Presidential Alerts | Hacker News Reader

Presidential Alerts

time.com

57 pointsconfounded112 comments

"Presidential Alerts" is a terrible name in a time where presidents from either party tend to have about 40% approval or less. The name just automatically angers a significant portion of the population, no matter who the president happens to be. Considering that the presidency is a political position, it's not unreasonable to expect "Presidential Alerts" to be of a political nature, even though that is not how the system is intended to be used.

How about "National Alert System" or just continue calling it the "Emergency Alert System" (except now with new abilities). Put a procedure in place to let the president use it if needed.

Used correctly, these should be so infrequent that there's no legitimate reason to disable them. This is a broadcast, not a data collection, and if a missile is headed in your general area, literally every capable device should be telling you about it.

How are you opting out of the air raid sirens?

You don't own air raid sirens, and you can't stop others from installing them.

You do own your phone (in theory, at least). You should have full authority over what that phone does or doesn't do.

With all due respect, this seems like a pretty lame hill to die on. Consider the potential harm that might come from allowing people who don't fully understand what the implications are of opting out of a "presidential alert". In theory, this feature is only supposted to be used for the worst of the worst situations and if poeple disable it.... bad things might happen.

Consider if a whole bunch of people are supposed to evacuate and some don't get the message because they opt'd out without knowing all the risks. Now you are in a situation where rescue workers are risking their lives trying to save people.

There is no absolute right to freedom because "freedom" is an abstract concept that is fuzzy and full of edge cases and what-abouts. If your "freedom to opt out" of a possibly once-in-a-lifetime message puts rescue workers lives in danger... well that really isn't cool, now is it.

People aren't required to carry phones, so mandating a required alert message still doesn't guarantee reach.

The way I see it, now comes the time to eliminate cell providers, same as the "cut the cord" movement was adopted by people seeking to eliminate cable TV service for a wide variety of reasons.

There are at least two straws this week, that threaten to break the camel's back. Mandatory noise alarms like this, and mandatory password seizure at borders and airports in places like New Zealand.

Sorry, make noise and vibrate in some other pocket. And oh yeah, here's a password to a blank burner phone I never even used once. Throw it in the garbage for me, I bought it at a pawn shop for a dollar, instead of paying thousands to refuse some draconian policy.

Time to drop cell phones. Large faceless groups of people don't seem to grasp that they might be pushing it too far.

You make a good point about endangering rescue workers. That complicates things.

Maybe those who disable such an alert should be exposed to liability for harm brought to others as a result of their choice? I realize that doesn't help the hypothetical dead rescue worker, but it's more of a middle ground between personal freedom and minimizing harm.

You're free to disable the alerts by installing a custom OS on your phone where you have disabled the feature.

Your argument makes it sound like, say, Google owes you infinitely customizable software if they are going to provide any software at all, when they have no such obligation - just like you have no obligation to buy their phone, or use their software.

Please don't do this. If you're not ready to post, don't.

Meh. Ban me if you don’t like it. The discussion ended up being about politics. Not interest in participating in politics or having my comments be misunderstood as political comments.

From https://twitter.com/dmelvin3737/status/1047557154729840646

The "Presidential" alert is the level of alert. It's been named this for over a decade, but none have ever been sent.

The levels are :

AMBER alert

Severe alerts

Extreme alerts

Presidential alerts

I'll bikeshed this; I'd rather see the latter ones titled as "Local emergency", "State emergency", "National emergency". What sort of intuition are we supposed to have for the difference between a severe and an extreme emergency?

Same intuition needed for differentiating telescope aperture sizes

(context: https://xkcd.com/1294/)

So I don't know why but when the alert when off in my office several people simply got a generic "This is an emergency test system" and not once did it say "Presidential".

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that: A) My area code isnt from a US State B) Some of my coworkers are not US Citizens C) Network Infrastructure from my phone / provider

Either way it seems like a lot of people have been negatively impacted by a single word but I doubt anyone will actually go ahead and change it.

> The name just automatically angers a significant portion of the population, no matter who the president happens to be.

I think that pretty much speaks to how shamefully bad politics has gotten here in the US. I see a couple of comments that jump to speculate that it could be used as a tool of politics, or that they would rather opt-out of knowing about an imminent threat to themselves and/or their fellow American's lives. I think it's selfish, considering smoke and CO2 detectors can't warn you of nuclear attacks. If an office of the state was responsible for calling out a fire in the building, I would want every chance to be informed, regardless of whether or not they were my prefered elected official. Obviously, if the system was abused I would want it to be fixed.

Here's a good example. This tweet from a respected Dr. is really unfortunate.

