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New Yorkers Sue Trump and FEMA To Stop Presidential Alert (cnet.com)
Not everyone is pleased to hear that President Trump has the power to use communications systems in case of an emergency. According to CNET, three New York residents recently filed a lawsuit against President Trump and William Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to halt FEMA's new Presidential Alert messaging system.
The lawsuit reads in part: "Plaintiffs are American citizens who do not wish to receive text messages, or messages of any kind, on any topic or subject, from defendant Trump. [Trump's] rise to power was facilitated by weaponized disinformation that he broadcast into the public information sphere via Twitter in addition to traditional mass media." From the report: Presidential Alerts are similar to Amber or other emergency alerts on your phone -- you hear a loud noise comes along with vibration. The messages come from the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), which attempts to send the alert to every cell phone within the U.S. operating on a network run by a carrier opting into the Wireless Emergency Alert system. IPAWS is used in the event of natural disasters, acts of terrorism or other disasters or threats to public safety. The plaintiffs' main complaint is that Presidential Alerts are compulsory -- there's no way to opt-out of receiving them. They argue that under civil rights law, government cannot use cellular devices to compel listening, "trespass into and hijack" devices without a warrant or individual consent.
The plaintiffs are also concerned Trump might use the alerts to spread disinformation because IPAWS doesn't regulate the content of the messages. That means Trump may be free to define "act of terrorism" and "threat to public safety," and may broadcast "arbitrary, biased, irrational" messages to "hundreds of millions of people," the plaintiffs say in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit reads in part: "Plaintiffs are American citizens who do not wish to receive text messages, or messages of any kind, on any topic or subject, from defendant Trump. [Trump's] rise to power was facilitated by weaponized disinformation that he broadcast into the public information sphere via Twitter in addition to traditional mass media." From the report: Presidential Alerts are similar to Amber or other emergency alerts on your phone -- you hear a loud noise comes along with vibration. The messages come from the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), which attempts to send the alert to every cell phone within the U.S. operating on a network run by a carrier opting into the Wireless Emergency Alert system. IPAWS is used in the event of natural disasters, acts of terrorism or other disasters or threats to public safety. The plaintiffs' main complaint is that Presidential Alerts are compulsory -- there's no way to opt-out of receiving them. They argue that under civil rights law, government cannot use cellular devices to compel listening, "trespass into and hijack" devices without a warrant or individual consent.
The plaintiffs are also concerned Trump might use the alerts to spread disinformation because IPAWS doesn't regulate the content of the messages. That means Trump may be free to define "act of terrorism" and "threat to public safety," and may broadcast "arbitrary, biased, irrational" messages to "hundreds of millions of people," the plaintiffs say in the lawsuit.
This is so butthurt, stupid, and such a waste of effort and thought. It's perfect for the millennial snowflake crowd. It let's them signal virtue with no effort, and while accomplishing nothing at all of value.
In fact it's basically:
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
> [Trump's] rise to power was facilitated by weaponized disinformation that he broadcast into the public information sphere via Twitter in addition to traditional mass media.
This is rich considering the objectively lopsided reporting by the media who did their best to elect Hillary. You can't complain about Russian trolls when you have the power of mass media and tech companies behind you.
Amazingly they still don't understand why Trump won. The fact is, Hillary was an awful candidate, and no propping her up by the powerful elites was going to change that.
Look, I hate Trump probably as much as anyone. But this lawsuit is dumb.
It's just an emergency alert. The weather service can issue weather alerts, emergency services can issue alerts for wildfires and earthquakes and such. They're an obvious public good - informing the public of imminent dangers to life and limb.
Could it be abused? In theory, yeah. Not quite sure how you'd do it in practice - it's not like there's a special console in the Oval Office that controls it, any message has to pass through lines of people before it goes out, any one of which would be required to refuse it. I'd be more worried about some FEMA staffer accidentally running something in prod instead of test and spamming the country than the Tangerine Toddler using it as an unblockable twitter.
More to the point, if you're worried that the President is likely to abuse a top-level emergency warning system to shovel propaganda at an unwilling public... the solution is not "don't let the president do that", it's "don't let that person be president". Such an untrustworthy person should not have been elected in the first place, and such a breach of public trust is cause for immediate removal from office, whether by impeachment or 25A or any other means necessary.
