161–170 of 409 posts
Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."
I think a small group of people feel "mission accomplished".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
Misguided. Circumstances are that he either is or is not qualified for a single point of failure job like that. If not it’s management failure. If the human is “qualified” for a single point of failure responsibility like that, he’s now fired.
If I were going to erode public trust in emergency broadcast systems in order to increase the amount of damage I would do by launching an actual missile, this is how I would do it. A series of false alarms. A similar, if obviously much smaller and less disastrous example, happens at my apartment about 4 times a week: the fire alarms for entire floors of my apartment building are easily triggered by people smoking in…
A ballistic missile heading for Hawaii would be nuclear, the amount of additional loss of life that would incur from “damaging the public’s trust” in the early warning system would be pretty much negligible if the missile hits any major population center. This is basically not an issue for nuclear missiles for something more like to the situation in southern Israel with conventional unguided munitions blindly shot at…
Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."
A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again? Absolutely not. Once you say “fire” you need official confirmation to say “no fire”. That means certification from the military. The official needed being in a meeting or tending to something of greater importance could easily introduce delays. In any case, I presume the system’s designers didn’t build in an “oops, f…
> The official needed being in a meeting or tending to something of greater importance I'm struggling to think what meeting or item would have an importance higher than "incoming ballistic nuclear missiles".
That’s not what happened. No military system detected a threat. “Incoming ballistic projectile” would be a high priority. “Civilian request for official confirmation everything is fine” is not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
BINGO. If someone makes a mistake like this, unless it was deliberate or negligent (e.g. he/she didn't follow established procedures), you don't fire them! You fix the technical or procedural failures that allowed them to make the mistake in the first place. Heck, you should probably THANK them for making the system better by uncovering a bug! When I was still mostly a Noogler, I took a large portion of Google comple…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If NORAD said “incoming missile strike,” sure. That isn’t what happened. The civilian notification system sent out a false positive. Saying “false alarm” would require, at that point, asking the military for affirmative confirmation nothing is wrong. That is a lower priority than responding to an active threat.
> That is a lower priority than responding to an active threat. No, that is the active threat and anyone in power would know it. A panicked civilian population can do about as much damage as a real bomb and the military knows it. Such a long delay in the all-clear message is incompetent and dangerous.
Honolulu was vaporised? Keep your perspective.
Responding was a priority. The error was corrected in 13 minutes. It’s just not as high of a priority as an incoming ballistic projectile.
So it took 38 minutes to send out a new message informing this was a false alert. How is that possible if this was simply a human error during a "shift change"? You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again?
I mean it's probably just a simple mistake, but it's also the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to stoke fears about a nuclear strike.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again? Absolutely not. Once you say “fire” you need official confirmation to say “no fire”. That means certification from the military. The official needed being in a meeting or tending to something of greater importance could easily introduce delays. In any case, I presume the system’s designers didn’t build in an “oops, f…
If you're engaged in a drill that's a completely predictable failure mode which you should have a standby plan for. This happened on a week-end. The coders could have very well been at home. Again, why would you perform a drill involving mass emergency mobilization and not manage that risk? What if this had happened during a morning commute or in some part of the country where people are more easily panicked? With gr…
Was this a drill? I understood it to be an unplanned mistake.