"But it’s called the Presidential Alert because Trump has a huge ego. And he loves his intruding into our lives without consent."

https://twitter.com/eugenegu/status/1047562343503122432

He states it as though it's fact. Now many of his 200,000+ followers also think that, if they didn't already.

I might've also believed that if I didn't do the work to look it up.

> If hackers got into the system or Trump decides to become a dictator, this #PresidentialAlert system could be used to brick all 300 million phones in America. https://twitter.com/eugenegu/status/1047565946527744000?s=21

Do we consider this fake news?

Specific presidents generally have low approval rating, but the idea of the office of the president has a high approval rating(which is why people care so much that their person gets put there).

I don't see the connection. Even if everyone hated the idea of having a president and we were in the process of amending the constitution to eliminate the office entirely, we'd still care about who had the position until that happened as they have a great deal of power.

Regardless of what it's called (let's say, "nationwide alert") is it possible to imagine anything that is 1> immediately actionable and 2> must be known by every person in the country?

I cannot think of a single thing. Even "nukes incoming" -- well what precisely should you do in this situation? If it's not actionable, no matter how important, it's not urgent.

I had to switch off the FEMA alerts -- which are a good idea! -- because I was getting spammed by spurious alerts about things hundreds of miles away (I re-enable them when I travel and when I am near my vacation house which is in a fire zone). An earthquake down south or a fire 8 hours' drive north do not require my immediate attention.

"nukes incoming"

People who live in big cities or live near high value strategic targets wouldn't survive for long anyway. Maybe some of those people wouldn't want to know that they will be dead in 5 minutes or in 5 days. Nevertheless, I expect that many if not most people would still want to know!

There are also literally millions of people in the USA who live in remote areas and who would survive the blast and radiation effects of a nuclear war. Giving those people some warning could make a big difference in their survival rates. Those people probably wouldn't enjoy living in the dystopian post-nuclear landscape, but that's a topic that's been amply covered by Sci-Fi movies.

I had to switch off the FEMA alerts

What is a FEMA alert? Is that something regional or something on Android?

My iPhone running iOS 11.4.1 has two different "GOVERNMENT ALERTS" (found under Notifications). These are AMBER Alerts and Emergency Alerts. I have them both enabled and I don't think I get even one per year.

The regular FEMA alerts are things like wildfire or tornado alerts, or what to do after an incident (e.g. post earthquake). Excellent if you don’t spam people.

Currently reading this book about continuity of government [1] and many Presidents have done the full exercise, including activating the older emergency alert systems in over the air TV. Other parts of these exercises include the emergency evac from White House to bunker or flying command post, testing comms with subs and other command authorities, and walking through response plan selection, and last, the process of launching the weapons. I don't believe it ever worked fully, and I hope that this test was part of one of these exercises. The book makes it clear that these plans are only updated every 10-15 years and almost never tested end to end, especially now that the cold war is over.

1: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010MHAG72/

I still don’t understand the actual point of this, beyond the optics of a vaguely-defined “emergency preparedness.”

Emergencies are inherently local. Even if smartphones had been widespread in 2001 and the presidential alert system had been active on 9/11, what purpose would a nationwide alert have served?

It's not hard to imagine much bigger emergencies than 9/11.

>I still don’t understand the actual point of this, beyond the optics

There’s your answer.

If the Yellowstone Caldera blows up or an asteroid hits, I want to know rather than wonder what happened and what I need to do. A system like this only needs to work once for it to pay off.

I don't think a little cell phone tone and alert is going to help much for a TEOTWAWKI event.

The most obvious example is the Hawaii Nuclear Scare that just happened in January [1]. Obviously it was a false alarm but I would like (or should I say dread) to be alerted of a crisis of that magnitude the moment it occurs.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_aler...

There are plenty of ways to be notified of breaking news if you so choose to use them. Why should an alert about something that happens in any state have to be broadcast to the whole country with no means of disabling it? What could possibly require every person in the US to need to know about some event immediately?

Nukes? There are such a thing as nationwide emergencies.

Honestly how could that be actionable in a short timeframe?

It's about a 30 minute travel time for land-based ICBMs to reach the US from Russia or China. Let's say 10 minutes to get through the chain of command, and 5 minutes to send out the alert, so you might have a 10-15 minute warning.

As absolutely mind-boggling as nukes are, I think people today credit them with more destructive force than they really have. For one thing, blast force goes down with the inverse square of of the distance. There's very much a diminishing return to bigger nukes, and the area of total destruction will always be much smaller than the area of sorta-destruction.

So if you have a 15 minute warning, you can get away from windows or perhaps go to a basement or subway, There are plenty of ways to drastically increase your odds of survival if you are in the middle-zone of a nuclear strike.

Any all out nuclear war is going to have a lot of people die. The purpose of national warnings and preparedness is to just make that number be smaller than it otherwise would be.

