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Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
- m3kw9 9y agoI was just thinking they are testing the network on one of the smallest areas in the US. You know with NK threatening to press the button
- nstj 9y agoI woke up to this this morning on the island of Oahu. People running around on the street freaking out and police / fire engine sirens going off. Everyone cheered when the “False alarm” SMS came through across the phones. Secure your networks people - this electronic psyops stuff is real.
- harryh 9y agoApparently it was some sort of test gone wrong not a malicious intrusion into an insecure network.
- digi_owl 9y agoSo basically someone left the test tape in the drive again? https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb371/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb371/
- craftyguy 9y agoWhy are people running around in the streets freaking out when they are told to seek cover because there is an incoming missile?
- nstj 9y agoThere’s not much of a consensus on “cover”, hence people seek insight on the concept from law enforcement officials. Is it cover when you’re inside but 30 floors up in a high rise?
- f- 9y agoThat is actually reasonably well-established - check out this: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/58cc34b9112f7043268b4bb4-1151 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 stopped worrying after the end of the Cold War. Despite the goofy title, this is a remarkably good book from the 1960s, citing some actual science, that helps grasp the actual dangers and the survivability of nuclear attacks or accidents: http://www.madisoncountyema.com/nwss.pdf http://www.madisoncountyema.com/nwss.pdf PS. For folks interested in less apocalyptic emergency preparedness tasks, I maintain a handy guide: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/ http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/
- jimhefferon 9y agoThank you for this. Any idea if the videos are easily viewable?
- Hasz 9y agoOff topic, but the same guy (Michal Zalewski) has an absolutely amazing guide to his CNC work. http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/ http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/ For something a bit less depressing.
- maxerickson 9y agoNote the "I maintain a handy guide" in the comment you replied to.
- Hasz 9y agoAh, my bad. I figured the /prep/ guide and the /gcnc/ guide were distinct, but I see how you could take it a different way.
- wglb 9y ago
- alva 9y agoBecause they believe they and their entire families are about to be turned to dust. I don't know if I would act rationally in that situation.
- dboreham 9y agoBecause "seek cover" is known to be code for "you are about to die"?
- nsxwolf 9y agoNobody teaches anyone about cover during a nuclear strike anymore. In fact, the concept is frequently mocked as cynical Cold War era propaganda.
- djsumdog 9y agoThe 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 there were powerless against US bunker busting bombs, and the hundreds of civilians in the shelters that were hit all died.
- Pinckney 9y agoPlay around with NUKEMAP: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ If you are hit directly, you're fucked no matter what. But the fireball has relatively small radius compared to the other zones. Ducking underneath something solid is to protect you if the building collapses, which is likely to occur in the large air-blast radius. This is much like ducking under a desk in an earthquake. Cover will save you if you're within the larger thermal radiation radius. Even clothing can be enough to protect you from burns, so any cover you can get is good.
- khuey 9y agoCover is extremely important if you're outside the immediate fireball zone (where you're just going to be vaporized). You shouldn't infer from the fact that bunker busting bombs successfully bust bunkers that attempting to survive a nuclear explosion at some distance from you is pointless.
- Houshalter 9y agoHave you ever looked at pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima? People who weren't behind cover survived the immediate blast but got horrifying burns.
- Johnny555 9y agoProbably because they don't know where to take cover. Depending on how much time I have, if I had to take cover, I'd either load up supplies in the car and head to the 3rd underground floor of my office parking garage (but away from the vent stacks in 2 corners of the garage), or if I have less time, I'll jump the fence at the apartment complex next door and hide out in their one floor underground garage. I live in a wood-framed house, so it's going to provide less protection than an underground garage, though still better than running around the streets.
- iends 9y agoBusiness insider says 37 minutes from North Korea to Honolulu. I imagine it’s only a few seconds difference between the various Hawaiian islands. However, you don’t really know how quickly the alert goes out. Do you estimate you’ll have more than 10 minutes notice?
- mistersquid 9y agoI was Facetiming with my gf when our session was "paused". She sent me a pic of notification on her phone. [0] Even more disturbing was the instructions of the initial warning which was to "hide in a safe place". Terrifying. [0] https://imgur.com/a/0QkgY https://imgur.com/a/0QkgY
- sosborn 9y agoWhat part of the island were you on? Out in Hawaii Kai no sirens sounded so it was a collective “meh, probably a mistake.”
- breck 9y agoIn Ala Moana lots of people were looking out their windows but most people seemed to think it was just a mistake, and were waiting for more confirmation, from what I saw.
- JBlue42 9y agoThat's pretty much how people reacted w/ the SpaceX rocket here in LA. Lots of videos of "What is that?" Jokes about NK, etc. People are more skeptical than we give them credit for. It's probably why in school we went through fire drills, tornado drills, etc. So you at least had some idea what to do and what it would be like.
- dboreham 9y agoPro tip: if you are conducting a drill, refrain from using the words "THIS IS NOT A DRILL".
- Johnny555 9y agoNow that they've already said that, next time they have to add "WE REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME".
