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

nytimes.com

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

#351

Post by fapjacks »

chiph wrote: post #309
astura wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting the button behind glass.

At a military communications center I once worked at we had the EPO button positioned near the door so you knew where it was, and you could hit it on the way out as you evacuated. One day someone had a toolbag in their hand as they were leaving and it swung and hit that big red button ... and it did what it was supposed to do - cutting all the power to the room. Which ended up being a big hassle - they had to reload…

One of my jobs in a big computer room had the same big red buttons by the door for the fire suppression system. By the time I'd gotten there in the 90s, they already had plastic covers on them, and had since a similar incident early 80s.

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

#352

Post by superioritycplx »

uabstraction wrote: post #71
djsumdog wrote: post #28

So either this was a security breach, a human mistake or a psyops/test on a small isolated American population. In the first case, we'll probably only be told about it if they actually make an arrest and the system is patched. The second is an interesting case, we'll come back to. The final one: it was intentional and used to track what happened on the islands, and to also watch that information propagate back to the…

I'll go right ahead and call you a conspiracy theorist. If you think The US intelligence community would go out of their way to stir up a panic like this just because CoIntelPro was a thing 50 years ago, with no other evidence or reasonable motives, you must be a UFO chasing loon. If there is anything nefarious here (seems like it), this is the work of a foreign state actor probing our infrastructure for exploitable…

>Russia, who has already been attacking our elections

I'll go right ahead and call you a conspiracy theorist.

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

#353

Post by wdr1 »

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.

If he's learned.

Therein is a key responsibility of the manager: if they've learned, you're 100% right. If they haven't, don't care, don't get it or whatever, then you also need to take responsibility & replace that person.

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

#354

Post by dingo_bat »

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.

Also, if he was able to do something in error, that means the system is designed wrong. It's a process problem. You cannot fire this one guy and expect this to not happen again.

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

#355

Post by rev_bird »

strken wrote: post #329
blhack wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.) Could you share this insight? The US gov't recommends that you do some amount of emergency preparedness ("prepping"): https://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit

Having 72 hours of shelter/water/food, a first aid kit, and some other bits and pieces is not how prepping is colloquially used. Given a disaster with a 1% yearly chance, and a lifespan of 80 years, lifetime odds of encountering that disaster are close to 50%. Given a disaster with a 0% or a 0.000001% chance, lifetime odds are still pretty close to zero. Disaster preparedness worries about the 1%, prepping worries ab…

I agree that the odds of "society" dissolving are very small. However, the penalty for encountering a blizzard without preparation -- maybe not having enough food to eat full meals for, say, a week -- is FAR lower than then penalty for encountering armageddon without preparation. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if the fall of civilization is 1,000 times less likely, and the consequences are 1,000 times worse, the calculus gets a little more complex.

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

#356

Post by marcosdumay »

cm2187 wrote: post #294
ImSkeptical wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say we just don't have enough information. It's possible someone deserves to be fired for this - e.g. if the alarm was intentional or negligent. It's also possible it was a misclick, confusing UI, etc, in which the person or people who should be fired are those who designed the system such that a simple mistake could set it off. There is a third possibility too - that some unpredictable alignment of factors means…

But there are certain jobs where the job is to get it right 100% of the time. This sort of mistake is extremely damaging in the unlikely scenarios that there would be an actual alert. A significant proportion of the population will ignore it next time because of this. You can’t take the “shits happen”, “break often and break fast”, “it doesn’t matter because we learn from our mistakes” attitude with everything. And i…

> But there are certain jobs where the job is to get it right 100% of the time.

No there aren't. There are certain activities that must be always correct, you implement those by making a reliable system out of unreliable jobs, not by making the people 100% reliable.

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

#358

Post by Banthum »

sorenbs wrote: post #153
dmix wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they tested the nuclear/missle attack warning sirens in Hawain cities for the first time in a very long time last month. Just because the sirens were installed during the cold war doesnt make the new attention and urgency being given to them is any less new. Same with the underlying infrastructure behind cell phone alerts being old while the systems on top are being newly revised and tested. Clearly there is a w…

I'm surprised the sirens aren't tested more frequently. In Denmark we have a national system of sirens. They are tested once a year at a specific date and time. In the cold war era they used to test them every Wednesday at noon, but it has been scaled down since then :-)

In Tokyo they test the public emergency speaker system every day.

At 5pm they play a 30-second traditional Japanese lullaby. If you ask people, they say it means it's time for children to go home - though as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with actual school schedules. I'm not sure everyone realizes it's actually a warning system.

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

#359

Post by Banthum »

strken wrote: post #329
blhack wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.) Could you share this insight? The US gov't recommends that you do some amount of emergency preparedness ("prepping"): https://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit

Having 72 hours of shelter/water/food, a first aid kit, and some other bits and pieces is not how prepping is colloquially used. Given a disaster with a 1% yearly chance, and a lifespan of 80 years, lifetime odds of encountering that disaster are close to 50%. Given a disaster with a 0% or a 0.000001% chance, lifetime odds are still pretty close to zero. Disaster preparedness worries about the 1%, prepping worries ab…

After the Spanish flu, multiple near-missed accidental nuclear launches as well as political crises during the Cold War, September 11, SARS scare, Ebola scare, weather events like Katrina or the Ottawa ice storm, as well as your bog-standard surprise wars from history, it seems obvious to me that the chance of a mass-destruction event requiring over 3 days of supplies far exceeds 0.000001% chance per year.

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

#360

Post by eadmund »

justin66 wrote: post #304
f- wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually reasonably well-established - check out this: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/58cc34b9112f7043268... Not common knowledge, though, in part because nuclear hazards have been painted in an exaggerated light by Hollywood (basically, no point in trying to survive, because everybody is going to die and what's going to be left is a 1,000-year lethal nuclear wasteland), and in part because we stopp…

> http://www.madisoncountyema.com/nwss.pdf That is classic cold war stuff. Before you even get to the foreward by Edward Teller you get a preface stressing (among other things) that low doses of radiation are "healthful."

It's just an attempt to defuse the sort of kneejerk reaction which thinks that all radiation is harmful.
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