FEMA and FCC Plan Nationwide Emergency Alert Test for Oct. 4 | Hacker News Reader

FEMA and FCC Plan Nationwide Emergency Alert Test for Oct. 4

fema.gov

103 pointsjshprentz124 comments

There is an interesting 2019 academic paper out of CU Boulder, on the topic of spoofing 4G WEA alerts. I wouldn't recommend doing this, but it's very interesting to understand the technical aspects of WEA, CMAS, and other non-standard mobile comms channels that are involved.

"This is Your President Speaking: Spoofing Alerts in 4G LTE Networks"

[PDF] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3307334.3326082

Crazy that theres no cryptographic authentication. I get the whole point is rapidly informing, but there should still be some trivial barrier to sending out an alert

A surprising amount of important systems work because nobody can he bothered to mess with them. I think the takeaway is that most people are good, but perhaps also a bit lazy.

Exactly. Another recent example:

https://www.wired.com/story/poland-train-radio-stop-attack/

Cryptographic authentication means somebody needs to require a set of trusted keys (or a PKI or similar), and I could imagine that during an actual emergency, availability might be a higher priority than non-spoofability.

For the Canadians in the audience, we have our tests in November (and May):

* https://www.alertready.ca/testing-schedule/

At least Canada still has 3G. I had my phone set to “downgrade” itself to 3G overnight so I can sleep soundly through amber alerts and nuclear incineration.

Canada sends our amber alerts at the “presidential” level.

I think Ontario tightened up its criteria for these alerts. Haven’t gotten one in a while.

They were mostly joint custody disputes where it’s highly debatable anyone was in danger.

There was the one where the father already murdered the kids at home. Police could legally light up 11m phones but couldn’t legally kick down his door.

I am very surprised to find out that people are still unaware that this is happening, I had to mention it to my partner this morning who had no idea (or forgot) since he mentioned having a call 10 minutes after it was supposed to happen.

This seemed like one of those things that has been communicated extremely well? Or am I being shocked by being in the tech bubble once again?

Also I just don't get all the conspiracy theories about this. I mean how long has Amber alerts existed? Or whether emergency alerts existed? This really isn't that much different but is just national instead of more locally based. As long as it isn't abused I feel like this is a good thing to have in place.

One of those, well hope we never need to use it but if/when it becomes a necessity we will be glad it exists.

If only there was a way to send a mass message to everyone to tell them this was planned..

It'd be really nice if the emergency alert system had pre-test non-emergency push notification functionality built into it.

That actually seems like a good potential addition. 72/48/24/12h beforehand everyone gets a regular text or notification, no priority, no noise, doesn't bypass quiet/sleep/focus modes, but there that says there is an upcoming test of the real deal.

I was actually kinda surprised all of the cell phone carriers didn't send out a text like "just FYI".

No link or anything, just to let anyone know that doesn't know.

I think you live in a bubble. I live in the same bubble, but other than this post, the only other notice I got was from my kid's elementary school. I haven't seen any other news or posts about it.

There should be a government RSS feed of things that are actually news and of import to every member of society. There shouldn’t be more than 3-6 messages on it per year.

Defining what constitutes an "actual" emergency is probably a non-trivial political discussion in and of itself.

The number of coworkers who had no idea this was happening today is really strange to me. It's been publicized quite a bit!

For what it's worth I'd consider myself to be a moderately above-average news reader (Reuters and WSJ most days with misc other sources irregularly), and the first I've heard of this is just now

The driver I had from the airport mentioned this last night and I didn't immediately know what he was talking about. Then I vaguely remembered having previously heard something.

I watch the news daily, and am active on social media (including following some government agencies and politicians), I only heard about this from a friend of mine who is deep into conspiracy theories. That was the only time I heard about it until now when it made it to the front page on HN (which is also the first time I see it on social media).

Whichever publicity they did, didn’t reach me at least.

Yeah all the conspiracy people are going nuts about it.

I have a family member thought an amber alert like system being introduced to the uk would bug her smartphone... my response "why would they need to, you already have the smartphone lol"

The way I understand it, this will send a signal across the 5G network which will somehow cause a storm of covid (or worse) raining from the sky. It is definitely one of the more out there theories, but does seem to affect quite a number of people.