After all, we trust the president with nukes. If we can't trust someone with an emergency broadcast system, how the hell can we trust them with thermonuclear weapons?
And when it was signed into law under Obama, I think I remember the Republican-leaning part of the population being equally outraged at it.
This "we must be outraged *just* because Trump was named in describing the thing" feels just as bad as "we must be outraged *just* because Obama was named in describing the thing" from a few years ago. The only thing that's changed is who is being outraged.
(Sure, this administration may be saying/doing a lot of things there's a real non-partisan reason to be outraged at, but this isn't one of them.)
Of course they do ...
And these are the folks who think they are smarter than us dumb flyover hicks.
'nuff said.
Trump may be a jackass, but this is his job. If he abuses the powers and access of his job, then people have a right to be pissed, but you can't preemptively take the tools of his job away.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yeah, no shit. I recall this being set up during the Obama Administration, and I also remember how badly it failed due to problems integrating it into the larger national alert system.
The presidential alert system isn't the problem. The president is the problem. Still, I recall once upon a time playing text based games called multi user dungeons (mud). In one someone may be blocking you from talking to them, but that person may then talk to you, since no such block exists in that direction. At that point you could just type "reply" and then your message.
It would be nice if it were possible for millions of Americans to simultaneously tell Trump what we really thought of him in a way he had to listen to.
I find him to be well, as Kieth Olberman used to say, the worst person in the world. Of course there are certainly people worse on an actual types of evil basis, but they have less authority and power. If you count the total corruption and evil that has spread since his election I'd tend to think he is certainly in the top ten, and personally as a person seeing his country's morals flushed down the toilet ironically in the name of morals, well yep I'd give him the award.
People talk about cult leaders like koresh and such, but he is small time compared to Don the Con. Hell he just convinced a small group. This fuckwit has convinced a large chunk of the country that all news that doesn't support him is lies. If that is not the sign of a cult leader I don't know what is and people need to wake the fuck up.
You don't get it. Trump is that badly distrusted.
But yes, we remember your hysterical anti-Obama actions. Birtherism, Jade Dragon, FEMA in general, and even a letter to Iran from members of the Senate. So sow what you reap.
The bad thing for you is that Trump has a record of needing adult supervision. His own staff documented it.
??? Testing a new system before it is needed is pretty standard. Not sure Iâ(TM)d call it abuse..., Dems on a hair trigger and disgusted before they even know why theyâ(TM)re upset.
It's sad that people even give a flying fuck about this message. Oh, test message. Not an Amber Alert, no hurricane or earthquake.
The EAS has messages at least once a week on your favorite radio station. No one gets outraged. Same principal.
The electronic trespass rubric seems like a sham to me. If there were a tornado coming through, you'd want to know. A national emergency like some fool N Korean lobbing stuff at the USA, yeah, a real one (not the stupid fake one of recent memory) is important.
Gonna be earthquake? Sunspots of biblical magnitude (just before most transistors get clobbered) would be nice. I'd break out the candles.
Of many things to give a crap about, this is not one of them.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
And the same outraged people would be outraged again if some disaster stuck and they weren't notified.
"Why didn't the government warn us?? WHYYYY!?"
And when it was signed into law under Obama, I think I remember the Republican-leaning part of the population being equally outraged at it.
Really? I don't remember any outrage about it at all. It was an extension/upgrade to the existing EAS system and back then people understood that a notification system was a Good Thing. Of course there were people who don't want to get any messages they don't want, like the presidential alert, and are unhappy that there is no way to turn them off. (I am one of those.) It's hardly "outrage" at "Obama" or "Trump" to feel that way. I feel the same way about useless Amber alerts, and even the Everbridge calls that our local Sheriff's office sometimes send out.
The only thing that's changed is who is being outraged.
No. There were no lawsuits from morons who wanted to predict all kinds of nonsense about how it would be misused when it was created. This is a lawsuit that is many years too late, because nothing has changed about the system itself. It's only who is now authorized to send the message, and that message is not coming straight from the cellphone of the President, it's coming through FEMA.
This lawsuit nonsense is a whole 'nother level of derangement. No, Trump is not going to declare a national emergency just so he can trigger a national alert. It just ain't gonna happen.
Exactly.
These days, half the people are raging that it's sun-up, while the others wondered why couldn't night time be longer.
