Hawaii’s false missile alert sent by worker believing attack on US was imminent

Re:Hawaii’s false missile alert sent by worker believing att... by rdtsc on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @01:34PM (#16267680)

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.

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.

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Re:Hawaii’s false missile alert sent by worker believing att... by Psilidae on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:03PM (#16269510)

I can see value in having someone capable of issuing alerts who is geographically _on_ Hawaii, as the potential for dropped communication lines seems problematic.

I don't know enough about military/federal operations to know whether having them handle it would imply keeping operations on the islands, or if they'd literally "centralize" it to somewhere on the continental US.

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