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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.
And Obama had this power too. Don't remember quite how far back this goes, but pretty sure Bush was able to do it too.
And EVERY president going back to the start of the Emergency Broadcast System, since 1963, has had the ability to commandeer all airwaves as well. It was accidentally set off once, in 1971.
Meh.
Next story.
Emergency alerts can already be turned off on your phone. I don't need to be getting woken up at 3AM for flash flood warnings in a different watershed or missing children in a vehicle on a major interstate hours' drive away from my out-of-the-way little hometown, so I have them off already. If that means I don't get stupid fucking Trump tweets either, great.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I have been woken at 2am by idiotic Amber Alerts about incidents hundreds of miles from my home. If there was some way to block these messages, I would do so.
Blocking Amber Alerts on iOS is simple. Go to Settings -> Notifications, scroll down to the bottom of that page, unselect "AMBER Alerts" (and/or "Emergency Alerts"). I assume it's equally easy on Android.
I don't get enough Amber alerts to be annoyed by them, but your post made me curious about turning them off on my Android (Galaxy S5). A quick search on DDG revealed that, on Samsung Galaxy phones, it's a setting in the Messaging app. Interestingly, there is also an option for Presidential Alerts that is checked/selected/enabled and it cannot be unchecked.
What ever did they do before there were phones....
Well, he's not the president yet, so he doesn't have the ability to do it.
It's not news, but it's also not fake. It's basically an opinion piece, which is hardly new to /.
Because Donald Trump is technically a sociopath?
Then you must be REALLY relieved that the Clintons didn't get the executive power they were hungry to regain.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You can always kill the phone's sound before bed, and check messages when you get up. You kids just don't understand that answering your phone, whether talk, text, email, amber alert, or presidential alert is NOT MANDATORY. If you're driving, leave the damned thing in your pocket, whoever is attempting contact can wait until you get where you're going.
Stop being a slave to your phone!
If it looks like there may be tornadoes that night, you might want to let the presidential/amber alerts annoy you.
Previewing this, I laughed; this font makes "tornadoes" look like "tomadoes" (I've seen "tomatoes" misspelled like that before).
Free Martian Whores!