FCC proposes $504k fine for broadcaster's misuse of Emergency Alert System tones
insideradio.com
insideradio.com
If I went to a public building and played a plausible sounding fake fire alarm over a megaphone I would almost certainly be arrested. They did this but to potentially millions of people.
While I agree with this in general, you need to be careful that songs like the "Nash Rambler" song wouldn't be banned. Same with a lot of other 50's - 60's hot rod songs that feature intros with tires squealing or car horns, etc. Maybe apply this only to advertisements but not to songs? But then again if it is unexpected it could be just as jarring if it is a new song you haven't heard before.
This is literally poisoning the well of public discourse.
They should be adding a few zeros and pulling licenses.
But that's Fox's bread and butter, it's what they do best!
I've had a lot of issues with spam calls that began only when my mom became terminally ill and I was assisting her. They'd call "this is senior aide helper" (among others) and would call "verified" from the carrier with local numbers. I can't imagine how many Americans who are dealing with trouble in their lives are being scammed here. The FCC should fine the telecom companies $1,500/reported spam call. That would stop this over night.
I don't know who is paying who to prevent us from stopping this, but it sure as fucking hell looks to me like people in our government don't give a damn about citizens.
https://reason.com/2022/10/27/yes-you-can-yell-fire-in-a-cro...
https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/blog/legal-mythbusting-serie...
2. If you cause damage to property, you may be liable - especially if you do so for no reason as opposed to eg escaping a burning building.
(2) is not dependent on some special word you have to shout. If you shout "Ah robotic snakes!" (falsely) and cause damage to people and property, then you have in fact caused damage to people and property. You will probably need to atone for that.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
Yeah, there are a number of those. But they never actually contradict the claim. They point out that it's perfectly legal to shout "fire" if the theater is on fire, as if everyone using the analogy were confused.
You have not committed a crime, other than talking during a movie.
Everyone is struck by ennui. People cry and gnash teeth. There is a stampede of people. The movie is ruined. Counselors and meditation teachers have to be deployed.
You are very likely looking at criminal charges! How can this be?
It matters whether or not if you cause damage.
If you cause a riot wordlessly.. you can still be at fault for a crime.
A man, holding a salmon, shoots a woman. Is the man a murderer?
What if he's holding a tuna?
That's the same as the shouting fire example. It doesn't matter what fish the murderer is holding, it doesn't matter what you yell if you do a crime.
--Dave Chappele
Also: The FCC document references the 18 Fox owned stations and says nothing about the 200+ affiliate stations. Are those stations culpable if they also broadcast Fox produced content that was in violation of EAS rules?
If there was evidence that the creators actually did a calculation to determine that the base fine of $144,000 was worth it, that’d be a nightmare for them
Why are they though?
Even a minute warning for things tornadoes etc can save lives, but this only works if people associated these sounds with significant issues and start paying attention.
It’s not like those times that Hanes Underwear played the “brown noise” on AM radio. What a commute that was.
But I’m confident that FOX isn’t calculating the trade-off for a fine. I think they just had an advertising contractor who didn’t know any better. Thought it was a cool angle for an ad.
SAME BFSK uses frequencies iirc between 1 and 2 kHz, and the attention signal is an equal mix of 853 and 960 hertz.
Besides that, those would be filtered out on the transmitter end long before they were allowed to modulate the signal. Especially AM transmitters may do some pretty wild stuff when you drive them with frequencies that low, fair chance that you'll find that you hold them 'on' long enough that you're going to find the limits of either the power supply or the cooling system.
Both on the high end (5KHz and up in theory, but more like 3KHz in practice) and on the low end (100Hz in theory, but you can go as low as 50 Hz in practice).
So I highly doubt that story is true.
Fine them to high heaven.
The false Hawaii missile warning comes to mind too.
Somewhat interesting is that I don't think they were used on 9/11.
According to what I can find, it's missing something called a SAME header that the tones are supposed to be prefixed by, maybe that's why FOX thought they could get away with it?