My friend actually believes the signal today is a test, but the real signal will be sent on the 11th of October, and that will be the beginning of the end of the world.

I've never heard this, and I occasionally read the news. How did you hear about it?

I heard about it from my kids' school; they sent an email to tell parents to give them a heads-up.

News, Mastodon, and Lemmy.

I just learned now

I wonder if some day a zero day will be snuck in that bricks every phone. How chaotic would that be!

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102516

> When your iPhone is connected to a carrier in the United States—using a U.S. SIM or while roaming in the U.S.—you can enable Test Emergency Alerts. By default, this is turned off.

> Turn Government Alerts on or off

Seems like test alerts are turned off by default and real alerts can be turned off for iOS?

Although this is a test, it is not being sent as a test. It is being sent as a Presidential Alert, which cannot be disabled on any phone running stock firmware. It's literally illegal to sell a phone that allows Presidential Alerts to be disabled.

Thank you for this – I've been wondering how this would work with inbound roaming phones!

I think visibility of this setting used to be tied to the phone's configured region, but the new behavior makes more sense for inbound roaming users.

I really hope to see someone trace and deconstruct the level of bizarre conspiracy theory generation around this event.

For those not aware, I've seen (mostly through semi-related posts on e.g. Reddit) a lot of people forwarding and subscribing to all kinds of absolute nonsense ideas about this event "broadcasting a signal to activate the Marburg virus" or "being particularly painful for the vaccinated to hear", or "likely to start many small fires in modern devices".

I bet that kind of stuff goes around about lots of events -- but I am curious if this one has become so popularly expected to result in bizarre catastrophes just because it's national? Or are people just _much_ more gullible this year?

The only concern I've seen is people who might have reason to keep a phone's existence secret. Those with abusive partners, parents, etc.

I was joking with my middle school aged son about this. They have a phones off policy at his school and my guess is a lot of kids are going to get phones confiscated at 12:30 MST.

They might consider setting airplane mode or powering it off when not in use.

Prison guards will probably also be on the lookout, I'd imagine.

Oh boy that's kind of grimly hilarious, depending on one's attitude towards cellphones in prison.

I saw this one too, and it's an interesting point to consider. I would imagine those people's phones would mostly already be usually concealed, because e.g. an amber or a weather alert with similar effects and consequences could come in at any time.

Unlike those alerts, the FEMA alerts cannot be disabled.

Hm, really? On my up-to-date iPhone 13 Mini, I have all of AMBER, Emergency, Public Safety, and Test alerts disabled. Seems like this would fall under at least one of those. I guess we'll find out :) I don't mind a text alert, but I'll be pretty pissed if it makes a bunch of noise.

Neither users nor device manufacturers are allowed the option to disable US Presidential or FEMA device alerts.

All right, fuck it, I'll just turn the thing off for an hour, lol. No one gets to make my phone make noise except me.

I heard from somewhere that even phones turned off will sound the alarm if the battery is in. Could you report back if that happens?

That's not how the emergency alert system operates.

Here's a bit more information for you, it should help with the fear-mongering bs.

> https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/out-of-coverage-switched-...

Report: I had the phone off from 2:10 through 3:30. When I turned it on, there was no alert. Emergency successfully avoided!

Thanks for reporting back!

How is it possible you are on this website?

This comment is low value, rude, and ignorant, and should not be on this website.

It's called a roving bug and dates back to at least the mid 2000's https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as...

Here's an article from 2014 on how it might be possible: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/nsa-remotely-turn-on-phones,new...

They obviously use the same undetectable power and rf technology that Bill Gates developed for the implantable microchip.

Thank you for reminding me to turn off Amber Alerts on my new 15.

Think of me fondly when you are sleeping soundly at 3 AM~

Can they at least be silenced so your phone doesn’t make an audible buzz or vibration?

At least for the ones sent in the Netherlands, if the iPhone is in silent mode, instead of making noises, it will vibrate strongly for a full minute or so.

Well, on Android I had Do Not Disturb on as a test today and the alert was silent but still received - saw it when waking my phone.

Nope.

Those aren't even that far-reaching theories... Apparently, Russia also did a test for this same exact thing today, so you can image the parallels that drew from a select few communities.

