Wireless Emergency Alerts
Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA, formerly known as the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS), and prior to that as the Personal Localized Alerting Network (PLAN)),[1] is an alerting network in the United States designed to disseminate emergency alerts to mobile devices such as cell phones and pagers. Organizations are able to disseminate and coordinate emergency alerts and warning messages through WEA and other public systems by means of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System.[2]
For other uses, see WEA (disambiguation).
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed and adopted the network structure, operational procedures and technical requirements in 2007 and 2008 in response to the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act passed by Congress in 2006, which allocated $106 million to fund the program.[3] CMAS will allow federal agencies to accept and aggregate alerts from the President of the United States, the National Weather Service (NWS) and emergency operations centers, and send the alerts to participating wireless providers who will distribute the alerts to their customers with compatible devices via Cell Broadcast, a technology similar to SMS text messages that simultaneously delivers messages to all phones using a cell tower instead of individual recipients.[1][4]
The government issues three types of alerts through this system:
When the alert is received, a sound is played even if the ringer is off.[6] On nearly all devices, the Emergency Alert System radio/TV attention signal sounds in a predetermined pattern.[7]
The system is a collaborative effort among FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA).[8]
Security[edit]
At the 2019 MobiSys conference in South Korea, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder demonstrated that it was possible to easily spoof wireless emergency alerts within a confined area, using open source software and commercially available software-defined radios. They recommended that steps be taken to ensure that alerts can be verified as coming from a trusted network, or using public-key cryptography upon reception.[61]