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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Announcer: Welcome to civil discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your host, Nia Rogers, Public Affairs Librarian, and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughe.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm feeling very alert. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I was going to come my way.
N. Rodgers: How do you like that for a segue?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, you actually stole my thunder because I was going to say, I'm going to put you on alert today.
N. Rodgers: Too late. I'm already there.
J. Aughenbaugh: You feel very alert today?
N. Rodgers: I do. You know what listeners, sometimes, I ask Aughe for a topic, and Aughe does the thing that Scooby-Doo does when he puts up one ear and one eye and he goes. Because Aughe knows things, like, he just knows them, and so he thinks that everybody else just knows them because that's what smart people do. But I knew about AMBER Alerts, but I didn't know about other alerts, and I didn't know the history of those alerts. I asked Aughe if we could do an episode about that and he said, sure, because that's what he always says. That's not always true, but most of the time it's true. Today, we're going to talk about alerts.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, what Nia is alluding to is that once I went down, and this is one of the joys I have with doing this podcast and listeners, I've shared this with you, is that we decide upon a topic. Sometimes the topics come from Nia and sometimes they come from me, but it doesn't matter who was the original source. I start doing research, and then I start going down these rabbit holes.
N. Rodgers: You go down the research rabbit hole, which is own special kind of rabbit hole.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, we are making allusions to Alice and Wonderland. Thank you very much. But this one, in particular, I found that there are other alert systems beyond AMBER.
N. Rodgers: I think AMBER's the one everybody knows about, but I don't think they know why it's called Amber, or what even Amber stands for.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, so we're going to first start with the AMBER Alert system. Then we're going to discuss others. Then because it's me, I couldn't resist including in our notes in the preparation for this podcast episode.
N. Rodgers: When it goes wrong.
J. Aughenbaugh: When it goes bad, so listeners bear with us. But first, we're going to start with the AMBER Alert system. Nia, when did the AMBER Alert System begin?
N. Rodgers: In the 1990s. Sometime in the 1990s.
J. Aughenbaugh: You are correct. It began in 1996. It originated in the Dallas Fort Worth Texas area when broadcasters teamed with the local police to develop an early warning system to help find a abducted children. Now, it is ubiquitous across the United States.
N. Rodgers: Wasn't there a particular child?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Wasn't there a kid named Amber? Isn't that where?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, a nine-year-old Amber Hagerman who was kidnapped while riding her bike in Arlington, Texas, which is a suburb of the Dallas Fort Worth area and was brutally murdered. AMBER, the acronym stands for America's Missing Broadcast Emergency Response. It ties to the name of the child. The acronym actually has designation like most of our acronyms, a long phrase.
N. Rodgers: The theory behind an AMBER Alert is that the quicker that you can get people looking for the child/abductor, the faster you can find said child.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: More likely you will find the child alive.
J. Aughenbaugh: Criminal justice research tells us that in kidnapping situations, the quicker you get the information out. The greater the likelihood that you will find the kidnapped person, but in particular, with the AMBER system, children, the increased likelihood you will find them, and you'll find them alive.
N. Rodgers: Isn't it something like the magic first 24 hours something like this? It's a whole thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Typically, it's the first 24 hours.
N. Rodgers: I get them on my phone.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. We'll talk about how the AMBER system has developed. But basically, the process is this. Once law enforcement has determined that a child has been abducted, and there are certain criteria, then law enforcement notifies broadcasters and state transportation systems. For many of our listeners here in the United States, in many states now, they have on the side of the roads, the board set up to where if there is a current AMBER Alert and who the child is, there's typically a photo, their age, their physical description, sometimes what they were last wearing, the clothes that they were wearing.
N. Rodgers: If they know who took the child or what vehicle the person is driving, because a lot of times children are abducted by non custodial parents, so we know who has the kid.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: We're just trying to get the kid back safely.
J. Aughenbaugh: Many of those roadside and I'm blanking on roadside.
N. Rodgers: The electronic signs.
J. Aughenbaugh: The electronic signs will have how long they have been missing. Because again, that emphasizes for the public.
