I think the most critical problem this revealed is <i>not</i> in the chain of events leading to the false alert (which contains several real problems), but that <i>the State of Hawaii apparently has no clear process for sending an all clear and informing the public of the resolution after a live alert.</i>
Why does the state of Hawaii even need a man in the middle for issuing ICBM alerts. It would seem the military or at least something centralized at the federal level should be able to trigger this alert. Basically have it patched through directly.<p>I can't see a benefit of an extra person in the loop. It could at best delay sending the alert, send the wrong alert. At worst is obviously missing sending the alert altogether. One might say, well one benefit is the state could prevent a bogus alert from being sent. But does the State of Hawaii have its own independent monitoring network of satellites or radar? I am guessing it doesn't.
Everybody who publicly excoriated the UI (or what they thought was the UI) of the Hawaii public alert system here should think about their role in spreading misinformation. This story was catnip to computer people, and too few people waited for any kind of confirmation before deciding they knew all about what happened, and how to fix it.
So, more fundamental than UX, that the proper employee action for an “exercise” differs from that for a real threat doesn’t seem to be a proper test. Why not just have an administrative airgap keyswitch that enables exercises to be conducted without the requirement to disseminate the fact beforehand? Then you can test for the proper response without risk.
I'm not saying the UI of their system is great, since I have never seen it, but I believe it's a better idea to have the "test" alert be very similar to the real one. When the time comes to send a real alert, the operators should be practiced. Diverging the UI could cause confusion in am actual emergency, wasting precious moments.
After a few more days, we will hear that it was not the worker who sent the alert, and after some more days, we will hear that nobody sent the alert and that it was a bug. Just kidding. News such as these have to wait till the investigation is complete, otherwise we will simply be reading speculation.
> Following standard procedures, the night-shift supervisor posing as Pacific Command played a recorded message to the emergency workers warning them of the fake threat. The message included the phrase “Exercise, exercise, exercise.” But the message inaccurately included the phrase “This is not a drill.”<p>This is just a test. This is not a test.
So who was fired for this? Someone dropped the ball by not communicating the fact that this was a test to the employee who sent the false alarm. That person should be fired.<p>This reads like a classic tale of government incompetence. If you don't fire people in a situation like this, why should we expect anything to change?