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False Hawaii Missile Alert Sent After Drill Recording Said 'This Is Not A Drill' (npr.org)
A false ballistic missile alert in Hawaii was sent on January 13 because an emergency worker believed there really was a missile threat, according to a preliminary investigation by The Federal Communications Commission. From a report: The report finds that the false alert was not the result of a worker choosing the wrong alert by accident from a drop-down menu, but rather because the worker misunderstood a drill as a true emergency. The drill incorrectly included the language "This is not a drill."
Funny, it said it wasn't a drill, so the worker treated the alert as the real deal.
I'm glad we have that person ready to save Hawaii from a missile strike. If anything they deserve a raise for doing such a standup job.
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Someone had to do it.
Still a false alert, just that level of the alert chain wasn't to blame. Whomever put "This is not a drill" in the drill message was to blame.
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the worker misunderstood a drill as a true emergency. The drill incorrectly included the language "This is not a drill."
If "This is not a drill" was included, the worker didn't misunderstand anything. He correctly understood the message and performed as expected. Dont' blame him, blame the person who sent the drill.
I'm curious to know what big failure you are referring to? Russia annexing some bordering territory? Oh, wait, that was the last two administrations. North Korea developing advanced missile and nuclear technology? Oops, it was those last two administrations. Oh, you mean that quagmire in the Middle East! ...That he inherited from the last two administrations.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think he has any clue what he's doing, but lets not pretend he's straying far off the recent track record of US foreign policy.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The drill incorrectly included the language "This is not a drill."
Here's some irony for you: see http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mcc/002/0001.jpg and note the date sent.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
It sounds to me like they didn't want to spend resources improving/replacing their existing system, so they decided to say it's a human's fault instead of a system's fault.
At some level it is essentially always a human's fault if there was a human decision involved at any point. It might be the human(s) who designed the system or the one(s) who built the system or the one(s) who operated the system but at some level it is a human failure. That's why when someone tells you "the computer failed" they are saying a false statement because while it might not have been their fault, it almost certainly wasn't the fault of the machine - it was the fault of some person somewhere. The machine is simply doing exactly what it was designed and instructed to do. If something bad happens and you trace back why far enough the answer almost always is that some person made a mistake.
Now I'm not talking about blame here. That's different. It rarely is a productive exercise to seek out the person who failed and (figuratively) execute them. Most mistakes are unintentional and caused by putting a person in a situation where they were set up to fail. It's more useful to figure out how to design the system so that the failure mode cannot recur. Fix the problem, not the blame.
(Yes I'm aware that technically computers can actually make mistakes but this is so rare as to be inconsequential to my point - and even then those errors are typically errors made by the designer of the machine making it insufficiently robust)
Funny, it said it wasn't a drill, so the worker treated the alert as the real deal.
For some reason people in Hawaii take the phrase "this is not a drill" seriously.
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It wasn't a drill - it was a mistake.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The message played for the drill said "excercise, exercise, exercise" according to TFA, followed by the real message that would be played, which includes "this is not a drill".
One would presume that someone who was paying attention at the time would at least seek clarification on the mixed message before sending a whole state into a panic.
That is pre-12/7 thinking.
More seriously, missile flight time from North Korea to Hawaii is 20 minutes. How many minutes did military detection and verification consume? How many more minutes to notifying Hawaii Emergency Services? How many for the information to propagate to the worker? How many minutes does it take civilians to take shelter?
Each minute of delay will cost lives in a real attack. In a false alarm people suffered some temporary stress and the government embarrassment. If this is a one off as the government debugs the alert process and procedures there is no real problem here. If its recurring and the public begins to ignore alerts assuming its another false alarm, then there is a problem.
This is a trend I have noticed for the last 10 years: Americans have become so ridiculously afraid of literally everything... Constantly on the edge, flipping by a hair trigger. Everything is OMG this, and creepy that, and don't dare or try anything that could even remotely make one imagine it might possibly cause dreams where one might dream of dreaming of imagining that there might be a chance it might be imaginable that there might be a risk.
It's mad, to see it from the outside.
Is it the fearmongering? Is it psychotropic drugs given to livestock and then in the meat? Is it the constant fearmongering of the news? Is it because intelligence has actually gone up and everyone now being better at coming up with possible ways it could go wrong?
I just know, this won't end well.
Or maybe I'm just affected by it too.
Oh, wait, that was the last two administrations.
Is that code for "started under Bush?"
Oops, it was those last two administrations.
Is that code for "started under Bush?"
That he inherited from the last two administrations.
Is that code for "started under Bush?"
You can see the Republican apologists. It's like for Vietnam, where the Republicans still blame JFK, when the first American boots on the ground in Vietnam and first American losses were under Eisenhower. And it was Eisenhower who explicitly interrupted the elections that was the proximate cause of the "civil war" that became a proxy war. But that's forgotten and "continuing a failed policy by a Republican" is somehow turned into "started by a Democrat."
I'm not a Democrat, but I do believe in telling the truth.
Learn to love Alaska
OK? Not sure how this answers my question about Trump's big foreign policy flop. I think my post was pretty damning of Bush's foreign policy - and Obama's for that matter. I think you are preaching to the converted.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I want to focus a moment on the idea that, "Each minute of delay will cost lives in a real attack."
Are we sure we can do enough in 20 minutes, to make much difference? I don't mean that Hawaiians are expendable, or that more warning isn't better. However this isn't the 1950's anymore; civil defense measures have mostly been dismantled. It has been fashionable for decades to suggest that "nuclear war isn't survivable, bomb shelters are useless."
You surely have heard of "duck and cover"? There are steps that civilians can take in a matter of minutes that will reduce casualties in large areas affected by the attack. "Duck and cover" is the fastest and most basic, but it can prevent serious flash burns, injury by flying glass and other objects. Getting under cover, behind cover, and so forth take longer and likely needs minutes to accomplish in many cases.
Of course, all this depends on civilians who know what to do. How many is that, at present? But this can be fixed quickly with education.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age