N. Rodgers: The immediacy.
J. Aughenbaugh: That time is of the essence. Now, Nia, as you pointed out, AMBER Alerts have now also been expanded through lottery systems. We've already talked about the digital billboards, Internet ads, so it's not unusual.
N. Rodgers: That's right.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you are surfing the net, it's not unusual to see an AMBER Alert pop up where you would normally find an Internet ad, Internet service providers, Internet search engines, and Nia, as you mentioned, it's now been expanded to wireless devices like your cell phone.
N. Rodgers: Because if you're in a store, you're probably not looking at all of those other things, but you probably have your phone on you.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: If it makes a noise and you look at it, and you're like, that looks like the person who took this kid or whatever, you can alert authorities.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because it will pop up in your phone, as Nia just described it. For most of us, it will make a noise on our phone. AMBER Alert will be all in caps, and if you click on it, if they have a photo, the photo will appear. They will give the location of where the child was last seen and when. They again, usually have a physical description, including the clothes they were wearing, when they were last seen.
N. Rodgers: Do they work?
J. Aughenbaugh: As of December 31 of 2023, the AMBER Alert system has contributed to the recovery of 1,186 children.
N. Rodgers: That's a win.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's a win. The wireless emergency alerts, which now are, again, ubiquitous on most people's cell phones have resulted in the rescue of 165 children.
N. Rodgers: Another win.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's another win. There is a growing body of research, Nia, that also suggests that Amber Alerts act as a deterrent to those who might prey upon children.
N. Rodgers: If it hits your phone and you're the criminal, you're going to drop that kid off at a mall and be like, I don't want to have anything to do with this because it is way worse to be found in possession of a child that's not yours or should not be with you.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. There have actually been cases, and I found this in my research where perpetrators released the abducted child after hearing or seeing an Amber Alert.
N. Rodgers: Well, especially if you know you're going to get caught?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We know who you are, or we have a good description of you. You're better off releasing this kid and letting them go.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because the alert decreases the chance that the abductor with the abducted child can just fade into the morass of people.
N. Rodgers: Because the more people who get it will see you in a restaurant, or a store or whatever and say, hey, isn't that guy with a kid he shouldn't have, or woman?
J. Aughenbaugh: Even if you take him to a campground or a State Park. Again, once we started to use the Internet and wireless, then the alert system became much more effective, but the Amber Alert system is not the only one. We also have the wireless emergency alerts. These are emergency messages, usually, less than 90 characters.
N. Rodgers: Oh, I get these from the National Weather Systems.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Tornado in your area. Tornado warning. Take cover now. They're very short and very terse and very scary. It's never have a good day, XOXO FEMA. It's a hurricane making landfall in your city. Get to higher ground. There's that's the kind I've seen with that. Is that the normal kind with that?
J. Aughenbaugh: There are three types of wireless emergency alerts. Again, of course, because this comes from the government, we have an acronym WEA, wireless emergency alerts. There are three types of warnings per the WEA system. First, you can get one from the Office of the President. These are issued in the case of a national emergency. It was created after the 9/11 attacks. To date, there has not been a presidential warning issued via WEA.
N. Rodgers: Good.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's good.
N. Rodgers: Well, because that would be a nationwide alert. If you got that alert, the national weather alerts are vocalized.
J. Aughenbaugh: Very specific. Just like the Amber. In fact, we just described.
N. Rodgers: That's true. You don't get Amber Alerts from another state, you only get ones where you're likely to see the child?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Those are, actually, the three types of warnings through the WEA system. Presidential imminent threat, which is issued by the National Weather Service. You see these a lot, for instance, in hurricane prone areas, tornado prone areas, and increasingly wildfire areas, for instance, out west, California, etc. Those are loosely related to weather. Then you get the Amber Alerts. These are, again, part of the WEA system now.
N. Rodgers: Do you not get the other alerts because you would get so many that you'd stop reading them, if you got every alert from every weather system and every missing child in the US?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. That was actually part of the design engineers' process for WEA, which is they relied upon the body of scholarship in communications and in psychology about how the public will tune out.
N. Rodgers: Multiple warnings.
J. Aughenbaugh: Emergency messages if they get too many of them.
N. Rodgers: I hate to say it, but I probably would. Well, I don't know if I would or not, because I'm paranoid, but generally speaking.
