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Trump Will Get Power To Send Unblockable Mass Text Messages To All Americans (nymag.com)
President-elect Donald Trump will have access to a system which can send unblockable texts to every phone in the United States once he becomes the president. From a report on NYMag: These 90-character messages, known as Wireless Emergency Alerts (or WEAs), are part of a program put in place after Congress passed the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act, in 2006. WEAs allow for targeted messages to be sent to every cell phone getting a signal from certain geographically relevant cell towers (or, in a national emergency, all of them). While it'd be a true nightmare to get screeching alerts from your phone that "Loser Senate Democrats still won't confirm great man Peter Thiel to Supreme Court. Sad!", there are some checks and balances on this. While President-elect Trump hasn't shown much impulse control when it comes to his favorite mass-messaging service, Twitter, the process for issuing a WEA isn't as simple as typing out a 90-character alert from a presidential smartphone and hitting "Send." All WEAs must be issued through FEMA's Integrated Public Alert Warning System, meaning that an emergency alert from the president still has at least one layer to pass through before being issued. While FEMA is under control of the executive branch (the head of FEMA is selected by the president, and reports to the Department of Homeland Security), the agency would have a vested interest in not seeing their alert system bent toward, uh, non-emergency ends.
LOLOLOLOL
Journalists, be careful what you publish. Don't give donald ideas!
First FEMA tweet
Rosie O'donnell is a yuge bitch!!!!
Instead of reading a summary of Mr. Trump's 3AM tweets in The Wall Street Journal each morning, I'll be force to read each one as they come in real time.
Yeah, yeah, right. Presidents have been able to do this for a long time. No big deal.
Why this is news is because in the past, presidents were sane.
(Idea: incoming administration should modernize nuclear launch system for the 21st century so it is possible to give launch orders via Twitter.)
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This is a low ^^ id number. That is all.
Because Donald Trump is technically a sociopath?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes. Yes there is ... and obviously you, youngster, are not on it. ;P
How is it that whenever there is a discussion regarding low UIDs you guys seem to crop up. Is there like a mailing list that people report to that you're all subscribed to for notifications?
"Mailing list"? "Subscribed"? Ha!
No, I'm sure these guys predate all that new-fangled nonsense. The 4-digit UID guys have a 1980s-style robocall recorded message that goes out; the system that operates it runs on a beowulf cluster of Commodore 64s.
The 3-digit UID guys have a network of carrier pigeons that send out "notifications."