Miscellaneous News

Dec 2, 2017
well, Hawaii has been preparing for missile attack, now its credibility is under fire
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180113140649-hawaii-missle-alert-false-alarm-exlarge-169.jpg
 

plawolf

Lieutenant General
The whole thing was farcical and an accident just waiting to happen.

There should have been safeguards in place to ensure a single person could not send out the alarm with just a single button push or mouse click. As things were, it was only a matter of time before someone pressed that button by mistake/accident.

I am not even sure why the EMA employee that sent out the alert had access to do so at all, since you would expect the military to make the call on whether a ballistic missile is inbound, and if they determine that has happened, why does it then need some civilian and press a button to send out the alert? If the military determined ballistic missiles were inbound, they would raise their own alarms, so why isn’t the civilian alerts automatically tied to the military alert system, whereby certain alerts, like incoming ballistic missiles, automatically feed through to the civilian alert system?

Seems like an entirely needless step that adds unnecessary delay (I can almost bet that if the ballon really went up and an EMA shift operator got the call, he/she would ask ‘is this for real’ or something similar at least once before sending the alert. So that would be 1-2 minute out of the 20 you had gone for no reason), and points of failure to the process for no apparent practical gain.

I really feel for the poor guy that sent the alert, as it was the system that let him down.
 

Shaolian

Junior Member
Registered Member
The whole thing was farcical and an accident just waiting to happen.

There should have been safeguards in place to ensure a single person could not send out the alarm with just a single button push or mouse click. As things were, it was only a matter of time before someone pressed that button by mistake/accident.

I am not even sure why the EMA employee that sent out the alert had access to do so at all, since you would expect the military to make the call on whether a ballistic missile is inbound, and if they determine that has happened, why does it then need some civilian and press a button to send out the alert? If the military determined ballistic missiles were inbound, they would raise their own alarms, so why isn’t the civilian alerts automatically tied to the military alert system, whereby certain alerts, like incoming ballistic missiles, automatically feed through to the civilian alert system?

Seems like an entirely needless step that adds unnecessary delay (I can almost bet that if the ballon really went up and an EMA shift operator got the call, he/she would ask ‘is this for real’ or something similar at least once before sending the alert. So that would be 1-2 minute out of the 20 you had gone for no reason), and points of failure to the process for no apparent practical gain.

I really feel for the poor guy that sent the alert, as it was the system that let him down.

Yes, I don't want want to sound conspiratory, but some things don't add up in this episode. They have been sounding the sirens these past few weeks in Hawaii, the first since the end of the Cold War. It's as if this is the doing of the civilian goverment, with no input from the military. What for?

Seems like some kind of psyops is in motion here.
 
Jan 15, 2018
Dec 2, 2017
well, Hawaii has been preparing for missile attack, now its credibility is under fire
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180113140649-hawaii-missle-alert-false-alarm-exlarge-169.jpg
now the story is
Hawaii Worker Sent False Missile Alert Thinking it Was Real
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A Hawaii employee who mistakenly
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of an incoming ballistic missile earlier this month, creating a panic across the state, thought an actual attack was imminent, the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday.

Hawaii has been testing alert capabilities, and the employee for the state Emergency Management Agency mistook a drill for a real warning about a missile threat. He responded by sending the alert without sign-off from a supervisor at a time when there are fears over the threat of nuclear-tipped missiles from North Korea.
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"There were no procedures in place to prevent a single person from mistakenly sending a missile alert" in Hawaii, said James Wiley, a cybersecurity and communications reliability staffer at the FCC. There was no requirement to double-check with a colleague or get a supervisor's approval, he said.

In addition, software at Hawaii's emergency agency used the same prompts for both test and actual alerts, and it generally used prepared text that made it easy for a staffer to click through the alerting process without focusing enough on the text of the warning that would be sent.

The worker, whose name has not been released, has refused to talk to the FCC, but federal regulators got information from his written statement that state officials provided. The employee still works at the state Emergency Management Agency but has been reassigned to a job without access to the warning system.

The alert was sent to cellphones, TV and radio stations in Hawaii on Jan. 13, leading people to fear the state was under nuclear attack. It took 38 minutes for officials to send an alert retracting the warning because Hawaii did not have a standardized system for sending such corrections, the FCC said.

The federal agency, which regulates the nation's airwaves and sets standards for such emergency alerts, criticized the state's delay in correcting it.

The FCC said the state Emergency Management Agency has already taken steps to try to avoid a repeat of the false alert, requiring more supervision of drills and alert and test-alert transmissions. It has created a correction template for false alerts and has stopped ballistic missile defense drills until its own investigation is done.

The employee in question heard a recorded message that began by saying "exercise, exercise, exercise" — the script for a drill, the FCC said. Then the recording used language that is typically used for a real threat, not a drill: "this is not a drill." The recording ended by saying "exercise, exercise, exercise."

The worker did not hear the "exercise, exercise, exercise" part of the message and believed the threat was real, according to the employee's statement. He responded by sending an alert.
 
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