J. Aughenbaugh: But we know this, for instance, in regards to weather alerts. There are communities and, for instance, Tornado Alley, which is for non-American listeners, in the central part of the United States, where tornados hit with some frequency, particularly during the summer months.
N. Rodgers: Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, or what we call the square fly over states in the middle.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. The flyover states. They get so many warnings that the National Weather Service actually has staffers who have now determined that because they get so many warnings, many of the citizens in those areas tuned them out.
N. Rodgers: Well, that's scary.
J. Aughenbaugh: But in listeners, one of the books that Nia and I are really fond of is Michael Lewis' book the Fifth Risk, and he actually has a chapter about how the National Weather Service has been historically befuddled by how they will warn citizens of an area of an imminent weather threat, and the people won't respond. One of the things that contributes to the non-response is that when residents get too many warnings. Some of those warnings or in reality, the weather was not as bad as-
N. Rodgers: If you get warned a tornado and nothing happens, the next time you get one of those, you like, whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: You stop believing the veracity of the warning.
N. Rodgers: It's true. Being a person from North Carolina when they talk about terrifying hurricanes, I'm like, unless you're talking about Isabel, I don't want to hear it.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's like for those.
N. Rodgers: It's not an attitude, by the way that we're encouraging listeners to have.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: You should not have this attitude, but it does seem to be human nature.
J. Aughenbaugh: I am aware of this listeners, you probably long time listeners are aware that I grew up in the North, part of the Lake Erie snow belt. Well, after a while, when you hear the National Weather Service say this is going to be.
N. Rodgers: WEA condition.
J. Aughenbaugh: Conditions. Once in a generation snowstorm, we're like, they told us that earlier this winter or last winter. We got four.
N. Rodgers: It has not been a generation since then.
J. Aughenbaugh: We got 4-6 inches and it melted the next day. Fool me once, I'm the fool, fool me twice, I'm not going to believe you anymore.
N. Rodgers: Can people opt out of that? Can people not get alerts to their phones?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. In privacy, if you will, advocates, really push the fact that wheel alerts cannot be mandatory. If you're a wireless user, you can go onto your phone and disable that function on your phone. Now, it usually requires three or four steps, and for the Luddites amongst us, you may never be able to disable it.
N. Rodgers: Probably is going to ask you, are you really sure? It's a safety measure for missing children and for yourself when it comes to weather, but I have a question about. Let us say that you and I are enrichment. Big stretch. Enrichment and a child goes missing in Texas.
J. Aughenbaugh: There's a system somehow that recognizes that outside of Texas, they probably don't need to send that amber alert. Unless, if it's at the edge of Texas, you might want to send it to Oklahoma, you might want to send it to Arkansas but you're not going to send it to North Carolina or Virginia or Maine because it's unlikely. How does that work with it knowing?
N. Rodgers: That is usually a determination made by law enforcement. If law enforcement has a credible report that a child has crossed state lines, then law enforcement in the original state will let law enforcement know in surrounding states. Hey, our Amber alert now may be applicable to your state in your state's residents, but it is the other states who have to make the determination whether or not they employ the Amber alert, so it requires cooperation among government officials across state lines.
J. Aughenbaugh: But they're going to get with a missing child.
N. Rodgers: Yes. But that is also the case in regards to imminent weather threats. The National Weather Service will issue a threat, say for the Eastern part of Oklahoma about a tornado. But if the weather system moves, for instance, north or east, then state officials in those states have to make a determination. Do we report that to our residents?
J. Aughenbaugh: Do we release the National Weather Service warning to our folks?
N. Rodgers: Through WIA, but there's typically very little pushback, by the way, from the broadband in wireless providers. Do you actually want to be the company that goes ahead and says?
J. Aughenbaugh: We're not sending out your alert to save lives. The liability in that would be horrible. Two, you really want to be that guy in that company?
N. Rodgers: The bad press alone would not be a good business practice.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I would drop a carrier that said we're not going to carry these alerts. I would drop that carrier and move to another carrier.
N. Rodgers: You can deal with the complaints that you received from your customer service reps from people who are like, how do I turn off this alert? But are you going to be able to go ahead and deal with the blow back when you have a bunch of people who are like, what, you didn't think that I should receive this alert?