Edit: For clarification, the particular message that needs o be sent to be considered "Emergency Broadcast" is not just the "Attention signal", it's has many other vital parts (like the header in the message that it begins with). Besides that, the Attention Signal has to be at least 8 seconds long as long, otherwise I'm assuming it should be considered one. The one FOX broadcasted seems to have been ~3 seconds.
This makes sense because advertisers could misuse it to grab attention (exactly as Fox did) and cause people to start to ignore the sound due to false signals.
Just like it’s usually illegal to have lights and sirens on your car.
I’d be interested in the story of how this happened. How did no one say “that’s probably not a good idea”? Even without knowing the law existed?
Correct. CFR Title 17, Part 11 [1] specifies the technical and operational aspects of EAS. Section 45:
> No person may transmit or cause to transmit the EAS codes or Attention Signal, or a recording or simulation thereof, in any circumstance other than in an actual National, State or Local Area emergency or authorized test of the EAS. Broadcast station licensees should also refer to §73.1217 of this chapter.
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2010-title47-vol1/pd...
I actually do use a ringtone composed of three SAME headers and the attention signal; specifically, I use that ringtone for PagerDuty. It reliably raises me from the dead in the correct state of mind to respond to an alert, and also reliably turns heads when it goes off while I'm out and about. But I don't need to worry that the FCC's gonna come after me about it, as long as I don't have my phone plugged into a radio station when it goes off.
That said, if I were doing a radio interview or something, I'd be sure to turn off my phone or at least remove PagerDuty's ability to override the silent switch.
The tones aren’t illegal. Misusing public emergency infrastructure is illegal.
So, not illegal in general, but illegal to transmit it on broadcast channel.
I would even bet that if you searched E-Bay long enough, you could find a 1950's-era vacuum tube AM radio with tone-squelch tuned to those tones so that you could leave the radio on and just hear the duck-and-cover message without the distraction of that nasty Rock-n-Roll music that the kids are all listening to.
The SAME header and footer are each repeated three times, and consist of BFSK-modulated data on a couple of frequencies I forget offhand. (If you're interested, they're specified in Section 31 of the regulation I linked elsewhere in this thread.) The header encodes the type and geographical applicability of the alert, and EAS receivers configured for the applicable area use it to automatically interrupt broadcast with the bulk of the alert. The SAME footer encodes no data but serves as an "end of message" flag; EAS receivers can use that to resume normal broadcast depending on configuration and the nature of the alert. (Sufficiently severe alerts may be repeated in entirety.)
CONELRAD didn't use any in-band signaling of this type, in any case. The technology wasn't really there for it, and in any case the whole point of the scheme was not to continue transmitting from any one station for a significant length of time, in order to deny Soviet bombers navigation references which would help them drop nuclear bombs on American cities.
There are two syllables in English such that if you shout them in sequence in a crowded theater in a non-emergency context, it is also a crime: fi-re.
Im fact the FCC mentions the affiliates several times. One example: “Therefore, we find FOX responsible for broadcasting the Promotional Segment containing the EAS Tones on 18 of its owned-and-operated broadcast stations, transmitting the Promotional Segment to 190 of its network-affiliated television broadcast stations, and causing the transmission of the Promotional Segment on Fox Sports Radio and the Fox Sports on XM channel.”
> Are those stations culpable if they also broadcast Fox produced content that was in violation of EAS rules?
Station licensees are responsible for the content they broadcast. In this case at least the FCC went after the content source, which is itself also a licensee.
The font also looks like the subtitles that some local teletex stations used to use. I wonder how much of that broadcast is teletex/subtitle aligned to work well.
If it had some smooth jazz with helvetica playing in the background I wouldn't take it seriously. That EAS font (to me a foreigner) screams "This isn't daytime television".
I honestly wish the same was for radio stations and any emergency/siren sound that are commonly heard in traffic, it makes me absolutely paranoid. No responsible radio station should use these sounds or broadcast music containing them.
