Re: Amber Alert part 85

[brouder@juno.com]

Dave asked about Monday's Amber meeting at Mass State Police HQ in
Framingham.  I was asked to attend by Al Sprague, President of the NH and
Massachusetts Associations of Broadcasters.  Contrary to media reports,
Governor Swift was not in attendance, though her press secretary was. 
Swift called the meeting; it is my understanding letters were sent to all
radio & TV GMs.

I counted 50 people in attendance, including the crews from 5 Boston TV
stations and the Boston Globe.  The meeting was conducted by Mass State
Police Captain Robert Bird who I have talked to at length and consider
quite well versed on Amber, and pretty well versed on EAS.  Bird was
assisted by WBZ's Mark Manuelian, the Mass SECC chairman; Cable
co-chairman Mike Gaudet (AT&T Broadband) was also there.

The long and short of it is that Mass wants Amber up and running by
October first with a public test.  It appears all efforts to date revolve
only around the 10 key stations in the Mass EAS plan.  An effort is
underway to get all of their encoder/decoders updated with the new 21
event codes approved in May, including CAE (Child Abduction Emergency). 
No organized effort is underway downstream to similarly equip everyone
else.  I left confused whether the Mass Amber Plan will utilize the
existing CEM code (Civil Emergency Message) or CAE; both were dicussed.

There was extensive discussion about how to distribute photographic
images of the victim to the visual media.  Al Sprague pledged to make the
Mass Broadcasters web site available as one option.  E-mail attachments
were also discussed.

My impression is that the broadcast part of sending the messages is
pretty much ready.  What is still being hammered out is the behind the
scenes law enforcement protocols that must be established.  I gather that
effort is also close.  If a child is abducted in Mass, the info will be
funneled to State Police for dissemination over EAS. All parties agree
that is a police function and the only role of the broadcasters is to
relay the info to the public.  To that end, Mass plans to ask
participants to re-broadcast the info every half hour for three hours. 
They plan to accomplish that by sending repeated EAS activations.  From
what I've read in other state plans, that is different than most states. 
Most places follow up the EAS with a FAX or some other form of written
communication and just ask stations that are live and attended to read it
several times in subsequent hours.

There was also discussion about cross-border notifications so missing
children can be publicized in nearby states.  Since EAS typically focuses
on in-state geographic regions, the current thinking is that the State
Police in each New England states will use existing means of
communication to ask neighboring states to activate their own EAS systems
based on the info provided by the originating police agency.

Vin Kajunski of the Boston FCC office was there and he explained how TV
broadcasters can work out written arrangements with particular cable
franchises so an EAS won't be rebroadcast on a particular TV channel on
that cable system.  Unfortunately that is financially prohibitive and it
remains to be seen whether that can be accomplished.

That's probably more than Dave wanted to know....

Ed Brouder, Chairman
NH SECC
http://nhab.org./help/eas.html