J. Aughenbaugh: My house was knocked down by a tornado because you didn't give me the alert that I should have gotten to lower ground, safe places.
N. Rodgers: My car is now in the next county over.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks AT&T although I'm kidding, cause AT&T actually carries all the alerts.
N. Rodgers: We were just joking. That was just a hypothetical.
J. Aughenbaugh: As far as I'm aware, like you said, none of them sound like I have AT&T. My sister has sprint. We both get Amber alerts, and we get them at the same time.
N. Rodgers: I have a Verizon.
J. Aughenbaugh: If we're sitting in the house together, her phone will go Burke, and then my phone will go Burke.
N. Rodgers: Yes. Me and my good friend, Professor Saladino, he's got a different carrier than mine. Mine's Verizon, and we can be out together and all of a sudden, our phones just stark and we both looked down and we've received the exact same WIA message.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which is cool.
N. Rodgers: Now, that's not the only.
J. Aughenbaugh: Don't you wish that there was one for go vote? I'm just saying.
N. Rodgers: Go vote. There's a couple other things. In my case, if my local coffee shop just went ahead and ground some brand new beans. It's fresh.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're a lunatic. You wouldn't want an alert for that.
N. Rodgers: I would love to get an alert to where almost like Pavlov's dog. I'd be like, okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're right. That would be almost immediately commercialized into something terrible. Never mind. Forget I said anything.
N. Rodgers: We've mentioned two alert systems. Nia are those the only two.
J. Aughenbaugh: Apparently not.
N. Rodgers: Nia is like, go ahead and ask me the big question. We have the emergency alert system known as EAS. It is a national warning system in the United States designed to allow authorized officials to broadcast emergency alerts and warnings to the public via cable, satellite, and broadcast TV, both AM, FM and also satellite radio. These are the alerts.
J. Aughenbaugh: WIA gets you on your phone and EAS gets you on your Internet basically and on your entertainment.
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Television, table, music, radio.
N. Rodgers: All those folks who more than likely don't listen to the podcast because they don't have the Internet or they don't have satellite radio, or wireless or whatever. In other words, Nia, folks like my mom and my grandmother. They still get alerts.
J. Aughenbaugh: On their phone.
N. Rodgers: They don't have phones.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: But they get it on the radio and TV. The EAS is the older version of NIA.
J. Aughenbaugh: Analogue.
N. Rodgers: For all of our younger listeners, what I'm about ready to describe will make no sense to you, unless you go to visit elderly parents or grandparents, who still have cable TV.
J. Aughenbaugh: People listen to satellite radio.
N. Rodgers: But again, what I'm talking about here is you are watching your TV. Again, for our younger listeners, I apologize, you're just like, I stream my shows on my computer. I get that. But there are other Americans, part of the infamous digital divide that still get their entertainment through that big Honkin TV that sits part of their entertainment system in their living room. All of a sudden, at the bottom of the screen, will be an alert message with a really annoying sound to get your attention to focus on the bottom of the screen. Exactly, it's that noise.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's three sounds to get you to look at the screen so that you can read whatever's being written across the bottom or in the case of the radio to make the music stop so that or the talk radio or whatever it is that you're listening to. Remember when it used to be, this is a message from the emergency broadcast system. If we were really in trouble, we'd be saying something important right now, but this is a test. This is only a test of the emergency broadcast system and then it would go to let you know it was over.
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Is this a similar thing than the emergency broadcasting system?
N. Rodgers: EAS replaced the emergency broadcasting system in 1997.
J. Aughenbaugh: That tells you how long it's been since I've watched television.
N. Rodgers: The FCC, another acronym, the Federal Communications Commission decided in November of 1994 to replace the emergency broadcasting system, with the EAS. They did so in large part, is they went digital, digitally encoded audio signals, which are known as again, I apologize for another acronym, SAME, Specific Area Message Encoding. Basically, this is now all run digitally. Again, for our analog listeners or viewers, etc. most entertainment now is digital.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you bought the TV in the last 10 years, it's a digital TV.
N. Rodgers: Yes. Again, the idea was, this is a more reliable system because the old emergency broadcasting system could actually be affected by weather that it was trying to warn you about.
