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Introduction
June 1, 2011 marked the beginning of a four-year cycle during which all commercial and noncommercial radio and television stations in the United States will come under special scrutiny by the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC” or “Commission”) as the FCC considers whether to renew each station’s license to broadcast.

This is a period of regulatory uncertainty and vulnerability for stations, during which the FCC closely reviews their record of compliance with its rules and service to the public during the license term, and third parties have the opportunity to petition the FCC to deny the station’s license renewal request. One significant focus of the FCC’s and petitioners’ attention will be each station’s performance under the FCC’s rules concerning equal employment opportunity (“EEO”).

In light of the ongoing renewal cycle, this Guide is designed to assist stations in charting a course for full compliance going forward, as well as in evaluating their level of past compliance and the risks the station may face when filing its license renewal application.

Article continues — a full version of this article can be found at The FCC’s Equal Employment Opportunity Rules and Policies – A Guide for Broadcasters.

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February 2013

Pillsbury’s communications lawyers have published FCC Enforcement Monitor monthly since 1999 to inform our clients of notable FCC enforcement actions against FCC license holders and others. This month’s issue includes:

  • FCC Takes Action Against Interference and Unlicensed Operations
  • FCC Assesses $25,000 Fine for Unresponsiveness

Licensee Cannot Escape Fine for Intentional Jamming and Unlicensed Operations
In a rather odd chain of events, the FCC recently issued a Memorandum Opinion and Order (“Order”) against an individual in Thousand Oaks, California stemming from a 2009 investigation and a 2011 Forfeiture Order. The Order rejected a petition for reconsideration of the earlier Forfeiture Order and affirmed the FCC’s decision to fine the individual for unlicensed radio operations, intentional interference with radio operations, and refusal to allow an inspection of radio equipment.

In March 2009, an agent from the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau investigated radio interference at a shopping center. The agent located an unlicensed repeater transmitter operating from a secure radio communications facility on Oat Mountain with a beam antenna pointed in the direction of the shopping center. The repeater was transmitting pulsating signals on 461.375 and 466.375 MHz, the land mobile frequencies licensed to the shopping center for its own operations. These transmissions were jamming the shopping center’s licensed land mobile operations.

During the investigation, an unidentified individual communicated with shopping center personnel on a different set of frequencies, telling them they had “plenty of warning”, that he was jamming their licensed frequencies to force them to cease use of those frequencies, and that they needed to apply to the FCC to cancel their current land mobile license and apply for a new license to operate on different frequencies. He then began transmitting NOAA weather radio on the licensed frequencies to block any use of those frequencies by the shopping center.

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At this stage in the media cycle, few could have missed the news of several Michigan and Montana TV stations airing an EAS alert warning the public of a zombie attack. As I noted earlier this week, while the facts surrounding these alerts are still developing, it appears they were the result of someone outside the U.S. triggering the stations’ EAS equipment via that equipment’s Internet connection. While the resulting burst of media stories quickly devolved into a flurry of zombie jokes, the movie that came to mind as the story developed was not Night of the Living Dead, but the Terminator films, which feature an interconnected national defense network called Skynet. In the films, Skynet becomes so sophisticated as to turn on its creators, causing a nuclear launch that brings destruction to the human race and, after the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger to the California Governor’s Office.

For many years, the EAS system, as well as its predecessor, the Emergency Broadcast System, operated by having a number of primary broadcast stations connected to governmental agencies through a closed network (typically over telephone lines). When an alert was sent to these primary stations, they would broadcast the alert, which would then be picked up and aired by stations monitoring the signal of the primary station, and in turn, by other stations monitoring those secondary stations. This created a daisy chain in which an announcement over one station quickly spread to stations throughout the alert area.

One of the perceived flaws of the Emergency Broadcast System was the amount of human interaction it required. For example, when a national alert was accidentally triggered in 1971, it caused little disruption, since many station managers intercepted it and did not air it because they heard no corroboration of the emergency over their newswires. While it turned out that those station managers were correct in concluding it was an accidental alert, critics of the Emergency Broadcast System counted this event as a failure of the system, since the delay inherent in station managers deciding whether an alert should be aired (and the risk that they may reach the wrong conclusion) puts more lives in danger.