'Attention - remain calm': Russia tests public warning system (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-conduct-emergenc...)

So much current conspiracy stuff is so wild that it's essentially impossible to distinguish conspiracy theories that people deeply believe in from sarcasm and for the lulz postings.

Ya it's weird, but it's largely a rehash of the same things that come up every time an amber alert or emergency tone is played.

Also weird, it's the same people who complaining a pizza shop has a secret underground child prison that are upset by actual attempts to quickly save children.

The conspiracy is that the alerts are mostly used to catch escaped children

Same thing happened last time.

Time to mass-send "Over-the-air vaccination successful. Remain calm. -CDC" per SMS

It's not clear to me how they assert the success of their test from reading. If some large percentage, say a percent, didn't get the alert would they know? Didn't see anything on IPAWS from a quick search, but maybe someone here knows? Are there read-receipts for these alerts?

The process of sending an alert like this is very likely to have numerous steps in the process, with the actual alert delivery being only the final one. This kind of alert would involve multiple agencies, communication channels, coordination, approvals, etc., all before the actual alert goes out. A test like this is designed to make sure all of those things are working.

And yes, there’s definitely a log somewhere showing if delivery was successful, and collecting and analyzing that information after the alert is also probably part of the testing.

I would assume that they could pull the numbers from the amber alert on what sort of numbers they should be seeing.

Then I would also assume that part of the system would report back saying "delivered" and they could just compare those numbers?

I heard on NPR this morning that the test will be of an alert level that cannot be squelched by settings on the handset. Is that true?

Generally yes for stock OS. I like that GrapheneOS doesn't give a shit (and they don't have to, because they're not selling phones):

"Wireless alerts are fully optional since GrapheneOS adds a toggle for the otherwise mandatory presidential alert type. This is particularly useful in Canada where the government abuses the system and sends every type of alert as a presidential alert to stop users from being able to opt out of weather and amber alerts." https://grapheneos.org/features

That’d be a nice sub plot for a movie. Undercover spy in the bushes has his phone on silent and gets cover blown when FEMA alert is sent out.

In case anyone is curious, this is the commit that implements the change: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_CellBro...

EDIT: For folks with rooted devices, all alerts can be disabled with:

    adb shell su -c 'pm disable com.google.android.cellbroadcastreceiver'

and reenabled with:

    adb shell su -c 'pm enable com.google.android.cellbroadcastreceiver'

For folks on custom Android builds (or older stock Android builds without APEX module support), the package name is `com.android.cellbroadcastreceiver` (without the `.google`).

Au contraire - GrapheneOS gives a shit and actually represents the user.

It's funny - if I found some national opt-in list to where one could sign up for national/regional alerts delivered by email or SMS I would probably sign up. But alerts that commandeer my phone with some loud siren type thing? Fuck that (literal) noise.

based

I believe the alerts from FEMA cannot be blocked on the device [0]

> Devices may offer the capability to disable most CMAS messages, but end-users must not be able to disable alerts issued by the President or Administrator of FEMA ("National Alert"), as prohibited by the Warning, Alert, and Response Network Act.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Emergency_Alerts#Part...

I'm not sure, but i've had my handset set to what i felt were pretty reasonable yet safe settings for emergency alerts, and got enough of them at 2 and 3am that i had to disable it.

I don't like this, i would prefer leaving emergency alerts on, but why are we testing it in the middle of the night? That's encouraging people to disable...

I thought you couldn't disable this one? I know opting out of silver or amber alerts doesn't cut it. That has spawned some more conspiracy theories, because 5g and fema... people built faraday cages for today.

I saw this in Kingsman. It's gonna be bloody and Sammy ain't gonna like it.

This comment has the test timing backwards, but is otherwise correct that these alerts are used way too often and are set to make phones behave way too severely. I completely disabled them after I got woken up by some garbage AMBER Alert at 3 AM, and some other time when my phone deafened me to alert me to some road flooding across town. Feels crummy to disable what could be a genuinely useful feature, but you blew it, boy who cried wolf. They're all off now and will be for the rest of my life.

In Texas they send "Blue Alerts" whenever a criminal shoots a cop or something.