- ghaff 9y agoThat was my initial reaction but if this was one of perhaps many pre-populated messages that wasn't meant to go out, you might well not have "THIS IS ONLY A DRILL" strings in those messages.
- packetslave 9y agoFrom what CNN is saying, it doesn't sound like it was a drill. The gov. of Hawaii said that the emergency management people were going through their normal shift-change procedures and somebody did the equivalent of: 'rm -rf $HOME/ foo' vs 'rm -rf $HOME/foo'
- Flammy 9y agoWell, it will be interesting if any researchers look into people's actual behavior within the first few minutes of the notification before the 'false alarm, never mind' message went out to see how effective this was as an emergency alert, even if unplanned.
- mxuribe 9y agoDoesn't everyone know that the best defense against such an attack is: "duck and cover"? Further, the desks of school children could be used as shelter/cover since everyone knows that these desks are made of the most powerful adamantium/vibranium alloy.
- djsumdog 9y agoTo play devils advocate here, because I agree those old videos were stupid, I think the point was survival in the case of indirect hits. If a building is bombed nearby and you're not close, hiding under whatever is similar to protecting yourself from an earthquake .. that is any debris that could fall from the shock.
- iends 9y agoI also keep an old refrigerator in my house to climb into.
- coldtea 9y agohttps://www.quora.com/How-did-people-survived-the-impact-of-the-Hiroshima-atomic-bomb https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-survived-the-impact-of-... That refrigerator would have been very handy here too: "DŌ-OH WAS ABOUT THREE-FOURTHS OF A MILE FROM THE HYPOCENTER, INSIDE A MITSUBISHI TORPEDO FACTORY. THE MASSIVE...FACTORY COLLAPSED ON TOP OF HER AND THOUSANDS OF OTHERS". https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-atomic-bomb-hiroshima-nagasaki-radiation-world-war-II-ngbooktalk/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-atomic-bo...
- rublev 9y agoYour crap humor could use work.
- coldtea 9y agoIf the building the kids are in suffers structural damage (which, if it's close enough it might) going under the desk is good, even if the desk is made from heavy cardboard paper. In general any kind of barrier is also going to help protect you against radiation, heat, etc. Why does everyone assume the bomb is going to fall directly above their heads or in some very small radius? It's a whole bloody island, it could drop anywhere.
- djsumdog 9y agoSo 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 mainland. I feel like all of America has forgotten about PRISM/the NSA. With their immense data collection architectures and ties to large tech companies, they could easily filter the keywords and images they want, and get measurements of how quickly this information propagates and how people react. Even more freaky, they can use language processing to even get numbers about what people might be feeling! I think we've all forgotten about this and it should be a chilling affect. In the final case, we will, of course, never know. Anyone who suggests it will be called a conspiracy theorist (even though there is evidence the US government has preformed operations like this in the past, e.g. COINTELPRO) and the official line will be either reason 1 or 2 .. possibly with a patsy to arrest if need be. The truth will be declassified in 30~40 years so some people will be able to say "I told you so," but long beyond the time period anyone will actually care.
- foobarbecue 9y agoYou should check the definition of "affect" and also of "chilling effect." Neither fits here.
- andr 9y agoI'm not seeing the angle for an NSA-type agency - what would they benefit? There are enough events of significance that happen organically - they could track those much more easily. They don't need to create an artificial event. The pattern is fairly predictable, too. Twitter users will hear of this first, followed by pockets of people with close friends in Hawaii. Then it will make the news sites and TV news.
- tambienben 9y agoEvents specifically related to an incoming ICBM? Context matters. People will react differently depending on the circumstances, which means there are things to learn there. The least nefarious reason for a 3 letter agency to do this would be to dry-run a reaction plan to such an event, and take what they learn from reactions & apply what they learn to improve said plan Then again, it could be a dry-run to measure peoples sentiments toward a war with NK. Less likely, but still possible.
- leothekim 9y agoSerious question: where would one seek shelter if that notification were true?
- subcosmos 9y agoThe more underground you are, the better. Shield from those gamma photons! If that ain't an option, jumping into the ocean doesn't seem like such a terrible idea.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> jumping into the ocean doesn't seem like such a terrible idea That’s a terrible idea. You’d be directly exposed when at the surface and end up inhaling fall-out.
- subcosmos 9y agoOf course I was sarcastically implying that you would immediately swim to the mainland
- krasin 9y agoI would be wary of the hydraulic shock (assuming the blast is near the ground), and if one is still alive, radioactive sodium will help: >Salt in seawater readily absorbs neutrons into both the sodium-23 and chlorine-35 atoms, which change to radioactive isotopes. Sodium-24 has a half life of about 15 hours, while that of chlorine-36 (which has a lower absorption cross-section) is 300,000 years; the sodium is therefore the most dangerous contaminant since it has the shortsest half life. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_explosion
- ChuckMcM 9y agoThis parallels the recommendation from the 50's and 60's.