The shift to EAS from the Emergency Broadcast System was done largely to increase the automation, and therefore the reliability, of the system. That digital squeal you hear accompanying an EAS warning is a digital code instructing other equipment, including the public’s radios (if properly equipped), to activate, lessening the chance that emergency alerts go unheard, either because a link in the daisy chain failed to relay the message, or because the public was not listening to radio or watching TV at the time.

The downside to this level of automation soon became apparent. As I wrote in September of 2010, a radio ad for gas stations sought to satirize emergency alert announcements, right down to including the EAS digital tone. Because EAS equipment has a poor sense of humor and is no judge of context, any station airing the ad would trigger EAS alerts on the stations “downstream” from it in the EAS daisy chain. For this reason, Section §11.45 of the FCC’s Rules provides that “No person may transmit or cause to transmit the EAS codes or Attention Signal, or a recording or simulation thereof, in any circumstance other than in an actual National, State or Local Area emergency or authorized test of the EAS.” Just a few months later, the problem repeated itself when TV ads for the disaster movie Skyline included an EAS tone among the many sound effects in the ad.

The highly automated nature of EAS was demonstrated yet again this week, when a Wisconsin radio station’s morning show disc jockeys played a tape of the zombie EAS alert, including the digital tone. The result was–you guessed it–the alert being automatically rebroadcast over at least one local television station whose EAS equipment was activated by the digital EAS tone.

While the automatic nature of EAS creates the risk of false alerts propagating rapidly, at least the false alerts up until now were somewhat self-inflicted wounds, caused by either the system being erroneously activated by a governmental mistake, or by an EAS Participant accidentally airing an activation code contained in third-party content. Because of the closed nature of the system, false activations necessarily required a mistake from a participant in the EAS system, even if that mistake was airing third party content that had not been screened for EAS tones.

This week’s episode, however, appears to have been something entirely different. In an effort to expand the types of consumer devices capable of relaying an alert, the backbone of the EAS system was moved not long ago from the closed network model to an Internet-based system. The benefit is that mobile and other devices connected to the Internet will be able to relay alerts to the public automatically, ensuring the broadest possible distribution of the alert. The bad news, however, is that by shifting to an Internet backbone, we have opened the public alert system to the same outside forces that plague every other aspect of the Internet. In this week’s case, it appears that someone outside the U.S. spent a number of days trying to use those Internet connections to access station EAS equipment. In at least a few cases, they succeeded, generating the now-infamous zombie alerts.

So the good news is that we are well along in the development of an automated emergency alert system that can spread emergency information to most Americans in a matter of minutes. The bad news is that by putting the system almost entirely under the control of “the machines” (a Terminator term), the moderating effect of human involvement is greatly limited. In addition, by connecting this equipment through the Internet, we have expanded the ubiquity of the system, but at the cost of making every EAS Participant’s equipment, whether in Michigan, Montana, or elsewhere, readily accessible to every miscreant in the world with an Internet connection.

Thus, we are perfecting an automated response system that operates most efficiently without human involvement, while creating opportunities for control of that system (or at least portions of it) to fall into the hands of those who do not have our best interests at heart. In other words, Skynet is now a reality. This Skynet does not, thankfully, have the power to initiate nuclear launches, but it certainly does have the capability to launch public panic. A more realistic alert than a zombie attack could cause immense confusion and harm, particularly where the false message is being reinforced by identical EAS alerts on every source of information available, whether it be broadcast, cable, satellite, or smartphone.

I have worked with many of the individuals who created and have dedicated themselves to improving and expanding the current EAS system, and I have no doubt that they are moving quickly to seal off any vulnerabilities discovered in the zombie attacks. Still, I can’t help but wonder if EAS is now subject to the same Internet arms race that bedevils online security everywhere, with ever-evolving measures and countermeasures being deployed in an effort to stay one step ahead of those wishing to commandeer the alert system for their own benefit or amusement. If so, the questions becomes: which is worse, false alerts that panic the populace, or a populace that becomes so used to false alerts that they ignore a real one?

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With the State of the Union Address occurring tonight, the FCC wasted no time in advising broadcast stations and other EAS Participants to take immediate steps to prevent unauthorized uses of the Emergency Alert System like the fake zombie attack alerts that went out over a few stations in Michigan and Montana yesterday. While federal and state authorities are investigating the source of those hoax alerts, which appear to have come from outside the U.S., the FCC has just released instructions for EAS Participants in hopes of heading off any more false alerts.

