Every minute that passes in a suspected child abduction is critical, and every person in the area of the kidnapping is a potential witness. Now wireless service carriers and their subscribers may soon join the fight to recover missing or abducted children. Telecommunications data provider Intrado teamed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the U.S. Department of Justice this month to launch a secondary system of distribution of AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) alerts to targeted geographic areas.

Intrado has worked with the NCMEC for about two and a half years, providing wireline emergency AMBER alerts, essentially delivering 911 functioning in reverse, said Mark Scott, Intrado vice president of wireline sales.

“When a child is abducted, local law enforcement notifies us or can actually use a secure Web site to map out a specific geographic area and send back a description of the child, and those calls will go to every business and residence in that prescribed area,” Scott said. “[Law enforcement] also has the option to enlist jurisdictions that use our services through their phone companies. They start at the exact location of where the child was and in a circular motion, begin to call outward. The chances are the abductor is moving away from that center point. We can also follow in a path, if we suspect the abductor is heading to a certain direction.”

As a partner to traditional wireline notification, the new secondary system will allow citizens to receive geographically targeted messages in the form of wireless text messages of up to 163 characters, or via computer with e-mail alerts and Internet pop-up windows.

“We provide what's called a high-speed bulk messaging platform, which is a way to provide high-speed, massive bulk SMS messages to telephones,” Scott said. “The way it's set up, at least initially, is that subscribers would opt in if one of the carriers offered this service through the National Center.”

Secondary distributors must apply and be approved by the NCMEC and could include wireless carriers, ISPs or retail outlets with electronic billboards. No carriers are signed yet, but Scott says the NCMEC is currently negotiating with several.

Scott said that in the cases of child abductions that end in fatality, in 74% of the cases the child is killed within the first three hours. The existing wireline system has a turnaround time of about 4 to 6 minutes from the time the NCMEC notifies Intrado to start the process, and they expect the secondary notification system to be about the same.

“Time is definitely the enemy,” Scott said. “That's why we do things like the telephone notification process because people may not have their television on, they may not have their radio on, but their telephone is always turned on.”