This past Sunday, a 10-year-old girl in New Iberia, Louisiana, was reported missing. The Louisiana State Police issued an initial alert, saying that they believed her to be in imminent danger, but they did not have much information to go on. After some investigation, the police learned that the girl was last seen getting into a car owned by an acquaintance of the girl's family who was driving a gray 2012 Nissan Altima, and the police were given a license plate number. With either of those pieces of information — a license plate or a specific vehicle description, and here they had both — police can take advantage of the AMBER alert program. Early Monday morning, an alert was sent to cellphones throughout the State of Louisiana. The alert was seen by two sanitation workers on a trash route who spotted that very car in a field. They called the police and used their garbage truck to prevent the car from leaving. One of them even started a livestream on Facebook. The police arrived, the driver was arrested, and soon thereafter, the girl was recovered, and she is now safe. The story was reported on multiple news outlets in Louisiana such as WWL and KATC.
Alerts like this first came to the iPhone in 2013, and I described how the system works in this post from July 16, 2013. But that was a long time ago, and the system has changed since then, so here is an update on Wireless Emergency Alerts on the iPhone in the United States.
Title VI of PL 109-347 (Oct. 13, 2006) is titled the Warning Alert and Response Network Act, sometimes called the WARN Act. The WARN Act, in 47 U.S.C. § 1201, gives the FCC the authority to adopt standards for cellphone companies to transmit emergency alerts. Participation by cellphone companies is voluntary, and if they do participate, the law states that cell phone companies may not impose an additional charge for such alerts. 47 U.S.C. § 1201(b)(2)(C).
Pursuant to the WARN Act, the FCC worked with FEMA to create a program called Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). The system was based on the prior Emergency Alert System (EAS), which are the warnings that you have seen and heard for a long time on television and radio when there is a weather or other emergency.
Alerts are sent to cell towers providing wireless service to a target geographical area, and then all WEA-capable phones using those cell towers receive the alert. Thus, you will receive an alert if you are in a targeted area even if you are just visiting that area.
WEA currently delivers four types of alerts:
1. Imminent Threat Alerts. These are alerts issued because of an imminent threat to public safety or life, such as evacuation orders or shelter in place orders due to severe weather, a terrorist threat or a chemical spill. For example, the National Weather Service notes on this page that it issues alerts for dust storms, extreme wind, flash floods, hurricanes, typhoons, snow squalls, storm surge, tornadoes, and tsunamis. The way it works is that a pre-authorized national, state or local government agency sends an emergency alert to FEMA, which then sends the alert to the participating cell phone companies, each of which then sends the alert to WEA capable phones in the zone of emergency.
2. Public Safety Alerts. These alerts contain information about a threat that concerns public safety but is not imminent. These alerts can also be issued as a follow-up to an imminent threat.
3. AMBER Alerts. AMBER officially stands for America's Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, but that is a backronym as the system was really named for Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old girl who was abducted in 1996 while riding her bicycle in Arlington, TX and was subsequently murdered. The killer was never identified. The incident, and others like it, led to the AMBER Alert system, a method by which police officers may quickly publicize information when a child age 17 or younger is abducted such as the name and description of the child, a description of the suspected abductor, a description and license plate of the abductor's vehicle, etc. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, as of December 2020, 1,029 children were rescued specifically because of AMBER Alerts. The original AMBER Alert system was opt-in only, and it sent a text message based on a cellphone owner's predefined geographical location regardless of where a cellphone was actually located when the alert was issued. That system was retired on December 31, 2012, and was replaced by WEA.
4. Presidential Alerts. I am not aware of any official standards for when the President will issue a WEA Presidential Alert. No president has ever issued a Presidential Alert under WEA or similar prior systems (and hopefully, no president will ever have a need to do so). However, there was a test of the Presidential Alert system on October 3, 2018, at 2:18 Eastern.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some state and local governments have used the WEA system to issue alerts. For example, an alert used in Pennsylvania last November said: "In PA, COVID-19 rates are rising, and hospitals could soon be at capacity. Stay home if possible. If you must go out, maintain social distance, wear a mask, wash your hands for 20 seconds. Stay up to date on the spread of COVID in your community so you can protect your loved ones with the COVID Alert PA app."
According to the FCC, since WEA became operational in 2012, the system has been used nearly 56,000 times. If that seems like too much for you, the WARN Act provides in 47 U.S.C. § 1201(b)(2)(E) that cellphone users may opt-out of all alerts except for Presidential Alerts. Thus, if you go to the Settings app on your iPhone, then go to Notifications, and then scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see options to opt-out of the first three alerts but not Presidential Alerts.
Although WEA alerts are based on your location, you do not need to have Location Services on the iPhone turned on to receive alerts. Your iPhone's GPS radio is irrelevant to the WEA system. As noted above, alerts are issued based upon your location as determined by cell towers. When the service first launched, alerts would often issue to an entire county (or parish, if you are in Louisiana). Starting in November 2017, the government required carriers to transmit alerts to a geographic area appropriate for the emergency, even if that was smaller than an entire county. And starting in December 2019, alerts had to be targeted even more, with providers now required to deliver the alert to the appropriate area with no more than a tenth of a mile of overshoot.
WEA alerts look sort of like text messages, but they are not text messages, so you will receive them even if text messages are not enabled on your iPhone. WEA capable devices are designed to reject duplicate alerts, so you should receive each alert only once. However, subsequent alerts may be issued that contain information similar to a prior alert. You might not receive an alert at all if you are on the phone.
Now that you know all about the WEA system, you need to decide whether you want to opt-in or opt-out of the system. An alert can be annoying when it doesn't seem relevant to you. I sometimes turn mine off when I will be in a courthouse or someplace else where it seems inappropriate to receive alerts. (And when I am appearing before a judge, I virtually always turn my iPhone off completely.) But I'm glad that those two sanitation workers in Louisiana had their alerts enabled Monday morning, and you never know when one of these alerts will be critical and timely for you.