N. Rodgers: This is more because it's digital. It's faster, but it's also reliant on a different system.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, they cannot.
N. Rodgers: To communicate.
J. Aughenbaugh: Is not necessarily affected by weather.
N. Rodgers: I assume that in some ways, it can be narrower than it used to be.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It used to be that the emergency broadcast system, you would get stuff from all over your state, whether you were going to be affected or not.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I'm assuming that now with digital, they can hone in on this county or these three counties and cut out a warning to those people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They've tightened up that range?
J. Aughenbaugh: They've tightened up the range, but it also allows it to go national. Presidential warnings about a national security threat affecting either the entire country or a large part of the country can go through the EAS, again, because it's digital.
N. Rodgers: Have we ever used it for that?
J. Aughenbaugh: No, we've not.
N. Rodgers: I was thinking, did I miss something, but we didn't, 'cause again if you're getting a national alert from the president, something truly terrifying is happening.
J. Aughenbaugh: The only time the EAS has been used for something national was announcing the 9/11 attacks. But there was not a presidential message. A message was sent out on the EAS to make Americans aware that yes, the news coverage was accurate, yes terrorists did blah, blah, blah. But there was not a "presidential message" about you need to hide in place or you need to seek shelter or anything like that?
N. Rodgers: Because it wasn't a nuclear exchange. I assume the thing the president would use that system for.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Would be to a concern of that nature. I have a question though about that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Do you think that part of why that system has not been used by presidents is because, and forgive me, I can remember 9/11. I remember distinctly sitting in my apartment for three days glued to the television, because the news coverage was 24/7.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We now have that ubiquitous. There is there is no stopping the CNN MSNBC Fox News of the world.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They report constantly. Do you think that that's part of why that system doesn't get used as much because it's already getting reported at that level?
J. Aughenbaugh: I think that's part of it, Nia. The other thing is, if a president sends a message out on the EAS, a president will have to go ahead and weigh the costs and benefits of sending out a message on the EAS.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say that would scare the sweet of Jesus out of most people.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Which might result in panic and extraordinary distress.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and in bad responses.
N. Rodgers: Potentially criminal behavior.
J. Aughenbaugh: Criminal behavior or people responding hysterically when they should be waiting for future messages on how best to respond. Think about, for instance, God forbid, the president has credible information that terrorists are going to explode a dirty bomb in a large urban area. Now, if you send out a message saying, Hey, we have credible information that there is a threat that this is going to occur, what might a lot of people try to do in that urban area?
N. Rodgers: Panic and get out.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But the first thing they do is go get their kids from school.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You would get blockages.
J. Aughenbaugh: Blockages. Now you have a scenario where a whole bunch of parents are creating traffic problems at schools.
N. Rodgers: Then it closes off the evacuation route.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then they're going to want to leave the area, which then again, means you're going to have evacuation issues, when what presidential administration may want is instead, people stay in place so that government and law enforcement can perhaps diffuse the situation, etc. There are pros and cons that have to be weighed with this. But it is a system that is jointly coordinated by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Association, the FCC, Federal Communications Commission, and then NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, what most of us refer to as the National Weather Service.
N. Rodgers: Although the National Weather Service is just a sub-agency of NOAA.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It does a whole bunch of other stuff too.
J. Aughenbaugh: But folks, if you have family members, friends who still use broadcast in cable TV or non-satellite radio, they do get the weekly testing of EAS equipment. It's what Nia described with the pip! pip!
N. Rodgers: This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. If anything were really happening, you would be getting a message right now about it.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: It's something like that. It doesn't say exactly that, but yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it's now the EAS. It's not the emergency broadcasting system, but you got pretty much the first two sentences of the testing message.
N. Rodgers: That is to make sure that it works because you don't want to find out it's not working when you need it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It needs to be tested because otherwise if you did want to put out an alert and you tried and it was broken, that's a heck of a time to find that out.
J. Aughenbaugh: These required monthly tests, again, government officials, they refer to them as RMTs, Required Monthly Tests, have to be transmitted by TV stations and radio stations. It's part of their licensing contract with the FCC.
