CSRIC Pushing the Envelope on Emergency Alerts, Use of Social Media

The CSRIC OK'd two reports by its Emergency Alerting Platforms Working Group, on social media and geo-targeting. “The report on social media is intended to advocate for using social media to complement alerting,” said David Simpson, chief of the Public Safety Bureau. WEA and the emergency alert system “can be made even stronger when they are used to in concert with other methods and platforms,” he noted.

More use of social meeting is simply “where we are going in the world,” said Farrokh Khatibi, Qualcomm director-engineering, co-chairman of the working group. The report looks at a number of recent incidents including the Paris attacks in November and the Orlando nightclub shooting in June, he said.

The report makes 15 recommendations and establishes 28 best practices, Khatibi said. Among recommendations is that the FCC convene an expert panel to look at more coordination between alerts on radio and TV and on wireless devices, he said. Alert originators and other entities also need to communicate better, he said. “Emergencies don't happen in silos and really big disasters don't confine themselves to single jurisdictions.” Also needed are internationally accepted symbols for communicating alerts, he said.

The working group also issues a warning on a trend among some public agencies to issue their own alerts, Khatibi said. “In trying to keep up with the fast pace of technology, public safety organizations are developing their own … apps,” he said: “Sometimes, they bite off a little bit more than they can chew.”

The report on geo-targeting addresses the biggest complaint of alert originators, the “perceived” ability for geo-targeting capability at the sub-county level, Simpson said. The importance of better-tailored alerts is easy to see, Simpson said. “You just have to look at some of the flooding in Louisiana recently and how many residents were surprised that the flooding occurred in their neighborhood, which isn’t typically in a floodplain and they didn't get a tailored alert.” Warnings were so broad they weren’t useful to many affected, he said.

Among key recommendations is that the agency collaborate with the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and industry players to develop standards and implement systems that support better geo-targeting, said Steve Johnson of Johnson Telecom, co-chairman of that working group. A goal should be to identify methods to transmit polygon coordinates to mobile devices using cell broadcast, while supporting legacy systems, he said. “Device-based solutions are where the future of WEA is,” he said. “Rather than expecting cell broadcasting to do things it was not designed to do, it can then be used to tell the device what to do to achieve better outcomes.”

A report by the Emergency Alert System Working Group examines best practices for multilingual emergency alerts. It looked at whether there are “regulatory barriers” to multilingual alerts and concluded that there are none, Simpson said. The report said it's too early for CSRIC to specify best practices, but instead should make preliminary recommendations that will later lead to best practices, CSRIC officials said.

The council approved a report by a Submarine Cable Resiliency Working Group on factors that influence landing and routing of submarine cables with an eye on how the FCC could encourage geographic diversity and network resiliency. The report recommends the FCC use its expertise to highlight for other government agencies how they can promote resiliency. “Our nation depends on the arteries that traverse the oceans and being smart about where those arteries are and having more of them in more diverse locations” is important, Simpson said.

Co-chairman Kent Bressie, counsel to the North American Submarine Cable Association, said the report was the third to look at cable diversity. Much work remains, but the FCC can do only so much in this area, Bressie said. “There are a lot of challenges … about the limits of the FCC’s own statutory authority.” There were many recommendations the group wanted to make, but couldn’t based on the FCC’s limited ability to act, he said. “We’re highlighting the need for the FCC to use its expertise and connections to draw attention to particular issues and to try to collaborate with other agencies at the state, federal and local levels.”

A report by the Security by Design Working Group looking at how to ensure that recommended security capabilities are being implemented by equipment vendors was also approved by CSRIC. The report recommends a voluntary approach.

Based on the group’s research, “it was very clear that there is not a single predefined attestation methodology that would meet the needs of all the companies that reside in this core public communications network space,” said Brian Scarpelli, ACT | The App Association senior policy counsel, and working group co-chairman. Some companies use self-assessment, others rely on outside certification, he said.

Simpson asked a number of follow-ups on what approaches companies take. Simpson said he worries about consumers. They don’t have a “cheat sheet” to tell them “what supply-chain risk attestation standards did one company use versus another,” he said. Providing “better, more recognized standards” would be “useful for the entire industry and increase confidence in vendor-to-vendor relationships,” he said.