Terrible as it is in reality, getting one of these for an event over a THOUSAND MILES away boils my blood so fast that I feel the desire to absolutely ruin the life of the person who chose to send it out and everyone who enabled them along the way.

Just wait until you find out that the child in that garbage amber alert was never in any danger, and was merely stuck in a custody dispute between two quarreling parents. Most amber alerts are just one parent taking their own child from the other parent. I have no reason to believe that the police are on the right side of such a custody dispute so I will never participate in an Amber alert.

In what world is 2:20pm the middle of the night.

The comment said am

And the article said 2:20 PM ET.

And the comment said " got enough of them at 2 and 3am that i had to disable it." not directly referring to the article.

And the comment also said:

> …but why are we testing it in the middle of the night?

Referring to the test occurring at 2:20 pm ET, leading the other poster’s question which wasn’t about the part you are quoting.

I guess it depends whether the 2am alerts he had been getting were tests or not

I mean, any relativistic world that has simultaneous day and night periods.

A 'world' was a strange geographical constraint here. Like measuring the width of a cell in watermelons.

You're getting tests in the middle of the night, or actual alerts(Amber, Silver, etc)?

I explicitly disabled all emergency alerts in the myriad android settings, and I kept the radio on just to see what would happen. I got the alerts.

I turn off all alerts on my phone and I will turn the unit off at 2pm today.

Meanwhile at the government:

"Sir, cellular telemetry reports 0.1% of devices dropped offline, mere minutes before the broadcast." "NOOOOOOOOoooooooo!"

This will be fun for my wife who's in the hospital right now. And everyone else in hospitals trying to rest.

Also, will this go off on cellular watches? I'm sure schoolteachers are going to LOVE this... :-/

>This will be fun for my wife who's in the hospital right now. And everyone else in hospitals trying to rest.

That this will be happening today has been publicly communicated for at least a few weeks (as far as I've noticed) now. If that's not enough time for people to realize that, if they want rest, or silence, or whatever, they'll need to turn their phones off around this time, then I don't know what to tell ya.

>Also, will this go off on cellular watches? I'm sure schoolteachers are going to LOVE this... :-/

Same sentiment as above. This isn't just happening to kid's devices, it's happening to teacher's/administrator's phones, too. It'd be no different than a timed emergency drill that folk in schools are anticipating; everyone knows it's coming, there'll be a few minutes of mild commotion, things will die back down.

> That this will be happening today has been publicly communicated for at least a few weeks (as far as I've noticed) now.

This is the first I (and many others, see further up) have heard of it.

> they’ll need to turn off their phones

Apparently if you turn off your phone, the alert will play when you turn it back on. So if everyone in a hospital wing turned off their phone, the alert would “happen” multiple times as people turned their phones on later.

The idea in my post is that you know it's coming when you turn it back on. Someone who wants to sleep can turn their phone off, sleep, and then turn their phone on when they wake up and are expecting it, in the privacy of their own room.

Edit: Not entirely true - it won't receive the emergency signal so long as you keep it off during the 30 minute window[1].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37766253

The thing I'm worried about is people in crowded, quiet areas like hospitals who have conditions that trigger on sudden noises or surprises. Many people in the hospital aren't up to speed on the news. Because, you know, they're half-awake and feeling terrible. So when the nurses' and patient's phones all start blaring while they're treating a patient who then has some sort of cardiac or nervous system response to the scary-sounding alarm...

I dunno. Maybe there's no precedent for my worry. But it feels real.

In that fairly contrived situation I would think and hope they already have precautions against noise anyway?

I mean, if you accept that we should have a warning system where the government can communicate with everyone quickly, it does need to be tested. And early Wednesday afternoon is a better time than most. What would you rather them do?

Why do we think there needs to be such a system? I don't. I'd rather delete the capability. The likelihood of bad uses overwhelms the slender possible benefits.

Incidentally, in the UK the test messages could be opted out of, and a lot of people did. Presumably this doesn't stop the government from cranking the level up to unignorable if they wanted to, unless the big phone OS cos sensibly didn't give them that access level.

What are the bad uses of a text message alert?