- nostrademons 9y agoFor most people fall-out is a bigger risk than blast damage or immediate radiation exposure. The immediate effects of a blast range only ~1km (depending on yield), but fall-out occurs over a much wider radius. For that - take shelter inside, anywhere. Make sure you shut all windows and doors tight, and ideally tape shut vents. Cover openings with a wet towel. Stay put (don't go outside!) and shelter in an interior room for at least one and ideally 3-5 days. Radiation follows an exponential decay curve, so waiting longer significantly reduces the amount of radiation you are exposed to. You have about 45 minutes after the blast (~1 hour after launch) before fall-out starts arriving in significant quantities: enough to take shelter and do basic preparations, but not enough to travel any significant distance. The biggest physiological danger comes from inhaled alpha-particle emitters, i.e. radioactive dust. Alpha particles have only a few cm range and are easily stopped by wood, paper, or skin, though, so don't breathe the dust. Beta particles are also easily stopped by clothing or a few meters of air. There's not much you can do about gamma rays or X-rays (this is what your hypothetical lead-lined vault is for), but they are physiologically less dangerous than alpha and beta particles.
- subcosmos 9y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/dallas-emergency-sirens-hacking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/dallas-emergency-siren...
- subcosmos 9y agohttps://twitter.com/DEFCONWSALERTS/status/952248265260634112 https://twitter.com/DEFCONWSALERTS/status/952248265260634112
- jogundas 9y agoHackers?
- packetslave 9y agono
- napsterbr 9y agoAny reason why it would take 30+ minutes to rectify the mistake?
- subcosmos 9y agoGotta wait 30 minutes to see if anything detonates ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoCivilian governments would have had to get clarity from a military caught off guard. Something as simple as the appropriate official being in a meeting could introduce delays.
- charlesdm 9y agoYou'd assume a potential strike by an incoming missile is important enough to interrupt said meeting?
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoIf 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.
- anigbrowl 9y agoThis is irrational. If you know a false alarm has occurred then you are endangering people by allowing them to believe the existence of an active threat. I feel like I'm stuck in a car with someone driving off a cliff because the GPS said so even though the edge of the cliff is perfectly visible though the windscreen.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
- Simulacra 9y agoI've read that it was a human error when someone pushed the wrong button. I feel bad for that person.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoDoes anyone have any details about EAS/Wireless alert procedures and how one is sent out? Surely this wasn't one step gone wrong.
- weaksauce 9y agoWhat is this like lost where he had to put the code in hourly? Why was someone in a position where that mistake happened in the first place?
- haeric 9y agoI'm sure the UI looked like this: [clear] [send and cause panic in 1.4 million people]
- virgilp 9y agoOr maybe the Apple way? [Send and cause panic] [Details]
- jschwartzi 9y agoBut it was on a Windows CE device with a resistive screen and the user lost the stylus.
- DonHopkins 9y agoWhat do you want to bet we never find out what really happened?
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoClassic destabilization tactics.
- jstanley 9y agoOn whose part?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Simulacra 9y agoSerious question: for those of you reading this, how would you have responded in those 30 minutes?
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI would've called my parents and then try to find cover. As pessimistic as I am sometimes, there's just enough paranoia on this issue to make me take it seriously.
- gh02t 9y agoIf possible move upwind, as far away from any military or industrial targets as possible. Otherwise, shelter underground or in a concrete/stone building. Put on the best dust/gas mask you can find. Put on heavy or waterproof clothing and try and cover as much skin as possible. I work in nuclear security so this is kinda my thing. If you're in the fireball zone you're pretty much toast, other than that it's mostly about avoiding the blast pressure wave (as well as secondary effects like buildings collapsing on you) and exposure to airborne fallout, which is most dangerous in the first 24-48 hours. After that it becomes much safer to move around.
- supermdguy 9y ago> I work in nuclear security I'm curious, what does that mean? Designing shelters? Teaching people what to do in nuclear attacks?
- gh02t 9y agoSure. Nuclear security is a broad area and it can mean a whole lot of things, but mostly it means more to do with non-proliferation and defense against and response to nuclear threats on a technical level and less the mechanics of training people what to do in the event of a detonation. It'd usually fall into the spectrum of nuclear engineering, though it can be pretty multi-disciplinary (e.g., my educational background is in nuclear engineering, applied math and CS). In my case I'm in research; specifically I develop algorithms for locating radioactive sources using sensor networks distributed through a city. My educational background focused heavily on non-proliferation and nuclear forensics. One of the things we studied in my graduate career was how to optimally sample fallout in the immediate aftermath of a detonation based on predicted dispersal in order to get the best quality samples (for forensics work) while minimizing the risk to first responders. Spent a decent chunk of time learning about all the sorts of dangers you expect from a nuclear detonation.
- Stratoscope 9y agoA lot of comments making fun of the "duck and cover" advice, but consider this: Many people suffered serious injury from the Chelyabinsk meteor when they went to a window to see the spectacle, not realizing the shock wave would follow a few seconds later and shatter the windows into their faces. If they had gotten away from the windows and ducked and covered, they would have been fine.
