[EAS] Misuse or abuse of EAS?

[Sean Donelan]

On Fri, 26 May 2017, Robertm wrote:
> That is in a large part because of abuse of the system by the originators.

There is very little evidence of abuse of the Emergency Alert System in 
the last 15 years.  Looking at the limited data available, probably 
were more hacking incidents of station EAS equipment than abuse of EAS by 
authorized originators.

There is evidence of mistakes, errors and lack of training. Most of 
the "mis-use" stories are from the initial roll-out of EAS in the 1990s.
A greater problem may be "lack of use" when EAS and other alerting 
channels should have been used.

EAS State Surveys (2010, 2008, 2003) conducted by Texas Association of 
Broadcasters reported almost no use of EAS by state & local governments:
https://www.tab.org/emergency-systems

Most common sources or types of EAS messages (annual estimates, based on 
IPAWS, news reports, twitter, youtube recordings)

1. National Weather Service (tens of thousands annually)
2. Required tests (monthly, weekly, and special)
3. AMBER alerts (about 250-300 annually)
4. Civil Emergency Messages (about 20 annually)
5. Immediate evacuation (about 5 annually)

Divde those numbers by 56 (states, territories and DC) to estimate how 
often an EAS participant might receive a local EAS alert.

While there is some data from EAS originators, there is almost no data 
about which alerts, if any, EAS participants choose to air.

WEA is going through the same growing and learning process that happened 
during the early days of EAS.  There are more examples of questionable 
use of WEA.