Emergency alerts from President Obama on your mobile phone?

Mobile phone users could soon find themselves receiving emergency text messages warning them of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, under plans announced in the United States yesterday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have announced the “Personal Localized Alerting Network” (PLAN) which will see new handheld devices fitted with special chips to receive the alerts, which will be sent by state and local authorities. The system is designed to supersede all other phone traffic, In an attempt to avoid delays.

According to the FCC, users will be able to opt out of all alerts apart from those sent by the US president.

(What makes messages from the US president so special, I wonder?)

In many ways this can be viewed as a logical progression from the other methods that authorities have used to…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.