Is someone pushing the wrong buttons in Hawaii?

THE ALERT WAS NOT A DRILL; IT WAS A MISTAKE. — COLBY COSH

The “Emergency Alert” sent to smartphones in Hawaii Saturday read thus: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK I MMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” That last sentence made for a terrifying touch to residents and vacationers in the state — but, of course, those five dread words were perfectly accurate. The alert was not a drill; it was a mistake. Some idiot had clicked on the wrong menu item at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

Of course, an i ncident like this really takes several idiots lined up in a long row. Missile tests by North Korea have been making Hawaiian officials nervous lately about the archipelago’s exposed position in the mid- Pacific. The rhetoric being traded between dictator Kim Jong- un and U. S. President Donald Trump is certainly not so easy to brush off in Hawaii, where plenty of living people have personal memories of Pearl Harbor.

U. S.- North Korean tension has, in recent months, been leading to a de- mothballing of old civil- defence measures in Hawaii, such as sirens and bomb shelters. It has also led, as we now know, to the updating of the traditional emergency broadcasting system. It can now reach out to your phone and fling you right out of your four- poster bed at the Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach.

For something that was “not a drill”, the mistaken smartphone message will have had a lot of the same effects. The most important thing that HEMA learned was that if you have the ability to electronically autoterrorize everyone within a certain radius, you had better have some fast, equally automatic way of correcting an error. It took HEMA 38 minutes to send a second notice to smartphone users reading “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm.” And, no, I’m not sure what the “Repeat” is doing there, either.

During those 38 minutes, thousands of Hawaiians and tourists had sent desperate farewells to loved ones — although some noticed that the outdoor sirens, which had just been tested last month, were not going off, and drew the correct conclusion. There is very little evidence of anything technically describable as “panic” happening in the state, despite the ubiquitous use of that word in Sunday headlines.

Jokes about poor interface design are being circulated in the aftermath of the Hawaiian incident, but the governor did specify that the person who made the “mistake” actually clicked through a second “are you sure you want to create traumatizing chaos for no reason?” confirmation message. HEMA also says it will require two separate people to confirm s martphone alerts in the future, which, if I can be forgiven a toe-dip into conspiratorial thinking, almost seems to hint at the possibility of some kind of awareness-raising prank.

Certainly t he person who sent the alert — who is, appropriately, having his identity protected for the moment — will find it difficult to cling to anonymity forever as fellow employees of the agency absorb inevitable public abuse and tolerate the sniffing- around of journalistic investigators. The head of the agency said he was taking “full responsibility” for the incident, but added that he was satisfied, after less than a day of inquiry, that nobody needed to be punished or fired. This is, of course, usually what the words “full responsibility” mean in that context: that no one is really taking it.

The emotional harm done by the false message itself is quite monstrous enough without enterprising dilettante columnists making tortured attempts to generalize it to the mainland, or to the world. But that did not stop us! The New York Times’s Max Fisher, in a widely circulated Twitter thread, attempted a tortured comparison between the Hawaii false alarm and a Cold War memory from September 1983: the accidental shooting-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Soviet interceptor aircraft.

Fisher never quite got around to explaining, as he tweeted, how a text message can be comparable to an actual mass slaughter of innocent travellers. His potted history claimed that “The Americans in 1983 had been repeatedly threatening to launch some kind of attack on the U. S. S. R.”, which surely deserves a hundred- decibel “citation needed.” ( Also: “the Americans,” aside from being weirdly vague, seems like ... a slightly odd way to refer to your own country?)

“The confusion over KAL007 literally could’ve ended t he world,” Fisher concludes, while admitting that it didn’t, quite. KAL- 007 did happen in the middle of a prolonged “war scare” within the Soviet military, which was alarmed at the deployment of short- range Pershing II tactical nukes in Europe. But historians agree that the likely moment of maximum danger came months later, when the USSR detected NATO troop and material movements associated with the military exercise now commonly referred to as “Able Archer 83”.

Able Archer was a very l arge- scale simulation of the NATO response to a Soviet first strike, complete with intensifying DEFCON alerts. This is — unlike a false alarm issued by a civilian agency and immediately known to be mistaken — the kind of thing that can actually provoke a defensive first strike under the wrong circumstances. You get the impression, if you are an overworked newspaperman yourself, that Fisher happened to have been reading about KAL- 007, was looking for an excuse to blab a bit about it, and chose an offensive and contrived occasion for doing so. Maybe we could say that he pushed the wrong button.