Facing Citizen Outrage Justice Department Reactivates AmberAlert.gov: 'The Amber Alert System Was Never Interrupted' Officials Claim
The Amber Alert website was restored after an erroneous online furor that thought the system was affected by the government shutdown. Officials say it was only the website that was down and not the Amber Alert system.
The Justice Department brought the Amber Alert site back online after critics exploded, thinking that the government shutdown forced the department to close the notification system.
On Monday, the Department of Justice insisted that the Amber Alert child abduction notification system remained fully functional at all times during the government shutdown. It was only the amberalert.gov website that had been taken offline for a week.
The Amber Alert website came back online on yesterday morning after a weekend of growing fury from rightwing commentators.
A Department of Justice spokesman told reporters that the Amber Alert program was never affected by the shutdown. The DoJ spokesman said the Amber Alert site was only to disseminate information. The site alers people to the work of the Amber Alert program.
Department of Justice official Brian Fallon said on Twitter "At no point has Amber Alert system been interrupted during shutdown. To prevent confusion, informational DOJ site has been restored."
Amber Alerts are issued by local police, press and city governments. Amber Alerts are issued by jurisdictions to make information on child abductions public. Amber Alerts are still being issued throughttweets, news broadcasts, cell phone alerts and road signs.
The website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which compiles the Department of Justice national Amber Alert information, is still up and running. There are currently no active Amber Alerts at this time.
The Amber Alert website normally displays information about current and outstanding Amber Alerts. It is not how the Amber Alerts are issued, which are handled on a a state-by-state basis.
The California Highway Patrol officials said that if there is an Amber Alert in the state, the media will be paged and Sacramento will still order messages to be posted on on freeway signs.
The state of California recently used the Amber Alert system to locate a San Diego County man who killed a friend and her child and kidnapped her daughter, the teenager Hannah Anderson. FBI agents shot the kidnapper in Idaho and retrieved the teen after their whereabouts were reported by some hikers who had seen the Amber Alert.