For something that occurred at around 5PM? The suspect could have been out of state or in mexico by then. At the time I was thinking, what makes this kid so special, this sort of thing probably happens daily.. I didn't know the details on the story until the next day. This might be useful if it arrived within, say, an hour or less of the incident and was sent to phones geographically within the area the suspect could have traveled in that amount of time (80 miles?).
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Did you get the message on your phone? I did. It was just a plain bad experience for most people. Scared the crap out of me, it vibrated and made a crazy loud noise I'd never heard before even though my phone was in my pocket and supposedly on mute. The first thing I did was disable all future amber alerts (which was the only option in the iPhone's settings), as apparently did millions of other people who were woken up or otherwise freaked out by the way it was delivered. One of the main things they needed to avoid with this "opt out" system was the "car alarm syndrome", and they completely failed that.
The message was completely irrelevant for those of us 600+ miles away. I don't even own a car, I live in an urban area. I literally have NO idea what a Nissan Versa looks like. Literally NONE. I NEVER look at license plates on vehicles while I'm walking. NEVER.
These messages have ZERO relevance. Send me a pic of the kids or the kidnapper. I don't give a shit about the fucking make/model of a car that is 600 miles away (the distance from Washington DC to Florida btw).
I can only imagine what people in the far Northern side of the state in Shasta or Humboldt thought of it all. 900 miles away something happened and they are also getting this message.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Not only that, but the entire system itself is so inherently flawed it amounts to little more than “crime-control theater.”
"His name was James Damore."
My phone made an awful, loud, startling noise. I had never heard it before, and it scared the crap out of me. It sounded like a fire alarm. Once I realized it was my phone, my first thought was some sort of disaster requiring evacuation. Once I saw the message, it was only confusing. No real information, no linkage to details.
A google search turned up more about the Amber alert, which I discovered was several hours away from me in Southern California. I'm in Northern California. The details on the web mentioned that they were suspected of escaping to Texas. So, it was absolutely irrelevant to me. I immediately looked into how to disable it, and had it disabled in a couple minutes. 75% of the others I talked to today also disabled there Amber alerts.
1. The alarm should be more moderate, or at least adjustable. It was very startling. If I had been driving when it went off, I think the effect would have been dangerous. I would have left it on if I could disable the audio alarm and just get the message.
2. It needs more information, or at least a simlpe click-through to details, location radius / distance from me, pictures of the people involved, etc.
They used the national emergency service to inform the population about some child being kidnapped. Erh... Ok, now please tell me why I should care. Yes, yes, it's probably heart breaking for the parents, and yes, yes, if it was my child I'd certainly love to use it for that but the problem is: 99.something % of the population do not give half a fuck, let alone keep an eye out for that car. "Why the fuck should I care about some random brat I don't know about?" will probably be the reaction of nearly ALL the people who got that message.
I see a "cry wolf" scenario waiting to happen. Some day in the future, something actually important, something that actually is meaningful to most of the population, will happen and people will simply click it away after reading "AMBER AL...", thinking "fuck, that kidnapping fad's getting worse than spam texts".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On iOS: settings -> notifications -> Government Alerts down at the bottom. You can turn off just Amber alerts.
On Android: open the Android messaging /application/, then menu -> settings -> emergency alerts -> disable Amber alerts.
You're right, the Amber Alert would be much more useful if they provided the exact location of the vehicle.
Wait for the alerts when http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/06/nsa-director-cyber-terrorism-snowden and the US gov has to "grab" and "bring" in all the:
..."nihilists, anarchists, activists, ..., twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years". ..... Occupation: Activist. Last seen . . ." ... watch for the running man . . . watch for a man alone, on foot . . . watch..."
"Police Alert. Wanted: Hacker in city. Has committed cyberterrorism and crimes against the State. Name:
"... watch for a man running
(welcome to Fahrenheit 451)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Only to someone who jumps to quick, incorrect, conclusions. There are thousands of things everyone could do everyday that could could save or improve others lives. We don't do the vast majority of them because the chance they will help and the time required stops it being viable. The chances of a car happening to travel 300 miles to just where I am, for me to be in a position where I see it, remember (5+ hours after the event) and actually recognise it are tiny. There would be literally dozens of things happening near by that my time would be better spent, still wasted in most cases, doing to help others instead.
