The Real Deal. The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a national system in the U.S. put into place in 1994, superseding the Emergency Broadcast System and the CONELRAD System and is jointly coordinated by the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Weather Service. Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) is the protocol used to encode the EAS in the U.S. for broadcast stations. The system transmits digital tones over normal audio. No president has ever used the current EAS system or its technical predecessors in the last 50 years, despite the Soviet missile crisis, a presidential assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, major earthquakes and hurricanes, 9/11, and three recent high-alert terrorist warnings. It has, however, been activated twice by human error; in Connecticut on February 1, 2005 and in Illinois on June 26, 2007 (and, no, that's not when BO announced that he was tossing his hat in the ring).
