FEMA to Administer National Alert Network

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that it will serve as the administrator of the national alerting system mandated by Congress in 2005. Under the plan, public safety officials would generate emergency alerts, route them to FEMA, who would verify and authenticate the messages, and then pass them to cellular carriers for transmissions to their subscribers. There are lots of issues yet to be resolved, some technical and others administrative. FEMA will announce with the next 90 days whether it will adopt the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard for handling and sending alerts. The CAP is an xml-based method of creating and sending messages, first devised in 2001 by a group of public safety and now adopted by several standards organizations.