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."

Comments

So the worker did their job

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Captcha: grenade

Re:So the worker did their job

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course management immediately blamed the worker for clicking the wrong button when he was just following orders.

Re:So the worker did their job

[thsths]

> Funny, it said it wasn't a drill, so the worker treated the alert as the real deal.

Exactly. The worker did not misunderstand the message - the message *was* wrong.

Re:So the worker did their job

[jellomizer]

For most mistakes made in a professional setting, it is usually a failure in the process vs a mistake of the individual.
Having been the person who had hit the go button to kick off a colossal failure. I can tell you it could happen to anyone. I have gotten approvals and did every step I was suppose to do. However the process had shortcuts because no one wanted to deal with the full complexity or waste their departments resources on looking at it. So they had blanketed approved the data where I was the one who hit the start button.
I didn't get into any trouble, but I had documented all the approvals. However I was the first on the list to be questioned. So I can feel for the guy who is under the public pressure for pushing the button to send.

Re:So the worker did their job

[ShanghaiBill]

And of course management immediately blamed the worker for clicking the wrong button

Indeed. They lied to millions of people about what happened. So will anyone lose their job over this? Or will our emergency response system continue to be managed by irresponsible blame shifting liars?

Re:So the worker did their job

[arth1]

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.

When there are mere seconds between thousands of lives being saved or lost, I would hope that they do not seek clarification, but err on the side of caution. I would commend this person and fire the idiot who approved the text "This is not a drill" in a drill.

Re:So the worker did their job

[hey!]

One of the things every system designer needs to understand is the role of emotion in human cognition. Survival-related reactions like fear or anger have absolute priority over all higher levels of cognition. Once you suspect a tiger in the grass, your perceptions will tend to process only confirmatory data. That's your reptilian brain trying to get you the hell out of Dodge.

So it's a statistical certainty that if you broadcast an emergency announcement that concludes with "exercise, exercise, exercise", a substantial fraction of the recpients will not perceive that concluding disclaimer at all. That inability to process contradictory data will continue until the level of emotional arousal drops. Cognitive psychologists call this the "Emotional Refractory Period", or ERP. Until the ERP is over you can't count on rational judgment, only on rote training.

So from a systems or exercise designer's standpoint, you need to start the drill with the disclaimer. Ending it with a disclaimer is nearly useless. What's more, introducing conflicting signals ("this is not a drill") is a really bad idea, because you risk triggering a higher priority behavior control system.

The refractory nature of emotions is why it's so important to control things like anger, which served us well when we were living in paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands but causes mostly mischief in modern society. If you get angry or fearful because of misinformation, you literally can't fix that until you stop being angry or afraid. That's what makes survival related emotions such potent tools of political manipulation.

Re:So the worker did their job

[T.E.D.]

Quite. If a human listener cannot trust the phrase "This is not a drill" to be an indicator that this is not a drill, then the phrase itself has no meaning whatsoever and shouldn't be included in either case.

Re:So the worker did their job

[hey!]

There is no purpose to the phrase "this is not a drill" if you use it in drills. Better to omit it.

I've just heard an exercise message that began "exercise exercise exercise." I'm so angry I'm going to forget that I heard it. What?

The relevant emotion here is fear.

Re:So the worker did their job

[Hognoxious]

This may be a drill, or it may not be a drill.

Ask yourself, do you feel lucky?

Re:So the worker did their job

[Xylantiel]

You have missed the point of your own argument. By your argument the real message and the test one should be worded mostly differently so that there is NO confusion. The problem here is that the test message contains a message, a moniker that the message is not a test message, and a moniker that it is a test message. That's madness! In order to convert the test message to the real message you remove some extra words, which, as you say, easily causes confusion. The test message should be something like "in place of this message you would hear information about the real emergency". That is sufficient to test the system and will never be confused with an actual emergency message. I hear that sort of thing all the time on government and institutional warning systems. It really appears that whoever is in charge of this warning system in Hawaii really has insufficient expertise in this area.

And so a new inquiry is launched...

[skids]

...wherein they now try to figure out why the message said "this was not a drill" ... and determine it was because that message was accidentally selected from a drop-down menu.

false alert, just higher up the chain

[networkBoy]

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.

The worker didn't misunderstand anything

[enriquevagu]

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.

Re:Fear Mongering

[MightyYar]

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.

No such thing as a computer error

[sjbe]

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)

Hawaii takes "this is not a drill" seriously ...

[perpenso]

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.
https://www.archives.gov/bosto...

Missile flight time to Hawaii is 20 minutes

[perpenso]

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.

Re:And it was completely accurate

[Chris Mattern]

Depends on how serious you are about your drills. After all, the real thing isn't going to be scheduled a day in advance, so a drill that is doesn't really tell you how well prepared you are for the real thing.

When did Americans become so INSANELY afraid??

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Fear Mongering

[AK Marc]

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.