It has never been used in an actual nationwide emergency, and it probably never will be.
It has never been used in an actual nationwide emergency, and it probably never will be.
T he national Emergency Alert System, which probably startled you when it was tested on Wednesday, is a perfect example of useless big government. It has never been used to communicate about a national emergency and likely never will be.
The Emergency Broadcast System was created in 1963 as a way to preempt television and radio broadcasts to allow the federal government to communicate directly with viewers and listeners. It was replaced with the Emergency Alert System in 1997, which has subsequently been augmented with Wireless Emergency Alerts to send alerts to cellphones as well. The test on Wednesday was the first-ever nationwide test of the Wireless Emergency Alerts system.
Plenty of really bad stuff has happened between 1963 and today. Only a few months after the Emergency Broadcast System was created, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Serious attempts were made on the lives of Gerald Ford (twice) and Ronald Reagan. If the murder or attempted murder of the president isn’t sufficient to trigger an alarm, it’s hard to think of what would be.
The September 11 terrorist attacks were the deadliest act of war ever perpetrated by foreigners on U.S. soil. Yet the Emergency Alert System was not used. Apparently, foreign terrorists crashing an airplane into the headquarters of the U.S. military isn’t sufficient to trigger an alarm either.
The specter that looms over the Emergency Alert System is nuclear war. The government would want a way to communicate directly with people in the event of such an attack, the thinking goes. But once the missiles are flying, people will have already taken matters into their own hands, evacuating themselves or hunkering down.
That’s because, contrary to the implicit assumption undergirding the Emergency Alert System, people aren’t mindlessly waiting for their overlords to tell them what to do.
The Emergency Alert System is the solution to a problem that doesn’t exist: information moving too slowly. In the immediacy of a disaster, the first thing Americans ask is not “What does the federal government think about this?” They would think first of themselves and their families, then of their friends and neighbors, then of their property and possessions. They would react accordingly in response to threats they face.
This is obvious to everyone except bureaucrats. The bureaucratic mindset says there is a public interest in the dissemination of knowledge about national emergencies, therefore there must be a government program to perform that task.
Never mind that the private sector would probably do it better, and any national emergency alert from the government would interrupt already ongoing radio, television, and online coverage of the event in real time as it is occurring. The public servants must serve the public.
As any bureaucrat knows, programs need procedures. There must be a clearly delineated procedure to get a message from the White House to the FCC to the public. And it must include important stakeholders such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency — where would we be without FEMA to manage the emergency? And if there’s one thing that we can all count on in national emergencies, it’s that procedures will be calmly followed to the letter.
Even if they do get followed, though, by the time they’re executed, every news organization on the planet will have already reported on whatever awful thing is happening. We see this dynamic play out on a smaller scale with weather. The alert system is regularly used on a sub-national basis to broadcast weather alerts. As you know if you’ve ever been in the potential path of a tornado, the government alert interrupts the weatherman on TV who was already telling you the most current information on the storm. And the flash-flood warnings that light up your phone when it’s already pouring rain probably don’t add much value either.
What about AMBER alerts for missing children? Research consistently finds that they’re ineffective. Most child abductions are done by relatives who rarely have any intent to physically harm the child, and police can easily figure out who they are by talking to other family members. Of the relatively few abductions by strangers that result in physical harm, AMBER alerts do little to stop them. The only way an AMBER alert can work is if someone sees the message (a reasonable probability, but not that high), closely reads the message (a lower probability), decides to act on it (even lower), has sufficient information to confidently identify the car used by a possible kidnapper (even lower), happens to be in the same area as the car (even lower), actually sees the car (we’re getting into infinitesimal probabilities here), and calls police. And that’s assuming the AMBER alert was actually for the correct vehicle in the first place, that the missing child is still in the vehicle, and that police can do anything in time to make a difference.
Other organizations that convey information seek your attention by packaging the message in ways that quickly tell you what you need to know. They seek to develop reputations of trustworthiness on a particular topic so that you see a notification and want to read what they have to say.
The government, on the other hand, decides to get your attention by turning every radio, television, and cellphone in the country into a siren. It would probably prefer to put an intercom in every home, building, and public space — just think about the people who don’t have a radio, television, or cellphone, how will they get the alert? — but it settles for commandeering your property for a few seconds to blare at you.
This system is tested more often than it is actually used (which is, to reiterate, for the national alert system, zero times in 60 years). If it ever would get used, it would likely have to tell you, “This is not a test.” It’s truly a great system of communication when the first thing it has to tell you is what it’s not saying.
The information conveyed by any of the myriad private sources that already exist might be wrong, the bureaucrat thinks. The government needs to have a way to correct a tangled mess of misinformation in the event of an emergency so that people have the truth.
Except that the government has, on multiple occasions, been the source of misinformation. The emergency alert sent to Hawaiians in 2018 — “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” — was, well, supposed to be a drill. Another major false alarm occurred in 2005, when the entire state of Connecticut was ordered evacuated. It was, of course, wrong, and basically nobody believed it. In 2016, all of Suffolk County on Long Island was ordered evacuated in an incomplete message on the Emergency Alert System in response to a tropical storm. The message was wrong, and the order was actually only for one barrier island.
None of these false alarms was the result of some hacker trying to terrify the populace. (To the extent hackers have sent false alarms, they have been hoaxes, not nefarious plots.) They were standard-issue government incompetence. Overlapping computer programs in Suffolk County automatically sent out the false alarm. A low-level Connecticut state employee typed the wrong code into a computer, and then faced no disciplinary action. The Hawaii employee responsible for the 2018 missile alert “had a history of confusing drill and real-world events,” according to investigators, and had confused drills twice before.
The lack of care with which the government treats these systems is perhaps the greatest indictment of their uselessness. If you actually believed a system was vital to convey information in times of national emergency, would you trust it to low-level government employees with poor records of job performance using a mess of outdated computer programs?
It’s basically impossible to imagine an emergency so awful as to be worthy of a national alert but that would not already be widely known about through ordinary means of communication, which is why there has never been one issued in all 60 years of the system’s existence and there is unlikely ever to be one issued in the future. The Emergency Alert System has all the hallmarks of big government: overbearing-bureaucrat mentality, poor employee performance, dilapidated technology, and little to no measurable results. Wednesday’s test was a great reminder of the federal government’s idea of good communication: blaring at everyone for no reason.