Yes, there was a screwup in that anecdote. Eliminating the notification system outright was not a viable alternative, as there was a comparable chance DC HAD been obliterated.
Government is like fire: dangerous, but beneficial in small controlled amounts. Congress has a Constitutional mandate to establish a system for calling out the militia, and this satisfies that. Yes EBS can be abused, but we're not going to chuck the military just because that can be abused too.
BTW: I'm skittish too.
Get this: Just watched a clip from the Portland, Or station KOIN-TV. Apparently, the ENTIRE STATE of Oregon missed the test. The State Primary station at Oregon Public Broadcasting received the alert, but for whatever reason DIDN’T re-transmit the message to the stations that monitor it.
Someone’s gonna get reamed over that one, believe you me.
What concerns me is that because I use TIVO I didn’t get the broadcast, and this system shut my TIVO system down. I don’t understand why it would do that, the regular ones we get here don’t do that, we have them regularly and I hear them and my system doesn’t reboot like it did with this one—why was this one different?
But in any case, if this had been a real emergency I would have been completely unaware of it. So, the system is worse than what we have now, which DOES WORK.