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Fake Cellphone Emergency Alerts About Zombies and Nuclear Attacks Predicted (backchannel.com)
"No matter how solid the system is, history reveals that false alarms -- of zombies, nuclear attacks, missing children -- are inevitable," warns an essay at Medium. An anonymous Slashdot reader summarizes the article: New York's police department is hailing emergency alerts as "the future" of government communications to citizens. But could the same system be used by scammers directing millions of people to a malware-installing site, or "a terrorist intent on causing mass panic (i.e., 'Tsunami imminent, evacuate immediately')... If the government can reach us at any time, who else can?"
The article runs through great moments in the history of false alerts -- including a 1971 incident where the national warning system mistakenly sent out the pre-nuclear attack warning, "normal broadcasting will cease immediately," and warnings in 2013 about zombie attacks in Montana, New Mexico, and Michigan. "To tell anybody that an agency is immune to these attacks would be a grave injustice," said the IT overseer at Iowa's Department of Public Safety.
The article runs through great moments in the history of false alerts -- including a 1971 incident where the national warning system mistakenly sent out the pre-nuclear attack warning, "normal broadcasting will cease immediately," and warnings in 2013 about zombie attacks in Montana, New Mexico, and Michigan. "To tell anybody that an agency is immune to these attacks would be a grave injustice," said the IT overseer at Iowa's Department of Public Safety.
>and warnings in 2013 about zombie attacks in Montana, New Mexico, and Michigan. "To tell anybody that an agency is immune to these attacks would be a grave injustice, I think most governmental agencies would be well prepared in case of zombie attacks. But I guess claiming immunity to them would be over convidence
God spoke to me
Get cracking people. Someone needs to warn about the extraterrestrial infiltration of the TSA and their plan to scan everyone to find the best subjects for abduction and probing. It might as well be you.
These ridiculous government institutions maintain popular support because they haven't been thoroughly exposed as failures. Hurry up and expose them.
Same here, and for the same reason. And I also disabled the Amber Alert on my weather radio for the same reason.
Any automated system like this needs to be a heck of a lot smarter about alerts during hours when most people are normally sleeping. An Amber Alert might be a life-or-death emergency for the kidnapped kid, but it is not a life-or-death emergency for people who are in bed asleep. I mean, it isn't as though someone is going to hear that alarm and immediately jump out of bed, get in his or her car, and start driving around looking in driveways for the suspect's vehicle....
Worse, many people have to drive late in the evenings, which means those alerts going off early in the morning can actually put lives in danger that were not in danger previously by disrupting people's sleep in ways that puts them at elevated risk of getting into an automobile accident. That makes this feature of cell phones a very dangerous tool to activate overnight. After the third early-morning wakeup in a row from a combination of two Amber Alerts and one telemarketer phone call, I turned Amber alerts off everywhere. So any good that they could have done by me knowing about them went out the window because they were too much of a nuisance.
IMO, cell phones should be aware of whether the device is in your house charging or is actually in use, and for any alert that does not constitute an immediate danger to the phone's owner, should wait to sound the Amber Alert alarm until the user picks up the phone. After all, Amber Alerts, when delivered to people who are outdoors, in their cars, or on their way out of the house is clearly useful, but for everyone else, they're a nuisance with essentially zero chance of helping anyone.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I don't want to be alerted about FAKE zombies, just the REAL ones so I know who is running for Congress.
The public is quickly being conditioned to just ignore the alerts. All the alerts that I have received are about some kid kidnapped hundreds of miles from where I live, with no useful information other than the color of the car. Like I am supposed to call the police if I notice a silver car with a kid in it? Later on the news, I find out that the kidnapper was the non-custodial dad trying to get his child away from an abusive alcoholic mother.