
Hawaii official who sent false missile alert has been fired - dboreham
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/30/hawaii-missile-alert-error-false-alarm
======
Twirrim
They got rid of the one employee least likely to make a mistake again.

It was hardly their fault either. "This is not a drill" was part of the phone
message they received. Why the hell would you say that when it is a drill?

The whole thing was a fiasco from the top to the bottom and shows they haven't
even remotely approached operations from the very simple premise of "Humans
make mistakes". They didn't even have a runbook for handling the scenario of a
message being accidentally sent out.

~~~
atonse
While I agree with you in principle, there's more to it than that.

There was another report that claimed that the employee suddenly refused to
cooperate with any investigation to figure out what happened. It's likely
their lawyers told them to stop talking, and that we don't know the full story
here.

~~~
proactivesvcs
My take on "there's more to it" is that the employee had allegedly already
caused two false alarms through his own actions.

The fact that he made a written statement then refused any other cooperation
suggests to me that, rather than shirking his duty by this act, perhaps he
knows better than to dig himself a hole by trying to be "helpful".

------
fairpx
They should blame the [1] software and issue a redesign

[1] [https://hackernoon.com/redesigning-hawaiis-emergy-alert-
inte...](https://hackernoon.com/redesigning-hawaiis-emergy-alert-interface-in-
the-open-91c6318a7045)

~~~
laken
It has since came out that the alert was not sent in error due to bad design
(in addition, that image has since been turned out to not be real), but the
alert was sent on purpose due to the operator believing that an attack was
imminent (due to a confusing drill message).

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2018/01/30...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2018/01/30/heres-what-went-wrong-with-that-hawaii-missile-alert-the-
fcc-says/)

------
cableshaft
>Then a Facebook and Twitter message was put up on the emergency management
agency’s accounts. It was not until 8.24am that the corrective message was
retweeted by the Hawaii governor, David Ige.

>The FCC report notes drily: “The governor has stated that he was unable to do
this earlier because he did not know his Twitter password.”

Moral of the story: Memorize your Twitter passwords if you're going to take
office. Or just use something easy, like '1234' or 'password'.

~~~
tomkarlo
Having an simple / easy-to-remember password on your Twitter account is a bad
idea if you're a state governor. Or really, anyone.

The right answer here is, use a complex password (that you likely won't
remember), and/or 2FA, and use a password safe that's available on your mobile
device.

~~~
cableshaft
My suggestion of a '1234' password wasn't serious. Although they should at
least memorize their passwords and not offload that onto assistants or
whatever, although what you suggested is better.

------
zaxomi
Previous discussions

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hawaii&sort=byDate&prefix&page...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hawaii&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1517270400&dateEnd=1517356800)

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hartator
Little that they know that Hawaii itself is ours early warning system.

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dboreham
So the "bad UI" thing was fake news, it seems.

~~~
shepardrtc
I really hate the term "fake news". It implies that someone created the whole
story on purpose to deceive people. I think the "bad UI" thing was just
someone trying to figure out what really happened and noticed that the webpage
for the alerts was atrocious. They incorrectly thought that this could have
been the reason for the mistake. By no means was it fake, rather it was simply
a mistake. There's nothing malicious about that.

~~~
xupybd
>I really hate the term "fake news". It implies that someone created the whole
story on purpose to deceive people

No it just means someone published the story without proper fact checking.

~~~
mortehu
Back in 2016 it meant fabricated news, usually about politics. Donald Trump
started abusing the term not long after it was revealed that the fabricated
news at the time was mostly successful in targeting his followers, presumably
to dilute the term.

See
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XoLHF3Z9eMg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XoLHF3Z9eMg)
or Google "Jestin Coler"

~~~
xupybd
I stand corrected.

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mar77i
I can't help but feel betrayed clicking the link "guy ... has been fired" and
then immediately reading "guy has resigned". That's not exactly the same
thing.

~~~
pdpi
Not the same person.

> The head of Hawaii’s emergency management agency has resigned and a state
> employee who sent out an false alarm of an imminent missile attack has been
> fired

~~~
mar77i
Okay, sorry for the noise, then. I'll try to write my comments after I read
the article next time.