If someone is going to broadcast messages to my phone that they want me to read, let alone treat as a priority, then I need to think they are. If I don't I'm going to avoid seeing as many of them as possible.
Another option is to use the DND (do not disturb) feature which I believe overrides the national alerts and prevents a 2am wakeup call when you can't help.
My phone was on DND. Didn't help. Still sounded like my house was on fire.
Disabling an important warning system that could save children seems kind of... selfish.
Oh, come on, based on your UID I would have thought you'd be better than that tired line... BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!
If you look into it at *all*, AMBER alerts have been even less useful, with more false positives, than TSA airport screening. "Crime control theater", indeed.
The issue - as usual - isn't that the problem - strangers kidnapping and murdering children - isn't horrible, it's that it's in fact extremely rare and the "solution" spends an absurd amount of time, money, and attention on it instead of the other 99.9% of the actual crimes against children. And the implementation was so bad it managed to piss off people instead of encourage them to help.
How many people knew that it would even have been an option? If it weren't for this and the previous NYC story, I wouldn't have known about it.
(My phone doesn't support it I'm pretty sure.)
If a firetruck suddenly appeared out of thin air, it may well do so.
It's not just the loudness it sounds like (having never heard such an alert) but the suddenness and unfamiliarity.
I feel that both positions are overstating things. Saying "a slightly annoying buzzing that lasts for a few seconds" is a dramatic understatement from what people saying it sounds like. (I can't find a sample of what it sounds like.) Being woken up is more than a "slight" annoyance, and there are plenty of situations where being suddenly startled by an unfamiliar loud noise can cause far more damage than "a slight annoyance."
Those probably make sense for a tornado warning or something like that, but not an AMBER alert. Virtually no one is going to do anything other than roll over and go back to sleep. It sounds like phone manufacturers went too far towards making it obnoxious for that case -- it seems quite unlikely that there would be many cases where a massive alert would garner a response that wouldn't be achieved through a simple text message alert for example.
I got the alert 6 times. By the time I got it the first time, I'd already seen the alert elsewhere. Every single time it went off, I was still not in a position to see *that* car much less any car. Had I received it once, cool, no issues whatsoever. When it blows up my phone every 5 minutes, I'm going to disable it. I think giving it 30 min of being obnoxious was plenty generous and I don't much care if you think that makes me a terrible person.
Once the system is in place there is hardly any money involved in sending out an alert. The attention is minimal
That's totally untrue. I'm not just talking about the phone part, I'm questioning the whole system - remember AMBER alerts are not just about phone messages, but billboards, radio and TV alerts, police response, FEMA review, tons of false positive reports, etc. I read an article where authorities complained that an AMBER alert hoax cost taxpayers large amounts of money all told ($50-$100k+). I assume the hoaxes cost the same as the "real" ones, so it's clearly impossible that there is hardly any money involved.
It's called opportunity cost. These alerts aren't free and resources are limited. The argument that "if it saves one child it will be worth any cost" is unfortunately not a good one when there are so many thousands that could be helped in other, much more common circumstances if the limited resources were used more wisely.
This is as beautiful an example of idiotic, worthless, counterproductive security theater as we've seen.
For starters, the implementation is something I'd expect from a drunk college sophomore who's been pulling C grades in CS courses. It's miserable. The most significant effects it's had have been to alarm, confuse, annoy and distract people -- some of whom were driving. Great idea, that last one: cause their cell phone to make a noise they've heard before so that it increases the probability they'll pick it up and look at it.
Second, the lack of detail is outrageously stupid. A recipient of this message who just happened to see such a vehicle might approach it because there's nothing in it warning them not to.
Third, sending it 24 hours later is idiotic. Any competent murdered would be in a different vehicle by then. (Once again, police assume that everyone is as stupid as they are. Most people aren't.)
Fourth, sending it multiple times ensures that many people will disable it. Way to go, alleged public safety officials.
