When Men with Guns Tell You to Send the Message: The Impossible Ethics of Emergency Alerts
And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
In 2011, Vodafone Egypt complied with government orders to send pro-regime texts during the revolution, citing legal compulsion. Years later, the UK's emergency alert system raises the same dilemma: can networks refuse to send government messages? The law is vague, and the trade-offs between safety and abuse are stark. This personal reflection explores the design challenges of a system that must be both powerful and resistant to misuse, concluding that perfect safeguards are impossible.
But we're technologists, right? We can build fail safes and cryptographic proofs and simply build infrastructure that can't be abused. And then the men with guns come and tell you what to do.
- decimalenough
> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant
If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day. Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat".
You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.
- jameskilton
A good article, but missing one very important word: trust.
Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustworthy without consequence to ruin a good thing.
So no you can't build a system that's meets all of the article's criteria because almost all of them rely on the unspoken rule of trust in civil society. Everything built for good can be abused for evil.
- fyredge
Paraphrasing from Plato's The Republic, when the rulers and their auxillaries raise children with proper balance in the body and soul, there will be no need to deliberate on what is the right legislation, for the legislators themselves will be just in their duties.
In the end of the day, we need proper education, not only in technical excellence, but also societal awareness, what it means to be good and how to uphold oneself to such a standard even if everyone around them does not. This is how you defend against the men with guns.
- calgoo
Here in spain they have been abusing the system when heavy rain is expected. The issue here in spain is that they put it at the highest level of extreme and the phones dont let you disable the alerts.
- jcarrano
Regarding the Egyptian messages, if you care about these things you simply avoid doing business (especially in regulated industries) in the third world. The fact is that, even before the incident with the messages, cell providers had to sit down with the "men with guns" to even be able to operate in the country.
- gorgoiler
”Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused…”
Staged rollout with engagement metrics that cancel the alert if it’s not alerty enough.
Stages: one town, then a city, then one county, then everyone. Can be complemented by picking a percentage nationally as well, or picking two different towns (Croydon vs Barnstaple.)
Engagement: Poll at each stage as to whether the message was useful, or counted as an emergency, or was read for more than X seconds, or opened more than once.
The alert system also has four levels:
(1) National and (2) Imminent Threat (think “we interrupt this programme to bring you breaking news…”);
(3) Public Safety (“Charlie says” but more specific); and
(4) missing persons / Amber alerts.
The use of the we’d-rather-you-crash-your-car-than-not-get-your-attention klaxon should be reserved for the first two, and its use for the “no barbecues plz” warning should probably have been avoided.
- cjs_ac
Technology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.
- djoldman
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
> Rapid sending of messages
> Careful checking of the content of messages
> Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area
> Inability to mistakenly send a test message
> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before
sending
> Resilient enough to work after significant damage to
infrastructure
> That networks have the ability to vet and ignore
> That networks are compelled to send
> Which can only be used for good
> And cannot be used for evil.
Considering the last two, I'm assuming this must be tongue-in-cheek.
I think that the best approach for public utilities is to design them in such a way as to minimize, or preclude if possible, their ability to choose their customers or level of service. We want them to have a set of rules/instructions, written beforehand and publicly available, that everyone can point to after an event that says, "well, those were the things they were supposed to do, so they did them." The entities that write the set of rules are separate from the utility: the utility solely exists to implement the rules/instructions as efficiently as possible.
There's obviously a reasonableness factor here: it's impossible to foresee all situations. The effort spent on specifying exactly what should be done should be proportional to the potential impact of that possible decision.
- laughing_man
It's really difficult to see what technologies will be enablers of state power. IMO, the techs ushering in 1984-levels of control are wifi, cheap cameras, and LLMs. The three technologies on their own are beneficial, but taken together they're going to make Big Brother seem impotent.
- eviks
> In truth, having experienced fire-starters, I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.
Certainly, if you give up so easily because of a fantasy that some generic PSA becomes the sign to not burn your toast where all the other signs fail, no wonder you need the whole 10 steps to indicate "the impossible"