[EAS] Whole New Ballgame

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Honestly, Ed, I don't believe that a fundamental advance is going to come out of any committee.  Nor do I have much faith in grand unified solutions.  I'm rereading Karl Popper right now, and I embrace his preference for incremental improvement over what he calls Utopian engineering.  (He's talking about "social engineering" in a pre-hackish sense, rather than electrical or systems engineering, but I think the analogy holds.)

Somewhere, some individual is going to get a bee in her bonnet, and through some combination of altruism and ego will feel moved to persist in promoting and refining it over a period of years.  She'll seek out opportunities to expose a lot of people to it, while surviving as best she can, and eventually other folks will see a commercial or political advantage to be had from investing in it.  The use of the singular is wrong, I think, in both sentences, as I believe this is a process that will occur multiple times, sometimes in parallel and sometimes sequentially, each innovation advancing us incrementally toward a better state.  Committees will form around ideas, not the other way around.

So... we have CAP... what do we need next?  Four things spring to my mind.  The first is a low-cost, carefully optimized CAP authoring tool that hasn't been subordinated to some vendor's proprietary agenda.  The second is an economical way to get complete CAP messages all the way to devices in this hands of the people to be warned.  A third is a scalable, self-sustaining framework for verifying identity and ensuring authenticity of alerting messages.  And a fourth is education of alert originators, not just in government but also in industry and the non-commercial sectors, as to when and how to issue alerts (Dennis' video is a great step forward there, as I've never seen such a powerful yet compact delivery of the essentials.)

The fifth is sufficiently Utopian that I hesitate to even suggest it... but I think we also need an ethical and legal framework that incents people and institutions who know of hazards to disclose them responsibility to the people at risk.  It remains the case that we encourage actors to keep bad news secret in order to obtain advantage, or at least to avoid responsibility.  We portray that as a form of liberty... but it's just the liberty to model ourselves on beasts instead of angels, in my view.  As long as we tolerate the childish fantasy that we're better off exploiting each other than helping each other, no warning system will ever function fully.

We can do better than that.  Not that I have any strong feelings on the topic...

Art