New Yorkers Are Weirded Out By The Phone Alert They Got During Bomber Search

“We activated earlier today a messaging system used by our Office of Emergency Management that allowed us to get information out to all New Yorkers across the board,” Bill de Blasio said at a press conference Monday afternoon. “It had an extraordinary effect.”

The Wireless Emergency Alert system is generally only used for disasters and also cases of missing children, the latter of which covered under the AMBER Alert scheme. Using it to find a criminal suspect is quite unprecedented. And it kinda creeped everyone out – like it was something from a sci-fi:

On the subway, everyone’s phones went off simultaneously w/emergency alert about Ahmad Khan Rahami. Like something out of a dystopian movie

— Pamela Engel (@PamEngel12) September 19, 2016

People are vaguely concerned about it too. It seemed to work quite well in this instance – at least that’s what the mayor is saying, even though the bloke who discovered Rahami basically just reported him for napping in a stairwell. And it may well be reason for concern: beaming a message to millions of people could cause a panic if not handled correctly.

What if they start including physical descriptions in the message? That could be a nightmare. Some New Yorkers who received the message were a little iffy about the implications.

deputizing everyone with an iphone in the middle of rush hour does not seem like the responsible way to do this pic.twitter.com/ZTGZ6ksIyO

— ????? (@NJDG) September 19, 2016

I didn’t sign up for the NYC emergency alert system to be woken up by “join our paranoia about vaguely brown men.”

— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) September 19, 2016

The sound of every cell phone in NYC receiving an emergency alert simultaneously is an odd sound.

— Ed (@eddiespike) September 19, 2016

It definitely raises ethical questions about how such a system ought to be deployed in future, and the limitations thereof.