Finally, the entire concept behind this is insane. Untrained civilians are poor observers (as anyone who's studied trial witness dynamics for even an hour knows). How many blue cars got reported because they might be Nissan Versas? (I have no idea what one of those looks like; hell, I didn't even know there was such a model.) How much manpower got diverted to deal with all those false reports instead of being used to pursue leads based on hard evidence?
This is just another case of lazy, sloppy, incompetent police work -- like we saw in Boston when they closed down the entire city and rolled armored vehicles through the streets to catch one frightened teenager and STILL couldn't manage to pull it off. It seems that the pigs in California only know how to drink coffee and shoot helpless unarmed civilians in the back -- something challenging, like tracking down a murderer, is far beyond their pitifully feeble minds.
Go through the cases individually, and you'll find it's a lot more equal than you'd like to admit. When cops get called out, they're far more likely to assume the male is the aggressor - and in fact, they will most likely behave in a dominant fashion toward the male, and certainly behave in a sympathetic fashion toward a whimpering female in a given situation. That behaviour causes things to get worse. I've heard of a man being arrested after the female stabbed him in the arm. I've seen men arrested after women assaulted them. I've lived through it with an ex- who was both abusive and aggressive, and would go crying to any male around.
Then there was my mother, who beat herself up and called the police. They prosecuted my father for it, too. That'll go in your statistics in spite of it being a complete lie.
For the record, that didn't happen just the once, either. It happened at least twice, and probably a lot more often than that. Remember: I lived through it. This is first hand.
(I also lived through it when my mother tried to stab me with a kitchen knife, after through dinner plates at me, then started screaming that I was going to assault her. She had a knife, I was barefoot, and surrounded by broken crockery and glass: she was simply putting on a scene for whoever was listening.)
In much the same way that insurance companies ask if you've had any alcohol within the 24 hours preceding a car accident, the statistics you cite simply reflect social bias. Serial killers are usually intelligent white males, so when someone starts researching a serial killer the model begins with "Assuming a white male, intelligent..." If something doesn't fit that profile, it's far more likely to be dropped, and thus not represented in the statistics.
Social bias has it that women are weaker, and need defended from the evil bad mean big bully males, who beat them up. (Social bias completely forgets that women have faster reflexes, and the strength difference between men and women isn't as great as most believe it is, making a fight more of an even match.) Women are dainty and girly and tiday, not aggressive and non-violent, while mean eat steak and drink beer, drive cars fast, pick fights, and shout a lot. Women don't go and get in fights, but guys do.
This is all bullshit. Time to update your profile of humanity.
The parents of abducted children already know their kid is abducted. There's no point in alerting them.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Amber Alert seems like a really good idea, until you look at it closely. The root problem is false positives. Not false reports of sightings of abducted children, those can be weeded through pretty effectively. False Amber Alerts.
The basic concept behind the system is that since many abducted children are killed in the first three hours, it's necessary to get the alert out there fast. But, it's also really important that there not be a flood of Amber alerts issued about kids who just wandered off to a friend's house or something, so the process of verifying that a particular case meets all of the criteria for issuing an alert pretty much guarantees that by the time the alert is issued it's too late for kids who were victims of the most frightening form of child abduction, the sort for which the alert system was created.
Research backs this logic up. Multiple studies have been done, and none have demonstrated that Amber alerts do much at all that's useful. They're most effective at finding family abduction cases, but those almost never harm the kids and almost always get resolved anyway, without the alert.
All of the actual research papers I can find are paywalled, but here's a Boston Globe article that discusses the results of one of the earliest studies. Several more have reaffirmed and even strengthened the findings of the first.
So, it really doesn't matter much if the alert delivery system is broken. The alert issuance system is fundamentally and likely irreparably flawed.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
But if poor implementation (this is not just a text-alert noise, which mutes to vibrate when told to), results in millions of people disabling Amber alerts, then you've dramatically reduced the chance of it "reaching one person who can help find the missing child" next time.
Worse, if it results in reflexively people turning off all such warnings (including weather/emergency alerts), then you've also reduced the chance of people receiving appropriate warnings of danger. Ie, you've increased the risk of preventable deaths.
In other words, the system most definitely didn't work.
Any alert that sounds when it's not needed merely trains people to ignore all such alerts. This is pretty basic "emergency" psychology, and hardly new.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.