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(c) the appropriate uses of these systems. Among U.S. lawmakers and offi- cials, the factors of risk, trust, and appropriate use often take a back seat to discussions of technological capabilities. I argue that a technological emphasis has contributed to an American public ill-informed of and unprepared for the challenges of the mobile public alert and warn- ing era. One might trace the beginning of this era to January 9, 2007, when Apple’s Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Jobs declared that Apple Inc. was “going to reinvent the phone.”2 It did, and in so doing hastened the transformation of public alert and warning. The U.S. federal government had begun to recognize that major technological shifts were afoot. Seven months earlier, on June 26, 2006, President George W. Bush had signed Exec- utive Order (EO) 13407, which mandated that the United States “have an effective, reliable, integrated, flexible, and comprehensive system to alert and warn the American people in situations of war, terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other hazards to public safety and well-being.”3 In responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, EO 13407 did not pinpoint any particular technologies that needed to be used to fulfill that mandate, only that an integrated and inter- operable system “secure delivery of coordinated messages to the American people through as many communication pathways as practicable.”4 EO 13407 spurred the creation of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning Sys- tem (IPAWS)—the federal backbone of multiple alert and warning subsys- tems, including WEA. In describing IPAWS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stated: IPAWS is the nation’s next-generation infrastructure of alert and warning net- works. IPAWS ensures the President can alert and warn the public under any condition. Additionally, IPAWS will provide Federal, State, territorial, tribal, and local warning authorities the capabilities to alert and warn their commun- ities of all hazards impacting public safety and well-being via multiple commu- nication pathways. FEMA is upgrading the alert and warning infrastructure so that no matter what the crisis, the public will receive life-saving information via at least one path.5 By 2009, FEMA, working with the Federal Communications Commis- sion (FCC), the Alliance of Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and other standards organizations, had developed the WEA system’s technical specifications (at the time, officials referred to the WEA system as the Commercial Mobile Alert System or “CMAS,” the name originally given to the system). After development and testing, on April 7, 2012, FEMA formally launched the WEA system, which promised emergency manag- ers the ability to send 90-character, geotargeted, text-like messages to xvi Introduction