- vtail 9y agoI’m in Hawaii and received it this morning. First thought: there is probably no shelter close by anyway, and if they would send a missile they would probably target Honolulu (I’m in Kauai).
- davidp 9y agoI know this isn't a comforting thought, but: Missiles from the most likely source (North Korea) are not thought to have very good accuracy. They may be as likely to hit Kauai or the big island (or the ocean nearby) as Honolulu. I hope this event wasn't too stressful for you and your family.
- vtail 9y agoFunny - my gf had the same idea. We basically decided it’s most likely a mistake, so were not particularly worried.
- ju-st 9y agoThey would probably send multiple warheads to increase the odds...
- justin66 9y agoThat's trickier than you'd think. You either have to send the warheads one well after the other, or you have to set them up so they detonate at precisely the same time, so as to avoid the first warhead to detonate destroying all the others. (This is why, at one time, missile silos were placed relatively close together. The enemy could presumably get one of them in a preemptive strike, but not all of them.) At Korea's level of technology, for example, you'd probably just pick a secondary target in some other place entirely.
- augustocallejas 9y agoThe lack of sirens going off in Honolulu this morning tipped me off that it wasn't a real alert, but it took way too long (officially) to find out it was a mistake. Twitter was the first line of defense in getting information (within 10 minutes of the alert): https://twitter.com/wfh1901/status/952242062304227328 https://twitter.com/wfh1901/status/952242062304227328
- nodesocket 9y agoThis should not happen, yet time after time we see that critical American infrastructure and systems are run worse than a pre-revenue bay area chat startup. American infrastructure needs to invest and hire/pay for the same quality that bay area startups do. Let four people go that are inept and less qualified and pay a single solid person market salary. Besides the fear and chaos potentially caused to people in Hawaii there are financial implications if the stock market were open.
- sehugg 9y agoAmerican infrastructure needs to invest and hire/pay for the same quality that bay area startups do. Looking through the Github and Slack system status pages for this month so far ... I don't know that's exactly the model to follow.
- Deimorz 9y ago20 minutes after everyone has already figured out that they've been hit by a missile, you'd get an alert: "We are currently investigating reports of increased explosion rates."
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago>"We are currently investigating reports of increased explosion rates." Status lights will still all be green
- user5994461 9y agoAll status lights were hosted on S3 and the AWS datacenters were hit first.
- rschneid 9y agoThe government needs to employ lots of people. This necessarily means they will employ some low-quality people. It's such a difficult problem to produce high-quality work with low-quality employees that most tech companies of scale have optimized their hiring process to pass as few low-quality workers as possible at the cost of turning down many potentially good ones. It'd be nice to see some effort to make working with high quality-variance employees successful, but I think the reason we haven't seen much of a convincing, scalable answer yet is simply because it's a really hard problem.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- paulie_a 9y agoI will go out on a limb and say someone hacked the system and decided to prank an entire state. Fun fact, in my small hometown you could and possibly still activate the tornado warning system using DTMF and a transmitter on some frequency in the 149mhz range. To clarify, I never actually attempted it but I had a uniden radio scanner in my teens and noticed the pattern for the 12:00 test.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoPerhaps similar to that town in Texas where hackers set off the air raid siren nonstop in the middle of the night.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- inlined 9y agoSuperfluous but still somehow angering part of the article: "Per White House pool reports, Trump was out on a golf course when the alert was sent."
- MollyR 9y agoSo a test drill went wrong. It makes sense to have drills right now, India (tests with war against China and Pakistan), China (Telling their soldiers to be prepared to die for China), Russia(tests against Nato), and North Korea (getting ready for war with the US) are all having military tests for basically what will quickly become another world war. We are really at a big crossroads as a large amount of people are rejecting globalization in many different countries. And with such major powers willing to fight hard for resources like Ukraine, South China Sea, Oil Eu pipelines, and not even mentioning the increasing gulf between various countries on core ideologies and creeds. We really are at a new and dangerous crossroads.
- maxerickson 9y agoHawaii started 6 months ago though: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/21/hawaii-rolling-out-civil-defense-plan-for-north-korean-missile-attack/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/2...
- Lunar_Lamp 9y agoI'd argue it makes sense to have test drills simply because the system exists: much like backups need testing, so do emergency systems. I'm not sure that the current state of the world should influence whether or not the systems are tested.
- major505 9y agotests and training shold be done ever as possible. But in times like now, that war seens more iminent than ever it would make sense intensifing this tests.
- monochromatic 9y agoWas this a test drill? I haven’t seen anything stating that.
- runesoerensen 9y agoThe article seems to have been updated recently to include more information about this "drill": - Officials said the alert was the result of human error and not the work of hackers or a foreign government. The mistake occurred during a shift-change drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency. - In Washington, Lindsay Walters, a deputy press secretary, said that President Trump had been informed of the events. “The president has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise,” she said. “This was purely a state exercise.”
- runesoerensen 9y agoSo 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?
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> 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, fat finger” notification. Getting that ready could have easily taken 30 minutes. This happened on a week-end. The coders could have very well been at home.
