Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say • Hacker News Board

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#231

Post by mozumder » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

azernik wrote: post #226

mozumder wrote: post #219

Meanwhile, Trump went ahead and finished his 18 holes of golf while 1.5 million Americans were told a ballistic missile was headed their way.

Finished his 18 holes when the US military had issued no warning of missile attack, and the proper bureaucratic processes were dealing with the situation. I don't like the guy, but it's not on him to immediately and personally react to this kind of situation. Maybe a nice reassuring speech after the fact (which I doubt will be forthcoming or satisfying).

It actually is his responsibility, since it's a Federally designed system by the FCC. All the faults and benefits of the federal government ends on his desk. The buck stops with him, and we need to hold his feet to the fire on this issue.

"Why did this happen? What are you doing to make sure it doesn't happen again?"

Right now there are way too many people apologizing for his complacency (I guess people have normalized his uselessness at this point?), when it needs to be clear that he's responsible for this shit, too.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#232

Post by Feniks » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #187

macintux wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that if your criteria is “you can never make a mistake” that no one is qualified for a single point of failure responsibility.

Also, at a more fundamental level... when you're dealing with processes as critical as this one... there should be no single point of failure. Even our President has a backup, a failsafe, and a safeguard for the purposes we're discussing here. And that backup has a backup, a failsafe, and a safeguard. Etc etc etc.

Not really true. Thanks to advances in technology POTUS had 10 minutes to launch by the 1970s before Washington was toast.

It was an open secret that nuclear retaliation could be instigated without White House or even Pentagon approval if the Soviets tried to decapitate Nato.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#233

Post by IncRnd » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:23 PM UTC

blantonl wrote: post #139

packetslave wrote: post #117

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.

That may be for some cases, but there should be an extreme amount of due care on the part of employees who can hit a button and cause parents to put their children in storm drains. The particular person who did this may not be fired, but their responsibilities will somehow change.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#234

Post by mikeash » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:25 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #179

joering2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just recently I spoke to my friends that literally are living in LaLa land. They are making fun of me prepping and saving dry food, water, stacking up on legal guns and munition. I took upon challenge last xmas to meetup with them and they brought my prepardness as one of laughing subjects. It really saddens me when they believe that when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting…

Thinking prepping is silly is not synonymous with believing "when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting rules." I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.) It's also ridiculous to think this particular incident has anything to do with, well, anything...

Right! I think extreme prepping (the mild sort where you just prepare for a normal disaster is merely prudent) is dumb precisely because I know that people won’t be all friendly and nice after a collapse. Your stash just makes you a target for the meanest guys still around.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#235

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

BjoernKW wrote: post #154

jacksmith21006 wrote: post #127

Not to sound crude but if a nuclear bomb what can people on an island really do?

It doesn't matter if you're on an island or not. An ICBM (which is what you're usually talking about with nuclear bombs) takes about 30 minutes to reach its destination, which will be a large population centre. So, you have less than 30 minutes to get out of a large city. Because you won't be the only one to try this there will be major congestion on top of the usual city traffic. Public transport could be an option…

The total destruction radius of current ICBM warheads is much smaller than large population centres - if you live in one, and a single 2-5 megaton nuke would hit it, you likely won't die even if you stayed where you are (but duck&cover'ed, preferably in a basement, to avoid the secondary effects) because that nuke would hit some other district of your city; for any major population center the expected casualties from a single hit are just a small portion of the total population.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#236

Post by downandout » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

I'm surprised the discussion here hasn't veered toward what actually happened. Technical glitch/human error? Hacked emergency alert system? Missile actually was on the way, but being a cheap North Korean one, it fell into the ocean on the way?

There are lots of potential explanations...whatever happened, there is stuff to work on in the aftermath of this. Barring the idea that it was an actual missile that failed to hit its target, if these alert systems are vulnerable, that's a bad thing. This could have caused serious chaos in a large city like New York. Techniques like this could be used to cause gridlock before a terrorist attack, suppress voter turnout on election days, etc.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#237

Post by mikeash » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #20

nsxwolf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody teaches anyone about cover during a nuclear strike anymore. In fact, the concept is frequently mocked as cynical Cold War era propaganda.

The mocking isn't unjustifiable though. I mean the turtle/duck and cover is quite pointless, at least in the case of a nuclear strike (unless you're maybe on the far edge of it, in which case a ditch might save you..and that's big might). In the documentary "Iraq: The Untold Story", the creator shows civilian air raid shelters in Baghdad. They were four stories down, with the upper floors all reinforced concrete. Yet…

The mocking is utterly unjustifiable. Duck and cover would have saved millions of lives if MAD had come to its conclusion. The inability of a building to resist bunker busting bombs is completely unrelated.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#238

Post by dfox » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #188

dogma1138 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but if a nuke could get you it would do it regardless if you duck and cover or not. This is just not true. The area in which the nuke will get everyone regardless is less than a tenth of the area where taking precautions would save you. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. People widely laugh at "duck and cover" as if it was some huge joke. Even at the height of the cold war when the nuke stocks were at their larg…

Another thing that constantly astonishes me is how the immediate direct damage caused by any kind of intentional explosion is consistently overestimated by public at large. I largely blame action movies where C4 block of the size typically used for initiating industrial explosives in bore holes is often shown as leveling complete buildings.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#239

Post by rocqua » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:33 PM UTC

snowpanda wrote: post #191

f- wrote: post #125

So I posted something along these lines in another, now-duped thread... but I know that many folks were caught completely off guard and started wondering what they would have done in case of a real threat. Many just cracked Twitter jokes about dying in a blaze of glory. For folks who want to understand the actual dangers and survivability of an ICBM strike, I strongly suggest a book from the 1960s written by one of t…

> http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep Did you write this? This is great!

It was discusson on HN 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110850

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#240

Post by dzhiurgis » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:34 PM UTC

rrix2 wrote: post #214

dzhiurgis wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no real harm was done I wish to believe, but probably there was real harm, probably someone will come up with some million figures. Statistically, probably someone died during those minutes of terror and someone will try to attribute to this incident. What is interesting that employee probably meant no harm, but compare this to that SWAT murder a month earlier. The prankster meant no harm either, but he's going to…

> The prankster meant no harm either, Are you kidding? The people who were involved in this didn’t do it to introduce the swattee to new friends. They did it to terrorize someone who made them mad.

He didn’t mean the outcome (murder), terrorize is probably better word than a prank tho.

What I meant is that “oh I didn’t mean it” going to be interpretted differently.

Edit: if you downvote me thinking that I somehow support prank swatters - you are wrong. Otherwise you fail to see the paradox of intended vs unintended outcomes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea (as I understand it's interpreted very different in the US).