The government can control your phone's operating system?

Just a brief post, I thought this was a little bizarre - a few minutes ago because of the bad weather an alert popped up on my phone from the National Weather Service. Except it wasn't a text message, it wasn't an application alert, it was an actual operating system alert message. That's a little ... I don't know ... uncomfortable to think that at any point in time the network can just take control of the operating system and send you a government alert. I can see getting a text message ... but an operating system alert? Wow.