N. Rodgers: The FCC will pull your license and boot you off the air if you do not test the system.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Your local TV station can't say, our audience members don't like this, and they complain about it, so we're not going to do it. The FCC will say in response, then you won't operate.
N. Rodgers: For VCU students, you no doubt have experienced a similar phenomenon, which is the monthly siren test.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That we have on VCU's campus, which we tested so that we can make sure that if we need it, it's working.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The logic of VCU's monthly tests is adopted from the EAS system. It's not just VCU, it's colleges and universities across the country do this. Nia, they now do it in public high schools and middle schools.
N. Rodgers: Do they?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Your daughter has been through these?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You know what? It's good because it helps you practice and not panic.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The more you practice calmly responding to what that is, the more likely you are to do that in case of an actual emergency.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, because you want responsive behavior to become habitual. It's like Nia, when you are told by your parents, when you wake up in the morning you need to go to the bathroom, you need to wash your face, and brush your teeth. Because you want it to be habitual behavior.
N. Rodgers: So that you're not 30-years-old showing up in your pajamas and you haven't brushed your teeth, or combed your hair done anything, and people say, are you all right today?
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, this is rooted in psychology.
N. Rodgers: Repetitive things help you learn to do them. You try saying your ABCs backwards and see how you do.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. You want this to be habitual in stressful situations.
N. Rodgers: I don't know when you'd ever have an alphabetic stressful situation. Maybe if you were filing things.
J. Aughenbaugh: But I mean, for those of us who have undergone surgery, a number of times, one of the things that they ask you to do is count backwards from 100 while the drugs are kicking in, so you're out during the surgery. I never thought I would ever use that when I was required to do that in grade school until I had my first surgery, and I was just like.
N. Rodgers: Somebody's going to ask you to do this?
J. Aughenbaugh: By the time I got to 77, I remember nothing for apparently 3.5 hours. I was like, Wow. Now, this all sounds great. However, like any systems created by human beings, there have been a few false alarms. The first one I want to mention, and we're not picking on the Fine State of Connecticut, but this actually did happen in Connecticut, February 1st, 2005, an alert was mistakenly issued, calling for the immediate evacuation of the entire state. The entire state of Connecticut.
N. Rodgers: Where were they all supposed to go? Get out of Connecticut.
J. Aughenbaugh: Go to New York, go to Massachusetts.
N. Rodgers: Go anywhere else.
J. Aughenbaugh: The alert contained no specific details on the nature of the threat. The message.
N. Rodgers: That should have been a warning that it was fake.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was fake. Or not fake. It was-
N. Rodgers: A mistake. Mistake, I should say.
J. Aughenbaugh: Fake, because that's a different issue. The message was broadcast due to operator error while conducting an unannounced but scheduled statewide test. A study conducted following the incident reported that at least 11% of the residents actually saw the warning live and that 63% of those surveyed were a little or not at all concerned. That's the most alarming thing to me.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, except that, like we said, it didn't have any detail.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It didn't say why because there's a giant tsunami coming or because, I don't know. Whatever pick random thing that you would evacuate. Also, you would never evacuate an entire state. Wait, no, asterisk. I cave out that. You might evacuate the State of Hawaii.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: If you had sufficient sea rise from some horrible event, a giant, something in the ring of fire or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: An earthquake, for instance.
N. Rodgers: Was going to totally submerge the islands, I should say.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm recalling an incident from the 1960s where an earthquake occurred off the coast of Chile and the resulting wave disruption actually impacted the state of Hawaii and caused significant damage.
N. Rodgers: But other than that, I'm not sure that there's any state in the United States, where you'd say, okay, everybody get out.
J. Aughenbaugh: Apparently, according to the study that I read, only 1% of those surveyed actually attempted to leave the state.
N. Rodgers: Good for them, but that's still a lot of people 1%. Connecticut's not a low population number, anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: Other examples. These are typically all of recent vintage, because, again, these alert systems are relatively new.
N. Rodgers: Ninety-four and beyond.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, in the history. On 2007, June 26, an emergency action notification was accidentally issued in Illinois, when a new satellite receiver at the States Center Emergency Operation Center was accidentally connected to a live system before the final internal testing of a delivery path had been completed. The alert was followed by dead air, and then audio from one of the largest most powerful radio stations in the United States, 720 WGN in Chicago. There was a host of the stations morning show at the time was heard on air wondering, "what that beeping was all about."
