[EAS] [sbe-eas] More on the Review of the Emergency Alert System from today's FCC Daily Digest

[Ed Czarnecki]

Adrienne - The question you ask is how would one would validate a foreign
language EAS message?  The same way you would validate an English language
EAS message...  For a CAP message, the CAP/EAS unit is validating against a
digital signature, for one thing.  On this point the FCC NPRM is on the mark
- no CAP message should be processed by a station if it does not have a
valid digital signature.

After that, the language(s) you would be transmitting are just the ones that
you the broadcaster have elected to transmit.  If FEMA or a state EOC
someday sent a CAP message with 20 different languages, the expectation
should not be for every station to process every language.  They should
process just the language (or languages) that are relevant for their
business and their audience.

Conventional EAS messages are still a "trust" relationship between the
receiver and the upstream transmitter.  The FCC asks in its recent NPRM
about additional authentication mechanisms that could be added to
conventional EAS.  This would be another reason to add an authenticator to
the EAS message as well.

BTW, with conventional EAS, the originator could speak two languages into
the voice portion of the message.  This could work for radio, but not well
for TV or cable.  The textual output in this case could just be English,
which yields half of a solution. 

Ed
  
-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On
Behalf Of Adrienne Abbott
System and other emergency communication issues.'
Cc: 'The EAS Forum'
System from today's FCC Daily Digest

There's one issue I haven't seen in these discussions on multilingual EAS
which is a concern of mine...As broadcasters, how do we know that an EAS