The interface to send out a missile alert in Hawaii is, as expected, quite bad

  News
image_pdfimage_print
Enlarge / A morning view of the city of Honolulu, Hawaii is seen on January 13, 2018. Social media ignited on January 13, 2018 after apparent screenshots of cell phone emergency alerts warning of a “ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii” began circulating, which US officials quickly dismissed as “false.” (Eugene Tanner/AFP/Getty Images)
Getty Images

The Honolulu Civil Beat claims to have obtained a picture of the interface used to send out tests and missile alerts to the people of Hawaii, and it’s not pretty.

It appears the employee who sent out the mobile and broadcast missile alert that sent Hawaii into a panic for 38 minutes on Saturday was supposed to choose “DRILL – PACOM (CDW) – STATE ONLY” but instead chose “PACOM (CDW) – STATE ONLY” from an unordered list of equally unintuitive and difficult-to-read options.

The Honolulu Civil Beat noted in a story on Sunday that the employee who made the choice from the nearly unintelligible list has been temporarily reassigned within the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA), and his status at the agency will be decided after a review. The news outlet wrote that according to Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi, the employee “felt terrible about the mistake.”

One issue that prevented HI-EMA from correcting the missile alert immediately was that there was no automated way to send out a “false alarm” notification to the hundreds of thousands of people who received the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) or to the television and radio broadcast stations that also conveyed the grave warning. Instead, the agency had to send a correction manually.

In the aftermath of the confusion, the agency said that two people would now be required to sign off on an alert or a drill message. In addition, an automated “false alarm” message had been added to the alert system.

According to Honolulu Civil Beat, that automated “false alarm” message is now at the top of the menu of the still-bad alert interface.

If a future employee is just as perplexed by the menu below, at least now they can select “BMD False Alarm” to cancel a missile alert more quickly.

That the interface helping employees select such vital and potentially world-changing information is so rudimentary is concerning, but false missile alarms are hardly unique to Hawaii. In fact, just this morning, Japanese broadcaster NHK accidentally sent a push alert to users of the NHK app saying “NHK news alert. North Korea likely to have launched missile. The government J alert: evacuate inside the building or underground.” NHK issued a correction “within minutes” and apologized, according to CNN, but the fact that the alert was the second mistake in five days suggests there’s work to be done.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1244869