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Hawaii Governor Didn't Correct False Missile Alert Sooner Because He Didn't Know His Twitter Password (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a WashingtonPost report: Minutes after the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency mistakenly sent a missile alert at 8:07 a.m. on Jan. 13 -- terrifying residents and visitors across the state -- some officials, such as Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, rushed to Twitter to reassure everyone it was a mistake. But one Twitter account was deafeningly silent for 17 minutes: that of Hawaii Gov. David Ige. Though Ige was informed by the state's adjutant general that the alert was false two minutes after it was sent, he waited until 8:24 a.m. to tweet, "There is NO missile threat." On Monday, after he gave the State of the State address in which he avoided the subject of the missile alert fiasco, reporters demanded an explanation for that long silence. Ige's answer: He couldn't log in to Twitter. "I have to confess that I don't know my Twitter account log-ons and the passwords, so certainly that's one of the changes that I've made," Ige said.
What are the chances that these two independent errors happened near the same times?
Very good actually.
You climb down stairs everyday whithout problem. Yet, if you hear that someone has hurt him/herself falling down stairs, you can't help but think about it the next time you end up at the top of a flight of stairs, thus greatly increasing the risk of a misstep and a fall.
The guy in Japan had heard of the incident in Hawaii, and the stress of not wanting to make the same mistake, even if completely unconscious, greatly increased the risk of actually repeating the same mistake.
It's a very well known flaw of the human psyche. Never attribute to a conspiracy what can be perfectly explained by human nature.
BINGO!
I'm not on Twitter. Neither is anyone else in my family. Because state government wrongly assumes that all its citizens are willing to be interrupted by tweets all day long, those that aren't are just acceptable losses?
One might assume that DHS and FEMA would have drawn up suggestions for state and local officials on how to deal with emergency notifications like this. But it appears that neither of those organizations seem to be able to do their jobs.
When we lived in S. OH (many years ago), the entire southern half of the state was paralyzed for almost two weeks due to an ice storm that knocked out power. How did local government inform citizens on the progress of the repairs and when areas might expect power to be restored? They freakin' didn't. The idiots in the public safety department had no plan in place. None. Did they think to pass information along to the local radio stations? Hell no. It was like living a scene out of "Airplane!": "No... that's just what they'd be expecting us to do."
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Besides, what self respecting nuclear aggressor wouldn't simultaneously hack or at least DoS local official's twitter accounts? You think social media is going to stay up in a real war waged by a competent adversary? Nerp. It'll crash at the most critical moment. It isn't defense-hardened, folks.
Someone had to do it.