This week, The Federal Emergency Management Agency would conduct a test on a new system of presidential alert, which will allow the President to send a message to every single phone in the United States.
The alert is going to be a nationwide test of the presidential alert for the very first time, which would enable the President of America to address the whole nation as and when there is a national emergency.
With the help of the Wireless Emergency Alert system, any person having the cell service should be able to receive the message on their phone.
The message would run like the following: THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed. The message will also read that it is due to be sent out on Thursday at 2:18 pm ET.
A few minutes later, the Emergency Alert System would broadcast a similar test message over different mediums, television, and radio and wireline video services.
Emergency alerts are nothing new and warning systems have also been used and tested for a long time, in the United States to alert each and every citizen of local along with state incidents, similar to AMBER alerts for missing children and some severe weather events, which might result in danger to life or even loss of it.
Presidential alerts are yet to get tested. This will be, unlike other alerts, citizens would not be allowed to opt out of presidential alerts.
To allow the President for sending alerts to the whole nation was included in the WARN Act that had been passed in the year 2006 under the administration led by Bush, thereby creating a state of the art emergency alert system, which would replace an infrastructure that had gone old. The alerts can be alarming in nature and are particularly designed to modernize the system of alerts for a population, which is increasingly getting moved away from televisions and going towards mobile technology.
The alerts would be at the sole discretion of the President and he can send the alerts for any reason but the experts are less concerned about the fact that the system can get abused.
