National emergency alert system outed prisoners hiding phones | Hacker News Reader

National emergency alert system outed prisoners hiding phones

dailymail.co.uk

25 pointsLinuxBender12 comments

Also caused some amish people who were/are considering leaving that had phones to get shunned by the community

I remember seeing an online poster circulate that warned victims of domestic violence to turn off their secret phones during that time window.

The technology exists to monitor and/or block phones in prisons. It's trivial.

The authorities in most countries prefer to monitor, rather than ban or block. Presumably the intelligence gain is worth it, or the risk of riot is not worth it.

I have disabled what I thought was all emergency alerts on my iPhone. That was three separate toggles. This alert still came through.

Vendors aren’t legally allowed to provide a means of disabling “presidential alerts”, which is what the test was. You can disable amber and emergency and public safety alerts, which is what it sounds like you did.

Running rooted android with graphene it is possible to disable them.

I wonder how many cheating spouses with burner phones just got outed?

Such a stupid system. No alert should bypass specific instructions for a phone to be silent. Or at the very least they should do a silent alarm before doing this

>No alert should bypass specific instructions for a phone to be silent.

Why? Don't you know that bitter custody disputes qualify as national emergencies on par with the outbreak of a natural disaster or nuclear war? Surely the fact that 99.999% of the time it's only used for the former increases the chance the alerts will be taken seriously.

Nah the alert system has made itself known more for being utterly necessary to mute. You really don't need to wake up a metropolitan area at 2am because a grandparent "escaped".

This depends on the country though. Here in Germany the system is only used for actual emergencies, like fires or blackouts. It's not used for missing persons and the like. Though there was a warning about an allegedly escaped lion in the wild this summer. Turned out to be just some boars.

Amber alerts and similar can be disabled.

Unless you're in Canada (possibly only some provinces) where our government has, in their infinite wisdom, decided that all alerts must be broadcast at the presidential level.

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