If there was a concerted effort to make everyone touchy MFers, it worked.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
How can you be sure? He's known for doing or saying whatever just to get what he wants.
Your memory isn't the only thing that matters, and some of us remember the numerous birther lawsuits, the endless haranging that Obama was going to FEMA camp us into martial law, and all sorts of other nonsense which you were and are conspicuously silent about, but somehow expect the country to be "patriotic" and not badmouth the CURRENT occupant of the White House as he shoots his mouth off.
That's right. They are not the same. Few people had Obama Derangement Syndrome compared to tens of millions with TDS. But this madness is not over, it needs to play out further. It's going to be a neurotic society's Primal Scream.
Can we stop with the "Trump Derangement Syndrome"?
It's propaganda intended to dismiss the legitimate opinions about an elected official.
Trump is by all measures a terrible steward of the economy, the environment, diplomatic relations, the truth, etc. etc. It makes sense people are furious about his executive actions which to date amount to grift, corruption, dishonesty, and cronyism.
People upset about Trump's executive actions are not necessarily deranged. They're responding as one should to someone who wields executive power against the principles of the office to which they've been elected.
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What the hell makes you think that just because we hate president Dumpsterfire that anyone likes the Democrats a ton better? They're all awful, which is how we got this orange orangutan in the first place.
I think most of us would be thrilled with a "Fire them all" button where we could start over with all new people. The corrupt bastards from my state are some of the worst. I vote against them every 2 years, and nothing ever comes of it.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Through our collective consent, this is the leadership we ended up with. Now, I prefer to balls and strikes the guy. If he does something I like, I cheer. If he does something I don't, I cry foul.
What bothers me is most people can't name three things he did that they like, or at least agree with.
He supports changing the repliblican platform to support abortion for women in three circumstances (from 0 today).
He supports the use of medical marijuana (a first for republican president).
He struck back at an air base in Syria responsible for a chemical attack on a village with children.
If you can't say anything he did that you are for, you're too closed minded to have a conversation with.
Nuclear attacks are survivable. Heck, there is one unfortunate guy who was in Hiroshima when it got bombed, survived, went to Nagasaki and got another one. He died not very long ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Basically, and I am no expert, a few minutes could give you enough time to go into a bunker which would protect you from the initial explosion and irradiation, and from there, you might be able to plot an escape from the fallout zone.
This is why I fucking hate the Democrats. It's not a "good thing" or "bad thing" with them. It's a bad person, and EVERY SINGLE THING HE DOES is resisted and casted in the worst possible light, every time. It gets old.
This isn't really a "Democrat"-specific thing. A lot of Republicans treated Obama like the boogeyman, and everything he did was somehow nefarious. They tried to roadblock everything he did. They spent years hammering the Affordable Care Act-- which was largely a Republican bill, put forward as a compromise.
And not to say that Obama was perfect, but his behavior was, at the very least, much more in line with normal, respectable, Presidential behavior. Trump is a legitimate problem. He's a criminal and a walking disaster who has abused power at every turn.
You say you're not a fan, but I don't believe you. You say you don't care, but then you hope he "crushes them". If you're a Trump fan, at least admit it. Maybe you don't want to because you yourself know that he's a legitimate problem.
> Because none of that applies to the friend who had no traumatic encounter and no knowledge of this Kavanaugh person.
> For her, it was apparently just another party.
Where her friend mysteriously disappeared, despite having to go past her to get to the door and having no way to arrange a ride home?
> That people who are apologists for Kavanaugh are making it out as if Keyser refuted the claim, that she denied aby incident, discredits them, and by extension Kavanaugh.
She doesn't even remember how many people where there, ALL of the named persons disconfirm the story, and the Safeway she made central to her Senate testimony didn't exist until 4 years later according to public records. She has a history of changing her story every time evidence disconfirms it. The door she went to counseling in 2012 to get was built back in 2008. There are giant holes in every single part of the story she does remember, so the fact that your central witness can't remember anything about the alleged assault while Bret can tell you exactly where he was for the entire summer of 1982 simply underscores the fact that this is pure nonsense.
> You, of course, don't see the problem with your own actions.
You stole my words. I get that you don't like him, but to be unable to see through the obvious pattern of lies just makes me feel sorry for you. Are you always this easily manipulated or is it just hate blindness?