Alert that can't be skipped? Un-ignorable hectoring about whatever they want you thinking about today, perhaps for political ends. Makes it even easier to turn warnings into mandates, and it's already too easy. Over-application, so everybody gets told to worry when actually it should have been more targeted. Mistakes, causing needless fear. The risk of triggering largescale panic... or creeping up the use from "only dire emergency" to "often enough that people learn to ignore it". Potential for it to be subverted to malicious ends by third parties.

What are the good uses of a nationwide, rather than local and targeted, alert?

A good use of a nationwide alert is to send out a test alert for the nationwide alert system. Obviously /s

Allow users to choose how the alert is handled. I would leave these on if I could make them silent, but I can't. It's either world-ending screeching, or entirely off. So off it is. For folks who don't know to turn it off, they're going to have their day rudely interrupted to no benefit due to the godawful alert implementation.

My understanding is this test will be a Presidental Alert, which cannot be disabled. I guess we'll all find out soon enough.

> This will be fun for my wife who's in the hospital right now. And everyone else in hospitals trying to rest.

Hospitals are full of noise, one narrow time slice with an extra vurst isn't going to meaningfully change that.

> 2:20 p.m. ET

Amused at "ET".

I guess they didn't want to confuse people with EDT (which we're currently 'in') and EST ('winter time', which will be 'entered' on November 5).

This is the standard way to refer to the eastern US time zone, exactly to reduce the confusion you mention

Seconded. For normal conversation, I started using PT/MT/CT/ET. I can’t ever remember if it’s daylight savings or not, and people generally understand what you mean.

ET, EST, EDT, EST5EDT, US/Eastern, Zone R, and various America/* timezones are all defined names for this zone in various standards.

There are finite timezones affected, I wonder why they don’t just provide a table of all local times.

I wonder how confusing this is for residents of areas that don’t observe daylight savings, such as Arizona, Puerto Rico or the Hopi nation.

> […] Arizona, Puerto Rico or the Hopi nation.

There's some Inception-level stuff going on here: the state of Arizona does not observer DST, the Najavo nation with-in Arizona does, but then the Hopi nation with-in Najavo nation does not:

* https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2016/03/1...

Another weird one is American Samoa. The Uniform Time Act—which requires areas to switch to and from DST in a uniform manner—has no provisions for areas on the Southern hemisphere. So if American Samoa wanted to observe daylight savings—which they might have prior to 2021 when neighboring Independent Samoa was on DST—they would have to do so with the rest of USA, which is in their winter time.

I expect they're already used to dealing with it.

At one time, Indiana residents could be in four different de facto time zones (Eastern/Central, did/did not observe DST). It's been simplified a lot in recent years.

I’m kicking myself for losing track of it, but I bought an old booklet that described changes in Indiana time zones in the 50s and 60s. Different communities would observe different time zones, and sometimes a community would change zones between years.

Probably no more confusing than the time zone shift itself. If what you're after is “the time in New York, regardless of the time zone New York is in” — which is generally what you want to express — then “ET” is perfect for the job.

I've never been able to remember which time we're in so I always just use the two character version. It's not like it actually matters except when planning a meeting after a transition will occur.

I wonder how many illicit prison phones this alert test will discover.

Noted. I will turn of my phone from 2pm ET for a while.

Last year, here in Ukraine, we had something like that. A couple of times, I saw those alerts on my phone. At some point, they stopped doing it. Maybe it didn't work out as the government planned.

If you live in a situation where the presence of your phone needs to stay secret, turn it OFF, really OFF... now.

I wonder how many battered women will die because of this test.

Turning completely off for the duration should work.

Quote: If a phone is off before the test alert is sent and not turned back on until after the WEA Test expires (approximately 30 minutes), the phone should not get the test message. Unquote

Late notice, though I saw the same concern mentioned yesterday or earlier, but not in widespread media.

The alert is not received at all if phone is disconnected to network for the 30 min test period

I must admit, it is slightly unsettling knowing that there is a communications side channel out there which could effectively DDOS every mobile phone.

Not for nothing, I understand why it is useful to be able to broadcast messages/alerts like this and you can just click OK, the message goes away and you get your phone back. But people are really bandying about conspiracy theories that this will activate Marburg virus (what is this, the X-Files?) or be painful if you're vaccinated? FEMA (more X-Files!) is going to literally demonstrate its capability to control your phone.

I need to hang up this tin foil hat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com