There are 330M people in this country. How many of them have any idea what to do if an ICBM is on the way? I would be shocked if the number exceeded 330K. If anyone thought there were a credible thread of nuclear attack they would be taking steps of which a warning system like this would be a late step, not the first one.

The local FEMA alert system is a good idea; the last time I personally found it useful was in 1989 (Loma Prieta earthquake) though I hear it works in more dangerous areas (e.g. tornado alley) and am not surprised by that. However here in the Bay Area its link to phones was ruined by spam (pointless interruptions sent to my phone) so I disabled it. This new system is worse.

(BTW I wouldn't classify the false missile alert in Hawaii "spam". It was simply an error. But here I got messages that should have been on the news).

There are 20.4 million veterans in the US, so on that basis alone I'd guess a little higher for the number of people who had an idea about what to do.

Zombie Apocalypse. If people don't know to destroy their brains, their numbers can increase geometrically.

There are a few possible scenarios where a national alert makes sense: ICBM launches that they either can't yet predict the target of or on a scale that is targeting across the country, massive cyberattacks targeting national infrastructure, supervolcano eruption, foreign invasion, etc.

The idea is that it would only be used in the most extreme of scenarios that affect the country as a whole.

Why can't I disable or opt out of this?

on the iPhone there's a setting for "Emergency Alerts" at the bottom of Settings -> Notifications.

edit: apparently "Presidential" alerts will override this setting, so I guess you can't disable it after all.

>apparently "Presidential" alerts will override this setting, so I guess you can't disable it after all

That is my point. Not sure why I'm getting downvoted.

You're not the only one wondering this, and there's a related lawsuit (on first amendment grounds).

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/01/trump-presidential...

Ridiculous, presidential Spam...

Probably because Google and Apple make essentially every phone in use and they agreed to ignore your settings in favor of the President's.

I guess the benefit of not having control is that you can't be accused of being a jerk for having it go off during a movie or in court or whatever, since you have no choice.

So this is just something Apple/Google agreed on? Or is this some US law that requires Apple/Google to ship devices without an option to turn this off?

Yes, this is the result of a law, the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act which was passed by Congress back in 2006. See https://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=632941 for details.

Presumably they'd be used for FEMA-type issues; which are generally about imminent hazards.

It's supposed to be for extremely serious situations only. If the bombs are going to start falling in five minutes, millions of lives could depend on everybody getting the word as soon as possible. An unskippable alert pushed out to every cellphone in the country is the best way in the modern age to ensure that happens.

As long as its use is restricted to only that kind of sky-is-falling situation, I don't have a problem with being unable to opt out. If Trump starts using it to advertise his latest rally, that would be an abuse of the system and pressure to let people opt out would start piling up rapidly.

Considering that it's run by FEMA, and they are mandated by law to only use it in national emergencies, and multiple FEMA officials have to sign off on any message sent out, political misuse of it is fairly unlikely.

Because the 2006 law authorizing this mandated that Presidential Alerts not be able to be disabled.

https://www.congress.gov/109/bills/hr5785/BILLS-109hr5785ih....

With a little effort you can. Some ADB creativity with a restore rom or rooting or magisk. You'll be hunting down settings inside /data/data/com.android.messaging/shared_prefs/com.android.messaging_preferences.xml

It may have a different name as phone manufacturers like to play around with what they name it, and each setting may have a different specific name. Each phone may have a different term for it, but you'd be hunting for 'presidential', or something like 'pref_key_cmas*' and setting that to false.

I can't think of an important message that could go over this channel that would not cause more panic than if it were not sent.

Unless it's some good thing, like "we landed on the moon" or "victory in Europe"

If it's about a natural disaster or threat that affects the whole country, forget about it...

Those would be worse as they are not even actionable alerts! True spam.

Not sure why these need to be billed as "Presidential alerts" if they're for national emergencies, which is already the domain of FEMA. Call them "National emergency alerts". Presidential addresses (which the name suggests these are in the age of cord-cutters and smartphones) are for sympathy and calls for unity in the aftermath of disaster; if there's a hurricane or tornado bearing down on me, all I want is info straight from FEMA or the National Weather Service without having to be routed through the president first. Not to mention that referring to the president in any capacity is a great way to get half the country to dismiss a notification without reading it.

Could it be because the message is literally from the President, in their ex officio role as the President?

Just received one. It shows up as one of those "emergency notifications" you usually receive when a flood is happening nearby, except here it's titled "Presidential Alert".

So what system allows them to jack into every mobile network in the country at once? Or do I just have an extremely poor understanding of how these things work?