- tuxxy 9y agoThis. USPACOM had to check and give Hawaii an all clear.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago>In any case, I presume the system’s designers didn’t build in an “oops, fat finger” notification. Yeah, but imagine getting a legit alert, and then someone fat-fingering the "fat finger" notification. Or someone installing malware that sends that notification for all military related threats.
- gizmo686 9y agoI would assume the system supports arbitrary messages. During a real emergency, I doubt they would want to need to get coders in order to send an unexpected message.
- FireBeyond 9y ago> 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".
- intopieces 9y agoIf 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 the breeze ways or burning their dinner. The result is that I routinely ignore fire alarms because the likelihood of a real fire is has been demonstrated to be exceedingly small.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoThese systems are being revisited for the first time in a generation. Honest mistake is far more likely.
- bradfitz 9y agoI don't think user intopieces was taking a stance on whether it was intentional or an accident. Crying wolf is crying wolf either way.
- intopieces 9y agoLooking at the screenshot of the alert [0], it appears to be using the alert system adopted in 2006 in response to the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act[1]. How is this system for a missile attack different, and in what way is it being revisited for the first time in a generation? Text messages are just now 1 generation old (SMS first implemented 1992[2]; generation is about 25.5 years[3].)And of course the alert system itself is only 11 years old. [0]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/01/14/us/14xp-hawaii-sub2/merlin_132228536_17a59f1a-03c7-4243-841a-44888c17108b-master768.jpg https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/01/14/us/14xp-hawaii-su... [1]https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/5785/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/5785... [2]http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-12-03/after-25-years-of-sms-were-still-anxious-about-text-speak/9205734 http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-12-03/after-25-years... [3]https://isogg.org/wiki/How_long_is_a_generation%3F_Science_provides_an_answer https://isogg.org/wiki/How_long_is_a_generation%3F_Science_p...
- makecheck 9y agoAn interesting Reddit comment described a chaotic traffic situation for 20 minutes (people running lights, wrong-side-of-the-road driving, extreme speed, etc.). Human nature in these moments is very “Tragedy of the Commons” apparently.
- smitherfield 9y agoLink?
- leesalminen 9y agoWould also like to read this.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7q67a1/emergency_alert_about_ballistic_missile_sent_to/dsmp325/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7q67a1/emergency_aler...
- makecheck 9y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7q67a1/emergency_alert_about_ballistic_missile_sent_to/dsmp325/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7q67a1/emergency_aler...
- Houshalter 9y agoIt's good to see people react. There are lots of stories of people dying in disasters because they didn't take it seriously. E.g. sirens blaring for a tornado alert, and people are just continue mowing their lawns. Or people continue eating their meal when the building is on fire, who ended up dying.
- exabrial 9y agoTornado alley lifer here... they're a different story. They process slowly (10mph-30mph), the vast majority of them in the USA will move SW to NE, they usually have a very narrow damage track (100yards), and are usually very visible on weather radar as bright wind sheer. My point being, if you can see a tornado coming, you'll have ample time to take shelter in a basement [or if you're in an unpopulated area, you can get out of the way]. Why people get killed by tornados "still" is usually insufficient shelter (homes without basements or safe rooms), quick touchdowns, them occurring at odd hours when people are sleeping, or the occasional goliath tornado with a massive damage track that's moving quickly, in the wrong direction.
- chki 9y agoI actually wonder why this warning can be send in the first place. As this unwanted "test" has shown, people have absolutely no idea what to/where to go in that situation. Instead there was a lot of panic. If there is the possibility that you will send out such a message it would be a good idea to give some advice on what to do.
- vilhelm_s 9y agoWhen they reinstated the alert system, they also put out a bunch of campaigns about how you should take shelter. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/hawaii-reinstates-attack-warning-siren-prepare-possible-north-korean-missile-n823821 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/hawaii-reinstates...
- joering2 9y agoThis system is NOT designed to help you or tell you what to do. Its mostly designed to take off liability from the government... so that when the dust settles down, you don't go en masses to sue the government for NOT warning you. Besides, places like Amazon and your local library are filled with sections on preparedness. Waiting for Government megaphone to tell you what to do with clear instruction while intercontinental ballistic missile is approaching in few minutes, is already too late.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 21 9y agoOn TV there were some instructions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfvju0sBXgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfvju0sBXgc
- rumcajz 9y agoOk, I hope that the people who got scared shitless by this emergency start doing something against nuclear weapons. It's ludicrous: We can all die any day and ICAN, the people who helped to pass the ban on nuclear weapons and got Nobel prize for it are raising money at a rate of $50 a day.
- Houshalter 9y agoWhat do you want to do about it? Go to war with North Korea?
- rlanday 9y agoICAN got nuclear weapons banned? I.e. they got a bunch of non-nuclear states to sign an agreement about nuclear weapons? Maybe they’d be getting more funding if they weren’t so damn worthless.
- euvitudo 9y agoHuman error or crying wolf aside, it's an interesting exercise from which residents can learn what is truly lacking in the case of such an emergency. Hopefully instead of seeking to cast blame or personnel firings, etc., folks will learn what it is they lack in emergency response.