N. Rodgers: What do you think that is? He was asking. Which part shows that he wasn't sure what the beeping was. Which also means there needs to be education.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But didn't it take down almost everything in Illinois and Chicago? It was a big deal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it was a big deal, yes. Then there was in 2010, a national weather report coming from Noa in Hermiston Oregon. I just love the name of that Hermiston, which is near a chemical depot, the Umatilla Chemical Depot. An EAS alert was issued shortly after 5:00 PM. The message indicated a severe thunderstorm warning but the transmission broadcast was followed by a long period of silence, followed by a few words in Spanish. The Umatilla County emergency management system stressed that there was no emergency at the depot.
N. Rodgers: A chemical depot exploding is the kind of thing you would want a warning to go out about. Put on about a mask, don't go outside, don't breathe the air.
J. Aughenbaugh: There are other ones.
N. Rodgers: Wasn't there one about North Korea?
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, yeah.
N. Rodgers: Like bombs? Is that something about like Guam was told?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. This was in 2017,Nia. Guam radio stations, KTWG and KSTO, transmitted a civil danger warning for the island. Guam Homeland Security described the message which interrupted programming on the stations, and was received on television stations by viewers as being an unauthorized test of the EAS. The incident's impact was strengthened because North Korea had threatened a launch of ballistic missiles towards Guam only a few days beforehand.
N. Rodgers: They bring down their 911 system for a little while people freaked out and were like, are they bombing us?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: And 911 was like, what are you talking about? 911 had no idea and had to quickly say, no, no, nobody's being bombed. It's all fine. Everything's going to be okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: In to the credit of the 911 operators on Guam, they reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to verify that-
N. Rodgers: Missiles have been been shot.
J. Aughenbaugh: Had been shot.
N. Rodgers: That's right. Are we being attacked? Not that we can tell. Okay, good, then we'll tell people there they're fine.
J. Aughenbaugh: They're fine. In many ways, the system worked because of the response of the 911 operators,
N. Rodgers: Who responded calmly and carefully and was like, let's verify this thing before we tell people to freak out.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Nia, you did mention something when you accidentally misspoke. When you talked about fakes. There have been issues related to EAS equipment being the subject of cyber attacks.
N. Rodgers: Well, because talk about a good way to scare a population.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: If the weather looks sketchy, and you can get a whole bunch of people to think that something really bad is about to happen. You can cause generalized chaos.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you are a terrorist organization, just think about this. We know this because of the literature regarding the tactics of terrorist organizations. One of the most effective ways to create fear, is to attack, if you will, alert systems, government systems that people rely upon, but in particular, the EAS system has been prone to attacks regarding insecure or faculty default passwords on their encoders.
N. Rodgers: Because factory default is like 1234 is your password. They want you to change that, but if you are a relative lite, or you're in a very small county with not a lot of support, you may leave it that way thinking, yeah, but that'll be easy for all of us to remember.
J. Aughenbaugh: Remember. That's right.
N. Rodgers: Making it thus incredibly easy for someone to break into your system.
J. Aughenbaugh: What the federal government has had to remind operators is that they have to employ secure passwords and keep their software updated.
N. Rodgers: Yes. You need the patches.
J. Aughenbaugh: And yes, listeners, okay, most of us, Nia and I have complained to one another off recording the number of times that we've had to update our VCU passwords or how software gets updated on our computers, and it always happens when we're in the middle of something, etc., you got to do it. You have to do it.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughe?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: What about, okay, no, let me back up and say, the presidential seal is not allowed to be reproduced and used by people who are not the president of the United States. I cannot put the presidential seal on my door where they sign that says, president of the United States. I could briefly as a joke, but I'm not allowed to represent myself in that way. It's a protected symbol of the United States.
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct.
N. Rodgers: I know it's going to sound crazy, but is that Bur message in any way protected like that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I can't put that in an advertisement. To try to get people's attention if I want to sell them used cars from Nia's super special used car lot. Like, I can't start my ad with verb, because it will confuse people, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: The FCC has regulations, that prohibit the use of actual or simulated EAS or weird tones outside of genuine alerts, tests, or authorized public service announcements, and the regulations.
