The Hawaii employee who sent out a false alarm earlier this month warning of an incoming missile attack said he misheard a message played during a drill and believed a ballistic missile was actually heading for the state, according to a federal investigation.
This contradicts the explanations previously offered by Hawaii officials, who have said the Jan. 13 alert was sent because the employee hit the wrong button on a drop-down menu.
The cellphone alert sent to Hawaii residents set off a wave of panic across the state, coming as heightened tension with North Korea has fueled fears of nuclear attacks on the United States. To make matters worse, the alarming message blaring “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” went uncorrected for an agonizing 38 minutes.
Following standard procedures, the night-shift supervisor posing as U.S. Pacific Command played a recorded message to the emergency workers warning them of the fake threat. The message included the phrase “Exercise, exercise, exercise,” the FCC report said, but it also included “This is not a drill” — language used for real missile alerts.
The worker who then sent the emergency alert said they did not hear the “exercise” part of the message. This person, who has not been publicly identified, declined to be interviewed by investigators, but the worker did provide a written statement, the FCC said. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]Say what you want about President Trump, but at least he knows his Twitter password.
Hawaii Governor David Ige, a Democrat, now says he couldn’t inform state residents that a warning of an imminent missile attack was a false alarm because he forgot his Twitter password. The frightening admission comes 10 days after Hawaiians were thrown into a panic for nearly 40 minutes over the warning.
Gov. David Ige explains that part of the delay in notifying the public that the Jan. 13 missile alert was a false alarm was because he did not know his Twitter password. pic.twitter.com/S3tmoswOpZ
— SA Politics (@starpolitics) January 22, 2018
An employee accidentally triggered the missile defense warning on January 13 by pushing the wrong button — twice. He sent a message to all mobile phones warning them of an imminent ballistic missile attack. Some residents placed their children in sewer drains in an effort to survive the blast. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]In the aftermath of an erroneous missile warning that terrified Hawaiians on Saturday (Jan. 13), the state’s emergency management agency has come under increased scrutiny, from the poor design of the software that enables alerts to a particularly slapdash security measure by one of its employees.
Old photos from the Associated Press inside the agency’s office appear to show an unspecified password on a yellow Post-It note, stuck to a computer monitor. The image, which shows operations manger Jeffrey Wong standing in front of the computer, was taken in July and appeared in articles published at the time about the agency’s preparedness in the face of a nuclear threat.
The agency verified that the password is indeed real but wouldn’t go into specifics on what program the password was supposed to be used for. – READ MORE