The haste with which these instructions have been generated is demonstrated by the fact that they are not even on FCC letterhead, nor formatted for such a release. It is also worth noting that they are not described as “recommendations” or “guidelines”, but as actions EAS Participants “must” or “are required” to take. A copy of the FCC release can be found here, but the full text is below:

Urgent Advisory: Immediate actions to be taken regarding CAP EAS device security.

All EAS Participants are required to take immediate action to secure their CAP EAS equipment, including resetting passwords, and ensuring CAP EAS equipment is secured behind properly configured firewalls and other defensive measures. All CAP EAS equipment manufacturer models are included in this advisory.

All Broadcast and Cable EAS Participants are urged to take the following actions immediately

  1. EAS Participants must change all passwords on their CAP EAS equipment from default factory settings, including administrator and user accounts.
  2. EAS Participants are also urged to ensure that their firewalls and other solutions are properly configured and up-to-date.
  3. EAS Participants are further advised to examine their CAP EAS equipment to ensure that no unauthorized alerts or messages have been set (queued) for future transmission.
  4. If you are unable to reset the default passwords on your equipment, you may consider disconnecting your device’s Ethernet connection until those settings have been updated.
  5. EAS Participants that have questions about securing their equipment should consult their equipment manufacturer.

I’ll have more to say about the zombie apocalypse in the next few days, as I was already writing a post on the subject when the FCC release arrived. However, I wanted to get the FCC’s message out to broadcasters, cable operators, and other EAS Participants quickly, so that they can take action to prevent further hoax alerts, as well as be aware of the seriousness with which the FCC is taking these false alerts. Management should make sure that their staff is on alert for unusual EAS activity, particularly during major events coverage.

While the farcical nature of the initial hoax caused more amusement than panic, it is easy to see how a more realistic message could have caused far more damage. Yesterday’s events will hopefully be isolated incidents, but we will be seeing a lot more attention focused on the security, as opposed to the reliability, of the EAS system.

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The engineers who worked heroically to push broadcasting across the digital threshold had barely caught up on their sleep before agitation for more change began to erupt. The National Broadband Plan concluded that the amount of over-the-air viewing doesn’t justify the number of broadcast stations, and that the FCC could use incentive auctions to re-pack broadcasting into a smaller band of spectrum. Now incentive auctions are the law. This decade we will likely see more broadcast spectrum repurposed for mobile services and another “transition” as hundreds of broadcasters conform their facilities.

So what’s the connection between incentive auctions and talk of a new technical standard? The FCC thinks we need more spectrum for mobile services — in large part because of rising use of video on mobile devices. But the FCC’s rules dictate a broadcast television technical standard that means much of the most popular video — which is already available free-to-air — can’t be received by mobile devices. The FCC is right that spectrum best suited for mobile services should be useful for mobile services. So why stop with the highest frequency TV channels? If we’re going to do all the work of another transition, why not open a path for consumers to access the entire TV band with mobile devices? Many of the same forward-looking broadcasters that championed 8-VSB are working with others on a new standard that incorporates next-generation transmission technologies, as an article in TVNewsCheck reported earlier today. ATSC 3.0 would be easily accessible on mobile devices and provide a much better indoor viewing experience as well. And it will be ready to deploy when incentive auction repacking takes place.

But will every broadcaster want to upgrade at the same time? And what about consumers? FCC rules require all broadcasters to use the same digital standard to ensure universality — so every television can receive every broadcast signal. But not everybody thinks that’s the best policy. Back in the 1990s, the FCC itself debated whether it should select one standard, approve several standards, or simply let the market work things out. It adopted the ATSC standard, but it also asked whether the requirement to use that standard should sunset after a critical mass of deployment was reached.

Nobody wants a television Babel. But what does universal access mean when people increasingly consume their video on-the-move and on devices that we don’t think of as televisions? In my home near downtown Bethesda, Maryland, pretty close to many of the region’s television towers, I can reliably receive only three stations, even with an attic-mounted antenna. I can’t receive any broadcasts on any of my computers, tablets, or other mobile devices.

I love broadcast television, but in my case, it’s difficult or impossible to use most of the time. Millions of other Americans either don’t use over-the-air television directly, or use it less than they otherwise might, for similar reasons.

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