N. Rodgers: You should know an advertiser would use it to get people's attention if they were allowed to.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Broadcasters who misuse the tones can be sanctioned and fined. There are a couple of examples. Tones from the EAS were used in the trailer for the 2013 film Olympus has fallen. Okay? That is the series that stars Gerard Butler, I believe.
N. Rodgers: Morgan Freeman plays the President.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Cable providers were fined 1.9 million dollar by the FCC for the misuse of the tones, okay?
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Likewise, TBS, which used to broadcast Conan O'Brien's late night talk show. They were fined $25,000 for using EAS tones.
N. Rodgers: Well, you know what? I'm not mad about that because you shouldn't use those to confuse. When people hear that, that should be Pavlovian. I have to stop what I'm doing and listen to what this says because it could potentially be lifesaving. It doesn't need to be I mean, I love Conan O'Brien, but it doesn't need to be Conan O'Brien being a fool saying something silly. It needs to be something serious.
J. Aughenbaugh: Also, one more example. In 2014 on the syndicated radio show, the Bobby Bone Show. He played an audio from the 2011 National test as part of a rant about a genuine test that occurred, and interrupted Game 2 of the 2014 World Series.
N. Rodgers: Was that the earthquake? Was that the one in Oakland?
J. Aughenbaugh: No. That occurred much earlier. But the company, the corporation who owns the Bobby Bone show was fined $1,000,000 for the incident, and had to implement a three year compliance plan to avoid any further incidents. The FCC doesn't mess around with this.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, they're not playing with this now. Well, and they've now made enough examples out of people that they're like, no really. You saw Olympus is falling, you saw Conan O'Brien. You should have known better.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you should have known better.
N. Rodgers: Ignorance is not a defense before the law.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Again, listeners, to Nia's point, when you hear the message, and when you get it on your phone, this is designed to protect us. If we start to minimize the importance, then it loses its effectiveness as an alert and protection measure. We want people to pay attention to amber alerts so we can rescue kidnap children. We want people to go ahead and pay attention to imminent weather threats.
N. Rodgers: So we can save lives.
J. Aughenbaugh: Save lives and protect property. I mean, it devastates me when I see a local TV or radio broadcast where they interview somebody that is the day after a tornado or a hurricane saying, we've lost everything.
N. Rodgers: Well, and when they're looking through their stuff for photographs.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Right.
N. Rodgers: Precious things that you can't replace.
J. Aughenbaugh: Right. Again, yes, the alerts, okay or the tests are annoying. But again, a lot of things that are designed to protect us are annoying.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. The seat belt hits me right in the neck.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Hits me right on my neck. You know what? I wear it every single time I get in the car. Because I believe Ralph Nader when he says that I'm going to die in a car accident if I don't have my seat belt on. It's just one of those things. You just need to get over the mild discomfort.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because the benefit outweighs the risk.
J. Aughenbaugh: It is annoying to me during my annual physical with my doctor that he reminds me that I should not drink, 80 ounces of coffee a day.
N. Rodgers: See y'all can't see him, but he's actually holding his coffee mug right in front of his mouth because he's getting ready to take a drink.
J. Aughenbaugh: But it is necessary. Because he's trying to go ahead and add a few more years to my sad, pathetic life, right?
N. Rodgers: He's trying to give your daughter more years with her father. But so anyway, we urge you to listen to the messages as they come across because they are almost always for your good or for someone else's good.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. This is a category, one last thing, and I'll get off my proverbial soapbox. This is a good thing that the government does.
N. Rodgers: So many times we complain about the dumb crap the government does.
J. Aughenbaugh: But this is a good thing. They're trying to save people's lives. They're trying to save us, from making mistakes. They're trying to provide a sense of security for the population.
N. Rodgers: Immunity for a local area.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, right?
N. Rodgers: For communities.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Nia, thanks for bringing this up as a topic. In listeners, pay attention to those alerts. If you can do something to go ahead and help a kidnapped child then do it.
N. Rodgers: Absolutely.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Then email us about it, because how awesome is that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Thanks, Aughe.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thank you, Nia.
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