Something I just submitted to Interesting People:

SMS spamming isn’t restricted to businesses. I signed up for the DC Alert system , which generally has been a reasonable announcement service telling me about street closings and snow emergencies. Of course, the real reason to sign up for such a service is to get information telling me whether to get the heck out of Dodge in the event of terrorist incidents hitting the proverbial fan.

So you can imagine my annoyance when this emergency system was used to send me a greeting from “my new ANC commissioner” in Dupont Circle. For those of you not from here, ANCs are the very loud and largely toothless neighborhood councils that were established to provide grassroots democratic feedback to the largely toothless City Council. I don’t live in Dupont Circle (nor am I particularly affected by the ANC dealings in my own neighborhood), so this is spam, pure and simple, which serves to degrade the overall trust in an emergency network.

One could generally argue with the value of this service since it’s been already proven that in the event of a real attack, the federal jurisdictions are perfectly happy to withhold information from the local government which controls the service. I’m already acclimated to getting a disturbing message, waiting a few hours, and then getting an all-clear. So call me paranoid, but I think the true value of the service will be when I receive the message initially telling me “all is well, remain calm”, which I’ll take to be the trigger to start making tracks.

Amazingly, on the day of 9/11, people left to their own devices remained calm. It’s when they begin collating and distrusting information flows that mob mentality seems to set in. Given what I hear on a daily basis from my astoundingly uninformed neighbors, I fully expect the next incident to be managed straight into a major crisis.