- ilaksh 9y agoI am sure that I will also get buried here, but if someone intentionally pressed that 'button' then I believe they are the actual emergency response leader and should be put in charge of the effort statewide. A drill is supposed to tell you how close or far away you are from being prepared. A surprise drill is going to be much more effective. The threat is so great, if there haven't been serious drills in a long time then they were overdue.
- packetslave 9y agoJust 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."
- blantonl 9y agoA 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.
- verelo 9y agoAlso, it’s rarely one persons fault, and the next human is likely going to fail in similar (or worse, different!) ways to the previous human. Process controls variables like this, there is obviously an issue that we can learn from here and adjust to improve.
- packetslave 9y agoBINGO. 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 completely down worldwide for 6 minutes. Guess what? We did a postmortem, fixed the procedural and technical problems that allowed it to happen, and I'm still here!
- digi_owl 9y agoMakes me think of the stories of the early days of school computing, and how the admin would give the kids that hacked said computers part time jobs as they had demonstrated themselves both interested and talented.
- f- 9y agoSo 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 the folks involved in the US nuclear program during the Cold War: http://www.madisoncountyema.com/nwss.pdf http://www.madisoncountyema.com/nwss.pdf It cuts through many of the Hollywood-perpetuated myths - the certain and painful death in case of a nuclear strike, or the 10,000-year radioactive wasteland that's going to be left behind. For example, it discusses why the oft-ridiculed duck-and-cover strategy is actually surprisingly effective. The primary threat from an air burst is very conventional - a shockwave and an intense burst of thermal radiation. Shelter - any shelter - greatly improves your survival odds. The fallout from air bursts is comparatively modest (i.e., tends to be far lower than from an event such as Chernobyl) and while lethal, it decays very rapidly - dropping to reasonably safe levels in a matter of days, not centuries. Staying sheltered for 2-10 days greatly improves your odds, and the thickness of material between you and any surfaces that gather dust (roofs, ground) matters more than anything else. Here's a handy chart: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/58cc34b9112f7043268b4bb4-1151 http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/58cc34b9112f7043268... In other words, having enough food and water in your home to weather out a nasty stowstorm also makes you well-prepared for the nuclear apocalypse. Mattresses and bulky furniture provide decent shielding when all other options fail. The long-term effect of fallout tend to be exaggerated, too; water from streams, deep lakes, or wells should be safe or get safe very quickly. Removing a layer of topsoil allows relatively safe crops to be grown. Mild radiation sickness, at the levels where people start experiencing vomiting and hair loss, is actually pretty survivable and has a relatively modest impact on your odds of developing cancer later in life. (Plus, keep in mind that more than 2,000 nuclear tests have been conducted so far, including around 900 in Nevada alone; while they had some statistically observable negative effects, they have not turned the world into a nuclear wasteland.) Of course, don't get me wrong - even a single nuclear strike would be awful, and a large-scale confrontation would mean untold damages and loss of life. But the important point is that a lot of people would survive and would be able to do well in the aftermath - more so if we teach them about some common-sense preparedness steps. The main reason why our understanding of the nuclear risk is so lopsided is because for decades, many nuclear disarmament activists (including many prominent screenwriters, celebrities, and pundits) had a vested interested in portraying the already-awful outcomes of a potential nuclear war as far less survivable and far more hopeless than in reality; the mockery of duck-and-cover, the "barren wasteland" imagery in the movies, and the largely-discredited scientific theories like the "nuclear winter"... all helped to advance (otherwise noble) goals, but at the expense of teaching people that there's nothing they can do save themselves. Plus, of course, after Cold War, we have fewer reasons to worry. It's hard to top the Cuban Missile Crisis. There's plenty of politicized hyperbole around nuclear tensions right now, but the reality is that a large-scale strike on the US is a lot less likely than throughout a good part of the 20th century. PS. I have a short summary of NWSS and some other points about this topic (and other, more mundane but plausible hazards) in my "Doomsday Prepping for Less Crazy Folk" - http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/ http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/
- baxtr 9y agoThere you again: it is useful to have a testing environment. https://nwschat.weather.gov/p.php?pid=201801131825-PHFO-NOHW40-PNSHFO https://nwschat.weather.gov/p.php?pid=201801131825-PHFO-NOHW...
- jacksmith21006 9y agoNot to sound crude but if a nuclear bomb what can people on an island really do?
- anigbrowl 9y agoYes, Tulsi Gabbard's comment is ridiculous scaremongering.
- Retric 9y agoHawaii is huge and has a large mountain. You could get far enough away from a atomic bomb fairy easily. H-Bombs are a different story, but even then you would expect some survivors.
- BjoernKW 9y agoIt 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 but I wouldn't be so sure that trains keep running either once such an alert has been issued.
- PeterisP 9y agoThe 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.