The Wireless Emergency Alerts system, authorized in the 2006 Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act.

https://www.congress.gov/109/bills/hr5785/BILLS-109hr5785ih....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Emergency_Alerts

I accidentally swiped it on the iPhone lock screen and now it's gone. I don't see it in my notifications. Is there a way to find it?

Dunno if it's the same on an iPhone, but on Android it shows up in my texting app

Not on mine.

You didn't miss much; here's a screenshot:

https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/df2d9e6...

The moment I saw this pop up on my screen, all I could think of was the destruction one could cause via fake alerts. For instance, a warning of incoming nuclear warheads like what happened in Hawaii a few months ago. Sure, news stations might rapidly debunk it, but how many people wouldn't see it? Cell towers would be overloaded with calls and data, preventing the dissemination of info to many. Radio would be the best bet, but how many people would go out to their car (likely the only place they have a radio) when they think an attack may be imminent?

A centralized system like this seems like an extremely dangerous thing to have.

As opposed to the destruction that will certainly be higher without any sort of warning of an actual national emergency?

FEMA has established that two officials have to sign off on the alert text before it goes out. This is to avoid the situation we got in Hawaii.

Political appointees or non-political employees?

Only about half my office got one. Anyone know what that's about?

The TV (even streamed) was 5 minutes late due to the standard delay.

So as a test of the system how did it fare? How do they measure success or failure of the test? What percentage of devices were actually reached?

My iPhone X with iOS 12 made the siren noise, but no message appeared on the screen and I can't find any alert message in the notifications page, messages, or elsewhere. So I only got 1 bit of information :-(.

One of my coworkers was on their cellphone during the alert period. They did not hear nor see any indication on their phone. iPhone X with iOS 12.

Mine with 11.4.1 received no alert and made no sound.

> So I only got 1 bit of information

Be careful. That's basically how the family in the movie "Blast from the Past" ended up locked in their bunker for a few decades.

The alert didn't shut off until you pressed the button. Many devices were making noise for minutes around me.

How many car crashes were caused by people startled by the sudden, continuous alert?

Really? It sounded like all of the phones in my office alerted once and then stopped (though not all simultaneously, some took longer to receive it). What kind of phones are people using?

My ringer was off so I can't say personally.

I was at a car dealership. I didn't take a poll of devices used by employees and other customers.

Anyone know anything about the underlying tech? Is it related to E911, e.g. any privacy implications?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/19...

It was a bit odd to have every cellphone in a hallway go off with the same tone. I guess some folks weren't watching the news and didn't get word before hand.

> I guess some folks weren't watching the news and didn't get word before hand.

How would have knowing about it changed anything if you can't opt out?

Well, they probably wouldn't have that TV disaster momentary panic. It is really not normal to have a bunch of devices go off at once.

I guess some folks weren't watching the news

Some folks tend to do that at work, yes.

You know darn well I mean heard about it ahead of time.

This native English speaker honestly parsed it twice, and that's what I came up with. I don't watch TV news, though, so it didn't occur to me until now that people get and watch TV before work. I just go to work. <shrug>

I guess I expected them to have encountered it on whatever news source they use before the date since it was announced multiple times.

I guess some folks weren't watching the news and didn't get word before hand.

This has nothing to do with POTUS Trump, its been out for years, even under Obama. You can disable all alerts EXCEPT the Presidential alerts, due to extreme emergencies which its used for. And I don't think its ever been used.

But as alerts go, I had to shut off the Amber alerts, the local Seattle and King county was spamming my phone and even getting amber alerts for other counties hundreds of miles away. I carry 2 phones, work and private, double annoying on these alerts.

"Presidential Alerts" don't actually originate from the President. They come from FEMA, which selects one of several pre-written messages that fits the current situation, customizes the text as necessary, and sends it out to the phone carriers. One FEMA official has to actually write the message, and then two others have to sign off on the wording before it can go out.

So, no, you're not going to be getting mandatory Trump tweets on your phone.

"So, no, you're not going to be getting mandatory Trump tweets on your phone."

I think you seriously underestimate how much of the government is run by convention, "norms", and regulations that are easy to change.

You couldn't opt out of the Emergency Broadcast System alerts on TV either, did they scare you?

Why are these labeled as "Presidential"?

The combination of being impossible to configure as filtered and naming leaves me with the distinct taste of living under an aspiring dictatorship in my mouth.

Only one person at my office even got the alert. I'm going to have to call this test of the system a failure.

Dammit, and I'd even queued up Orff's "O Fortuna" to go with the rising crescendo of Emergency Alert System tones.

> Only one person at my office even got the alert. I'm going to have to call this test of the system a failure.

At my office, I heard a propagation of what I thought were amber alerts rippling up the hallway, and sure enough, my phone got it too, except it wasn't an amber alert.

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