Today was supposed to be the first ever national activation of the new Emergency Alerting System. There's fail, Fail and FAIL. and I think this one warrants the extra special category of....

F A I L

Some interesting points:
- Some DirectTV customers reported hearing Lady Gaga's “Paparazzi” play during the test.
- FEMA official concedes "glitch"; says that it appears (maybe) to be related to how satellite and cable providers prepped their equipment.

Not only did the message not reach the (shrinking) broadcast audience, there was absolutely no effort to reach people via mobile channel (SMS) or internet.

Yeah, but isn't that why they test?

At this point, this "test" should have been largely isolated gaps - certainly not the widespread failure. This is not a wholly new system by any means - the attempt to synch an alert nationwide has been in the works for a LONG TIME and the fact that the fail was this large is just embarrassing.

One thing I noticed here, was that it didn't run for nearly as long as the typical weekly/monthly tests. I barely had enough time to read what it said before it kicked back over to normal TV.

Don't be naive - the fact that they didn't test SMS or the Internet constitutes a success in my book: the day that a government agency can reach in and interrupt all Internet transmissions to transmit *any* message is a day that I turn off my laptop and PCs. Not to mention, if the capability exists for a national EAS over the Internet, the same capability is feasible for attackers with a far more dangerous agenda.

Second, this is what tests are for - afaik this is the first national EAS test. There are bound to be glitches. For my part my Comcast off-brand cable station was interrupted at 11am PDT, for 30 seconds, just as anticipated. Identify the glitches, rerun the test. Rinse, repeat. What exactly is your point in branding this test a FAIL?

I am less convinced of the necessity of a national EAS. A message with a national magnitude probably means we can all bend over and kiss our tuckuses goodbye.

I think I view this test similarly to Lono (I absentmindedly missed the test, BTW, and didn't have a radio or TV on. Doh!) As the first national test, half the purpose is finding the bugs in the system. Good thing that asteroid was going to miss us yesterday!

My local NOAA station was apparently down. Either that, or my weather radio broke.

I did hear the alert on the regular radio (NPR). I also got emails from the emergency system from work. So it wasn't all bad.

No texts, though I believe I should have gotten some.

DB

NOAA radio stations where not carrying this EAS test in any case. There are plans to include them in the future, and the data from this test was intended to help bring that about.

"NOAA Weather Radio will not transmit the EAS Test. There is currently no mechanism to transport this type of message to NWR transmitters. Additionally, the Test will use the EAN code where the audio message exceeds the two minute audio time limit allowed by Specific Area Messaging Encoding (SAME) and the EAS."

FEMA EAS Announcement

Hi,

I don't think of this as failure. It demonstrated areas for improvement, which was the purpose.
Of greater concern to me is the apathy demonstrated by our fellow citizens. Honestly, I forgot about it a minute after I saw it on CNN yesterday morning. Didn't think of it again until I saw the posts here.
There is a need to communicate with the citizenry without impinging on our privacy & freedoms. I think that banners on sites like Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, etc. will reach more people than radio and some TV.
The government can have the cell servers contact each subscriber also.
There are ways to reach out in the 21st Century.
Just my thoughts...

Finn