Nowadays I guess the vast majority of AM/FM radio listening takes place in cars, so it would be nice to tailor the laws to that.
Naturally the example that came up when I searched is The Purge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns8t4Y9G4wU
Both errors are likely intentional, specifically to avoid inadvertent broadcast interruptions. I still wouldn't expect a broadcaster to take a chance on it, but I would be surprised if it actually triggered an EAS receiver.
The first time I got an amber alert I was sitting in my living room and it was for something that happened 40 miles away, so I turned off all of the emergency alerts. I went for Christmas to visit my parents and an emergency alert went off and they're like we can't stop it, they go off all the time, and so I took their phones and turned off the emergency alerts.
Am I out of the norm or have other people experienced this, have also turned off the alerts?
For a few years, I kept them all on, but after umpteen alerts that I had miniscule chance of helping with[1], I disabled Amber alerts.
[1] Too far out of area, or working from home without a view of any traffic, too sick. Or sometimes excessively vague descriptions of suspect vehicle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34577793 (3 comments)
(I’m not weighing in one way or the other here)
> That may be difficult, however, since the FCC says in its proposal that the company had $4.44 billion of revenue in 2021.
Edit: Wow, looks like I really messed up the math. It has been updated. Thanks for the comments pointing that out/asking about it.
2021 Profit: $ 2,150,000,000
Proposed Fine: $ 504,000
Fine / Profit * 100: 0.023%
Emphasis added.
Sounds like they're suing Fox, and Fox's gross profit for 2022 was $4.86 billion, so that's more like 0.01%.
tl;dr: if executives/board members don't go to jail for things there is always a right price for a company to break the rules.
You can see the description of the facts from FCC's point of view here [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-4A1.pdf] -- as linked in the article -- describing the social damage Fox inflicted.
FCC makes clear that this is what is prescribed and that given the profits of Fox it has no impact in the company's operation. Thus, there is no reason to reduce it.
If you feel otherwise perhaps you have a more positive view of how companies make decisions in the U.S. which is great.
P.S. And for readers' convenience here is the forfeiture framework FCC uses here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/503 It is inadequate from my vantage point.
P.S.2. It is common secret, and a running joke here -- check other hackernews posts -- that FCC has no teeth. Regulations need to change.
In this case it's the desire to have an effective warning system for extreme events such as heavy weather.
It obviously wouldn't work if advertisement industry would be able to condition people to ignore it as a false alarm.
The same is true for putting lights, writing and sirens on your car which imply you are a member of emergency services.
If you can only talk if you are prohibited from saying something don't you see how that violates free speech?
This absurdly absolutist conception of free speech bears no resemblance however remote to anything ever actually codified in US law, and I don't see what you mean to achieve by advancing it other than to give the impression of being entirely unserious.
Yes.
>This absurdly absolutist conception of free speech bears no resemblance however remote to anything ever actually codified in US law
It's not absurd. It's quite a simple ideal of being able to freely express things. Whatever US law is doesn't change my ideals of existing in a society which is not bound by a govemment on what they can and can not express.
>I don't see what you mean to achieve by advancing it other than to give the impression of being entirely unserious.
This could be said about any compromise of free speech. Many groups desire to take away people freedoms of speech and they start by taking away things people think would be absurd to want to express.
Not in the US. Even if your station or device does not require an individual license, you are still subject to US law and must comply with FCC rules based on that law (the Communications Act). There is no free speech right to broadcast by radio.
How audit?
Recall Pfizer was fined $2+ BILLION for stuff they did a few years ago (not talking about the TRILLIONS in fraud recently revealed)
But WHERE SPECIFICALLY do the 'fines' wind up?
Also, if we are facing a gov't shutdown because we ran out of money in our budget, then how the F were we able to supply Ukraine (the most corrupt, according to some) with 100B++ in 'aide'
Where the hell is accountability in ANY of our agencies... and if not accountability, transparency?
And there isn't a shutdown, you're thinking of the debt ceiling, which is basically the government refusing to pay its credit card bills even though it's perfectly capable of it.