- topspin 9y agoA great deal. Nuclear weapons are not infinitely large or powerful. Here[1] is an account by Akiko Takakura. She was less than 300 meters from the hypocenter (the point on the ground directly below the nuclear blast) of the Hiroshima attack. She and others survived because they were inside a well built bank. She was 20 at the time and lived another 40 years. There are a number of things you can do to contribute to your survival and minimize long term consequences. First is distance; the further you are from a target the better. Assuming you have sufficient distance then you need shelter, anything you can put between you and the blast will help mitigate or entirely eliminate the impact; a hill can make an enormous difference. Should you have the good fortune to survive the blast then you need to deal with fire (nuclear blasts ignite many things simultaneously) and avoiding the bulk of the fallout until you're clear of the damage. If you manage all that you can indeed survive and live a long life. Much contempt is shown toward the old cold war era videos one can find of school children practicing nuclear attack drills by diving under desks and covering their heads. The fact is that these are entirely legitimate tactics that will mitigate the effect of the light flash, thermal pulse, flying glass and other debris. [1] https://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/akiko.html https://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/akiko.html
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gudsrclol 9y agoHoly fuck. MAYBE this actually happened, but your sources lack even a shred of credibility. Jesus fucking Christ.
- conspiracyies 9y agoThis thread is so fucking full of consipracy nut jobs, it’s goddamn insane. What a sad day for humanity.
- e0m 9y agoENV=prod is never a good default…
- mozumder 9y agoMeanwhile, Trump went ahead and finished his 18 holes of golf while 1.5 million Americans were told a ballistic missile was headed their way.
- azernik 9y agoFinished 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).
- mozumder 9y agoIt 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.
- anigbrowl 9y agoTo be frank I prefer him distracted, as opposed to overreacting and deciding to launch a retaliatory strike. I'm disinclined to trust people who announce themselves publicly as 'a very stable genius'.
- Feniks 9y agoNice going fools. Next time people will just ignore it. Hope somebody gets fired for this.
- jmadsen 9y agoNot a terrible thing to have happened, tbh Now we get to see & analyze the "real life" reaction to this dress rehearsal. I'm sure everyone knew without this that a real alert would be full of SNAFUs, but you don't usually get a chance to see what they would really be if everyone actually believed the alert was real. Hopefully (and I think they will ) they'll be smart enough to use this rare opportunity.
- downandout 9y agoI'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.
- anonfunction 9y agoThe emergency notice was triggered after an “employee pushed the wrong button” during a shift change at the state’s emergency management agency, Governor David Ige said at a press conference in Honolulu. Source: http://fortune.com/2018/01/13/hawaii-false-missile-alert/ http://fortune.com/2018/01/13/hawaii-false-missile-alert/
- downandout 9y agoI'm aware that he said that, and that may be the actual explanation (let's hope so), but even then there is work to be done - maybe adding authentication or confirmation to it etc. That said, this is a situation where if it were more serious (someone hacked in, for example), they'd almost certainly lie about it.
- DaniFong 9y agoSmart guy...
- exabrial 9y agoHopefully, THAAD and Aegis work in real life as they have practice. I guess the other comfort is that North Korea is likely a one-trick pony with a nuclear device (if they _have_ managed to miniaturize it). What is scarier is the anthrax antibodies found in the North Korean defector :/ I'm hoping the withdrawal of exercises of the USA and peace talks actually get us somewhere, but we've been to the table 100 times, I don't see much changing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- brerlapn 9y agoA number of folks have asked if anyone knows more details on how a false alert could have been issued. I had some exposure to conversations about these alerts a few years ago, so a few thoughts. This isn't based on extensive experience, but provides a bit more background than you'll get from the news stories I've seen, and if you're burning with curiosity this should give you some jumping off points to research it further. Although FEMA is actively developing more robust controls for their IPAWS system, the controls on user behavior and what functions can be triggered in the system have limited capabilities to enforce restrictions (one would be the requirement for a digital signature to accept a CAP message as valid). If you listen to the press conference [2] Hawaii says they will now be using a 'two person rule' which indicates that the most significant controls they have are manual/behavioral (not automated in the system by user roles or automated workflows based on state policies). Few information systems do much more than have a few coarsely-permissioned user roles, though, so it's not like FEMA or Hawaii has tried to cheap out on the functionality - it's just not a very common capability and emergency alerts isn't a mission where you want to be using 'interesting new tools' that aren't well tested. There are several alerting systems - the Emergency Alert System (EAS), the Wireless Alert System (WEA), and Non-Weather Emergency Alerts (NWEM). States use FEMA's IPAWS system for sending alerts, which [1] this one seems to have been sent through (localities don't necessarily participate in IPAWS, which is voluntary, but the Hawaii EMA was the one that sent this). Some questions I would have about this would be: - IPAWS messages must have a digital signature to be accepted by the system, however based the Hawaii EMA press conference and articles which say 'an employee made an error' I would guess that the digital signature is not used in a way that is actually tied to the official authorized to declare the