Why Homeland Security Unleashed an 'Alien Virus' on Silicon Valley

At 5:00 pm on April 25, 2015, dozens of cell phone users in Mountain View (CA) were warned of a bizarre road accident. A satellite had crashed to Earth on the busy Moffett Boulevard, three miles from Google’s headquarters, causing gridlock. Half an hour later, things got really weird. First responders to the scene began sickening with an unknown virus. By half past six, the infection had spread to Palo Alto and Menlo Park, traffic was at a standstill for miles, and gunshots had been heard in nearby Sunnyvale. The messages—issued through the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system that normally warns of severe weather and missing children—kept coming. A firestorm in San Jose, mobbed hospitals and widespread civil unrest. By the next afternoon, Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA) had ordered the evacuation of millions of people and the National Institutes of Health had confirmed the virus was extraterrestrial in origin. As darkness fell, the president imposed martial law. But there was no need to panic. This was, of course, just an exercise, a scenario dubbed "Alien Catastrophe" by researchers with funding from the Department of Homeland Security to test new technologies for public alerts. The real battle being fought right now is not between the National Guard and interstellar microbes but between government agencies keen to drag Wireless Emergency Alerts into the digital age and a telecom industry that seems happy with things just the way they are. Because of the way the underlying technology works (more on this later), WEAs are text-only messages limited to just 90 characters. All the information that could rescue a child or save your life today has to squeeze into less than two-thirds of a tweet. And there is currently no way to include a clickable phone number or web link for recipients to report sightings or learn more.