States in Focus After Hawaii False Warning

The state is changing its processes for sending alerts, Hawaii Gov. David Ige (D) said in an address to his state Monday. “It is clear what happened Saturday revealed the need for additional safeguards and improvements to our state system.” The state already has put in place improved protocols for false alarms, with a two-step process requiring an additional official to sign off before a warning is issued, he said. Hawaii also now has available a “pre-scripted cancellation and false alert message,” he said. Ige appointed Hawaii National Guard Brig. Gen. Kenneth Hara to oversee a comprehensive review of Hawaii emergency management.

“Whenever you have situations like this, where an error is made, I’m sure not only Hawaii but every state is going back and checking their processes to make sure that situations like what occurred in Hawaii are not likely to occur in the future,” Brian Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association, told us Tuesday. APCO didn’t comment.

Venable communications lawyer Jamie Barnett said the fix is easy, but the FCC can’t order states to change their policies. “It is good that we have a nationwide, integrated warning system to cover modern-day threats, and missile attack threats are constantly in the news now unfortunately,” said Barnett. “Coming from the military, I have always been strongly in favor of tests and exercises. Exercises include humans and protocols, and it is crucially important to regularly train and exercise systems, their operators and leadership in the broad array of scenarios that could happen.” The false alarm was bad, he said. “It shocked and panicked people on Hawaii for no reason,” and “it may make them less likely to need future warnings. As bad as it was, it is unconscionable that it took over a half hour for a cancellation,” he said.

Since the missile warning came over the emergency alert system, it was carried by TV and radio stations. State authorities didn’t use the EAS system to correct the error for close to an hour after it went out, more than 20 minutes after they issued a correction on Twitter, said Chris Leonard, president of the Hawaii Association of Broadcasters and radio licensee New West Broadcasting. Issuing a correction on Twitter 20 minutes ahead of a system that reaches 90-plus percent of 1.4 million residents doesn’t make sense, he said.

Because of the unprecedented nature of the alert, Leonard said he and other broadcasters started trying to verify the threat after retransmitting the warning, adding that stations shouldn’t need to have doubts about EAS messages, especially those warning of immediate danger. “When I get a message that comes from the proper authorities, I can assume and I want to be able to assume the message is authenticated,” Leonard said. Before the state corrected the message through EAS, county civil defense officials informed broadcasters that the warning was a false alarm, and stations pushed through that information, Leonard said.

FCC, Hill React

An FCC investigation is “well underway,” Pai said Sunday. “We have been in close contact with federal and state officials, gathering the facts about how this false alert was issued. Based on the information we have collected so far, it appears that the government of Hawaii did not have reasonable safeguards or process controls in place to prevent the transmission of a false alert.” The FCC will focus on needed steps to prevent a similar false warning elsewhere, Pai said. “Federal, state, and local officials throughout the country need to work together to identify any vulnerabilities to false alerts and do what’s necessary to fix them.” The regulator also wants to ensure that if similar incidents occur, corrections are issued immediately, he said.

Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and other members of the Hawaii congressional delegation have been closely following the federal and state-level response to the incident since Saturday. Schatz at one point sought “tough and quick accountability” and a “fixed process” for issuing text and broadcast emergency alerts. He earlier tweeted there’s “nothing more important to Hawai‘i than professionalizing and fool-proofing this process.” Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said that “we need to make sure all information released to the community is accurate. We need to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure it never happens again.” House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., believes Congress “must investigate,” tweeting it's “an unforgivable false alarm that took 38 minutes to correct.”

The House and Senate Commerce committees could incorporate questions about the incident into normal FCC oversight activities, a telecom lobbyist said. “I’m sure there will also be letters” from members of Congress to Pai “saying ‘I want you to get to the bottom of this’” even though the FCC has already opened an investigation, the lobbyist said. The FCC has limited direct authority over state agencies’ emergency alerts but Congress “is going to be interested in what measures can be taken,” the lobbyist said. Senate Commerce is “reviewing the incident and evaluating potential next steps,” a spokesman said.

Federal authorities haven’t yet contacted Hawaii broadcasters, but Leonard said he has been in touch with Schatz’s office and state EAS officials. A meeting of the state EAS body is being convened over the matter as well, Leonard said.