alert but to is accessible to their whole emergency Operations Group. - Are they sending test messages with that signature? With a 'two-person rule', it sounds from the press conference that it isn't enforced by the machine (not like having two keys which both have to be turned to send the message) but by the first person stepping away from the machine and letting the other person push the "are you sure you want to send this?" button. That doesn't seem much better, but changing the system to do that gets away from the basic CAP architecture and isn't likely to happen soon. The FCC is currently working on a proceeding regarding updating WEA to allow more geographic targeting of alerts, the way the other alerts can be targeted at specific locales. The current system dates back to 2011 or 2012, and is pretty coarsely-targeted, which is probably why you're getting Amber Alerts on your phone for a town that is 6 hours away just because it's in your state. You can find it at Proceeding Numbers 15-91 and 15-94 [3]. [1] You can see the message here, which archives messages sent via IPAWS: http://ipawsnonweather.alertblogger.com/?p=18764 http://ipawsnonweather.alertblogger.com/?p=18764 [2] http://dod.hawaii.gov/hiema/press-conference-missile-alarm-live-stream/ http://dod.hawaii.gov/hiema/press-conference-missile-alarm-l... [3] https://www.fcc.gov/fcc-announces-comment-dates-rulemaking-strengthen-wireless-emergency-alerts-public-safety-tool https://www.fcc.gov/fcc-announces-comment-dates-rulemaking-s... This gives some more technical details on IPAWS and the Common Access Protocol that these messages use: https://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/ipaws/ipaws_cap_mg.pdf https://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/ipaws/ipaws_cap_mg.pdf
- amckinlay 9y agoThis kind of accident has happened many times in the history of the Emergency Alert System (EAS)[1] and the earlier Emergency Broadcast System (EBS). The false alarm of 1971[2] actually revealed a major flaw in the EBS. During the incident, a legitimate national alert initiation message was erroneously broadcast instead of the scheduled test message. Many stations did not propagate the message as required because of confusion caused by receiving it within the time window of a scheduled test. Interestingly, this revealed a major flaw in the system in the event of a real emergency: that an adversary could time its attack with a test broadcast of the EBS, rendering the system generally ineffective. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System#Incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System#Inciden... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_System#False_alarm_of_1971 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_System#Fal...
- gtcode 9y agoI received a second alert just over an hour ago. https://i.imgur.com/Rc8cfO7.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Rc8cfO7.jpg
- gtcode 9y agoNobody else besides me has received a second alert, that I know of, I've posted it like 30 times on twitter under #Hawaii and #MissileAlert etc Context: I tweeted to someone who was upset about it all, "All your alert are belong to us", then immediately received the second false alarm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXGnAMp9Nvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXGnAMp9Nvk
- sumoboy 9y agoEvery public warning system processes will be under scrutiny Monday morning. I wonder what the military was thinking when they saw that message, like "what dumbass sent this out"?
- r721 9y ago"Amid public outcry over the incident, the Hawaiian government also released a timeline of what transpired after the false alarm: Approx. 8:05 a.m. – A routine internal test during a shift change was initiated. This was a test that involved the Emergency Alert System, the Wireless Emergency Alert, but no warning sirens. 8:07 a.m. – A warning test was triggered statewide by the State Warning Point, HI-EMA. 8:10 a.m. – State Adjutant Maj. Gen. Joe Logan, validated with the U.S. Pacific Command that there was no missile launch. Honolulu Police Department notified of the false alarm by HI-EMA. 8:13 a.m. – State Warning Point issues a cancellation of the Civil Danger Warning Message. This would have prevented the initial alert from being rebroadcast to phones that may not have received it yet. For instance, if a phone was not on at 8:07 a.m., if someone was out of range and has since came into cell coverage (Hikers, Mariners, etc.) and/or people getting off a plane. 8:20 a.m. – HI-EMA issues public notification of cancellation via their Facebook and Twitter accounts. 8:24 a.m. – Governor Ige retweets HI-EMA’s cancellation notice. 8:30 a.m. – Governor posts cancellation notification to his Facebook page. 8:45 a.m. – After getting authorization from FEMA Integral Public Alert and Warning System, HIEMA issued a “Civil Emergency Message” remotely. The following action was executed by the Emergency Alert System (EAS): 1. EAS message over Local TV/Radio Audio Broadcast & Television Crawler Banner. “False Alarm. There is no missile threat to Hawaii.” “False Alarm. There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. False Alarm.” 2. Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) “False Alarm. There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii.” 9:30 a.m. – Governor makes initial media notification. 9:34 a.m. – Governor’s message posted to his Facebook and Twitter accounts." http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hawaii-releases-timeline-of-what-transpired-after-false-ballistic-missile-warning/article/2645874 http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hawaii-releases-timeline-o...
- DonHopkins 9y agoI'm all for preventing another false alarm. But while we're at it, let's also prevent Trump from provoking a real attack, please.
- nfread 9y agoWhy was ‘test’ button even attempted only to worker ‘hitting’ wrong button, it’s not the 1st of the month ( usual test day for alert siren test)?
- jordache 9y agodamn man.. we have a more robust process in place for releasing our CRUD web app than they have to triggering a nuclear alert. That entire vertical branch of gov agency needs a heavy dose of slap in the face