Ok, anyone else think this is a bit ridiculous - that article states that someone visiting the area of an active alert will not receive the alert, but if a person lives in an area with active alert but is out of town at the time the alert is needed, they will still get it...
You got it backwards. From
NY Times:
A New York City resident who is traveling in Chicago at the time of an emergency in New York would not receive a message; a Chicago resident who is a customer of the same phone company would see the text alert while in New York City, officials said.
Anyway, there are other problems with this PLAN initiative, the first one being the dire lack of technical details. Is there a special chip required? Will it use GPS? And more...
Concerns with the PLAN chip
1. The cited reason for having an extra chip embedded in each cell phone is that the current SMS infrastructure can get congested in times of emergency. However, PLAN still uses wireless carrier cell towers to push messages (as opposed to a different frequency, like the ones used for
radio clock synchronization or GPS). The GSM standard already supports
Cell Broadcast (CB) messaging. What is the exact justification of the extra chip?
2. Why limit the system to 90 characters of text, instead of relying on the existing multimedia message infrastructure, which can be used to send, for example, such critical information as a
photo of an evacuation map? Also, the system is not backward compatible with the over 300 million mobile phones already in place in the United States, while using SMS is. (More on these issues at
elerts.com)
3. Does the technology use GPS, as
BBC mentions? The battery drain and surveillance implications are major.
4. Users can't opt out of “Presidential” messages. What safeguards are in place that would prevent an oppressive government from abusing this technology?
5. The design of the system is not available. How can the users know that it won't be abused? The chip could be programmed to snap a picture from the phone's camera, or to covertly record audio, upon receiving a certain signal. Remote activation of a phone's microphone has already been done by the FBI using the so-called
roving bug.
6. What is to prevent the government-required software from receiving a certain signal or message which would disable the cell phone or its Internet access (useful in times of civil unrest, as has been seen in the Arab Spring revolts)?
7. Will rooting phones or custom ROMs become illegal, especially if one modifies the function of how the PLAN network interacts with the smartphone?
