
Hawaii’s false missile alert sent by worker believing attack on US was imminent - rwc
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/30/heres-what-went-wrong-with-that-hawaii-missile-alert-the-fcc-says/
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jandrese
Wait, so all of the hand wringing over the crappy UI was pointless because it
was actually a case of miscommunication?

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krapp
No, according to the end of the posted article, poor UI and a lack of
necessary safeguards were part of the problem, just not the entire problem.

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rhino369
I don't really understand how it is part of the problem. If the worker really
believed an attack was incoming, confirmation screens wouldn't help at all.

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bearcobra
I guess it would depend on how that confirmation screen worked. If the design
asked for a confirmation from a second user, then a single user's confusion
wouldn't have resulted in the error.

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paulddraper
Sure, but that's a lot different from "move these buttons around and have the
user double click to be sure."

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jsjohnst
The extra confirmation shouldn’t have been on the same user. The “two man
rule” exists for emergency protocols for a reason.

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dragonwriter
I think the most critical problem this revealed is _not_ in the chain of
events leading to the false alert (which contains several real problems), but
that _the State of Hawaii apparently has no clear process for sending an all
clear and informing the public of the resolution after a live alert._

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moftz
They probably figured there wasn't going to be a State of Hawaii after a real
nuclear missile so why bother with an all clear?

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dragonwriter
Real missiles can miss, malfunction (the missile), be intercepted, not have a
nuclear warhead in the first place, experience a warhead malfunction, and—even
if they hit somewhere in the area of Hawaii and detonate a nuclear
warhead—leave much of the state intact (Hawaii is, after all, about half as
far across, east to west, as the continental US.)

The very last may not produce an all-clear in the short term, but it's likely
to at least require lifting the “missile is likely to hit in our area soon”
alert in favor of a very _different_ emergency posture, which is a similar
need.

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rdtsc
Why does the state of Hawaii even need a man in the middle for issuing ICBM
alerts. It would seem the military or at least something centralized at the
federal level should be able to trigger this alert. Basically have it patched
through directly.

I can't see a benefit of an extra person in the loop. It could at best delay
sending the alert, send the wrong alert. At worst is obviously missing sending
the alert altogether. One might say, well one benefit is the state could
prevent a bogus alert from being sent. But does the State of Hawaii have its
own independent monitoring network of satellites or radar? I am guessing it
doesn't.

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Psilidae
I can see value in having someone capable of issuing alerts who is
geographically _on_ Hawaii, as the potential for dropped communication lines
seems problematic.

I don't know enough about military/federal operations to know whether having
them handle it would imply keeping operations on the islands, or if they'd
literally "centralize" it to somewhere on the continental US.

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idlewords
Everybody who publicly excoriated the UI (or what they thought was the UI) of
the Hawaii public alert system here should think about their role in spreading
misinformation. This story was catnip to computer people, and too few people
waited for any kind of confirmation before deciding they knew all about what
happened, and how to fix it.

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giarc
It still is bad UI, that hasn't changed. So people didn't spread
misinformation.

Sure, the employee clicked the wrong button because of this audio alert, but
the buttons/text are still poorly designed.

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idlewords
There's no way to tell if it's bad UI given the publicly available
information. We'd need to see the whole flow (including confirmation steps),
as well as know something about how the employees were trained on this
interface.

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giarc
That's UX, not UI. The user interface is bad. The bad labelling/naming of the
links makes it more likely to click the wrong button. That is bad UI. Bad UX
would be the situation if even after that, there is no double check or alert
to confirm that users intention.

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dkresge
So, more fundamental than UX, that the proper employee action for an
“exercise” differs from that for a real threat doesn’t seem to be a proper
test. Why not just have an administrative airgap keyswitch that enables
exercises to be conducted without the requirement to disseminate the fact
beforehand? Then you can test for the proper response without risk.

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ARussell
I'm not saying the UI of their system is great, since I have never seen it,
but I believe it's a better idea to have the "test" alert be very similar to
the real one. When the time comes to send a real alert, the operators should
be practiced. Diverging the UI could cause confusion in am actual emergency,
wasting precious moments.

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perseusprime11
After a few more days, we will hear that it was not the worker who sent the
alert, and after some more days, we will hear that nobody sent the alert and
that it was a bug. Just kidding. News such as these have to wait till the
investigation is complete, otherwise we will simply be reading speculation.

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everdev
> Following standard procedures, the night-shift supervisor posing as Pacific
> Command played a recorded message to the emergency workers warning them of
> the fake threat. The message included the phrase “Exercise, exercise,
> exercise.” But the message inaccurately included the phrase “This is not a
> drill.”

This is just a test. This is not a test.

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mpweiher
The worst civil air disaster happened in part because the controller said “you
are not cleared for takeoff”. Alas, there was radio interference, so the “not”
didn’t get through.

As a consequence, the words “cleared for takeoff” have been removed from the
ATC/pilot vocabulary except when actually cleared for takeoff.

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triplesec
Are you talking of the Tenerife disaster in 1977? Almost correct:
[http://aviationknowledge.wikidot.com/aviation:tenerife-
commu...](http://aviationknowledge.wikidot.com/aviation:tenerife-
communication-error-s)

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colemannugent
So who was fired for this? Someone dropped the ball by not communicating the
fact that this was a test to the employee who sent the false alarm. That
person should be fired.

This reads like a classic tale of government incompetence. If you don't fire
people in a situation like this, why should we expect anything to change?

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JumpCrisscross
When it comes to ballistic missile warnings, I’d rather err towards false
positives over false negatives. Whomever made this mistake is highly unlikely
to do so again. Throwing that away seems wasteful, _ceteris paribus_.

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rlanday
False positives and false negatives are both really bad. Now if there’s an
ICBM launched at Hawaii this weekend, no one will believe it.

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JumpCrisscross
> _False positives and false negatives are both really bad_

Everything surrounding nuclear war is bad. Choosing the lesser of two evils is
the best we can do, given the domain.

> _Now if there’s an ICBM launched at Hawaii this weekend, no one will believe
> it_

No one? My collection from friends in Hawaii is they’re _more_ prepared. Each
of them have at least contemplated a plan and a few assembled go bags. In any
case, Japan and Korea’s experiences with false alarms don’t support your claim
that a few false negatives outweigh a single false negative.

To be clear, I’m not saying false positives are okay. No error is better than
error. But if we’re going to have errors, and we are, one kind is better than
the other.

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abstractbeliefs
> go bags

where are they planning to go?

It's a common mistake to make up "go bags" but forget they're only supposed to
last you the 24 hours that it takes to get to a new refuge should your
home/wherever else you're in become unsafe. I'm not sure how that works on
Hawai'i after a nuclear missile attack, so I'd love to know what the plan is
for such an event for these individuals.

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JumpCrisscross
> _where are they planning to go?_

Shelter, basement...depends on your situation.

I’m in New York and don’t have a go bag. I did look up our nearest shelter,
though, and thought about what I’d grab (water, cat, knife, extra glasses,
bacitracin, band-aids, battery + cable, nuts, kibble, phone, flashlight, duct
tape and masks).

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abstractbeliefs
Right, and that's super reasonable! What a lot of people _do_ do however is
make elaborate go bags but but then fail to prep their home, which is almost
likely the best place to hunker down and stay.

