The Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA had told us long in advance about the alert they would send to phones on Oct. 4, 2023. Many people did not get the message. They had no idea it was coming. (Those who did shut down their phones completely.)
So there was a sense of shock and amazement when at 2:18pm Eastern Time (two minutes early), FEMA blasted everyone’s phones with a loud sound and a sticker that popped up on the screen. Then it went away, and we were all left with an unsettled feeling.
I seriously doubt that any person felt a sense of comfort over this, along the lines of “Thank goodness the government is caring for me.” In any case, I’ve not seen anyone say anything along those lines. Mostly there was a sense that something was very wrong that government could achieve something like this.
Is my phone not my own? Short answer: no.
You could have the phone on silent mode. It still came through. You could have all your notifications off. It still came through. You can have all emergency alerts turned off. It still came through.
The apologists—the talking heads—said that this is no different from the tests of the Emergency Broadcast System that commonly appeared on television during the Cold War. The system was created in August 1963 to alert Americans about war or other grave national crises. It was used 20,000 times over the next 35 years, never for any real crisis but just as a way of letting everyone know that the government is there.
Why did this one feel so different? The TV when I was growing up was seen as a household appliance that broadcast pre-existing content. It was not something we customized for ourselves much less carried on our person.
The smartphone was supposed to eliminate the sense of otherness of both the phone attached to the wall and the TV in a console in the living room. It was our own property. We choose what it does, how it sounds, what applications it carries, and use it according to our own needs. People have developed a very intimate relationship with their phones. The archives in them tell a narrative story of our personal lives. The TV never did that and doesn’t even do that now.
That’s why it feels like something fundamentally different. People’s responses to this vacillated between indifference, annoyance, and alarm.
Let’s make a case for why you should be alarmed. There is no sitting office holder who voted for FEMA to do this. It was a decision of the administrative state. Invading your private space this way sends a message about who and what is in charge. That FEMA was the agency to push the button is highly significant.
The reason: FEMA was the lead federal agency that managed the disastrous COVID response that shut churches, schools, businesses, gyms, parks, hospitals to non-COVID purposes, and otherwise gave Americans a taste of life without a Bill of Rights.
Does that surprise you? Probably. It’s one of the least reported facts of the entire sorry episode.
The document contained a very interesting organizational chart that very clearly assigns all rule-making power to the National Security Council (NSC), while forcing the public agencies like CDC into a backseat position. Even today, this is not well known.
“Also, there was a 2018 Pandemic Crisis Action Plan (PanCAP) that was customized for COVID-19 specifically and adopted in March 2020 by HHS and FEMA; the plan identified the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the Lead Federal Agency (LFA) with FEMA supporting for coordination. However, a mere five days after the national COVID-19 emergency was announced, FEMA became the LFA.”
This is a remarkable revelation. No public announcement of this was ever made. Most people had no clue because the information was classified. Even after this news was made public, it went unreported. People continued to believe, and still do, that the CDC was the final authority when in fact it was marching to FEMA’s drum.
Why might this be? In fact, the country in those days was taken over by national security, which inevitably involves the intelligence community. This is why the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA), an offshoot of the NSA, had such a huge role in determining whether you were essential and nonessential as a worker.
You will notice that there has been almost no transparency about anything of this, no real apologies, much less justice for what they did to us and to the whole country. On the contrary, they are still very proud of what they did. They are not stepping away from their powers and their right to do it again.
This puts the emergency alert that you got on your smartphone this week in a bigger context. It was a flex and a show of power. It was a way of FEMA to say: your phone is not your own, you have no privacy, you have no operationally secure freedom, and we can do it again anytime we want.
This was the symbolic purpose. It was designed to codify all the powers they deployed over three and a half years to ruin civil society in America.
So, no, we are not really talking here about an innocent warning system designed to protect you. The same agency which sent that notice was three years ago forcing your business and school to stay closed, and imposing mass testing on everyone. This is not protection or security. It is a massive invasion of your rights.
If you had a bad feeling about that noise ringing out from your smartphone yesterday, you are correct. We are nowhere near being out from under the thumb of the lockdowners. I want this crisis to end as badly as you do. Sadly for us, the struggle to regain our core freedoms consumes our lives. It’s worth every effort.
