Thought. What if the Emergency alert gets hacked and a fake emergency alert goes out

[shraby]

to all and sundry. It could cause a nationwide panic.

I would venture to guess that the process of hacking has already begun. With the alert notifying all citizens at once there would be no lag time to diffuse the situation.

[octoberlib]

1. something like War of the Worlds. I'm sure Russia's working on it right now.

Trump would have to declare martial law then dictatorship. I have an active imagination.

[CincyDem]

2. I was in Hawaii for the false NK Nuke scare and it was total panic & mayhem...

...imagine that on a national scale.

I think it was contained pretty quickly via twitter and other communications from various reps, but still...it was a mess. Maybe not everywhere but in the Maui hotels, there were people calling their kids leaving last will and testament kind of instructions. Insane.

[SDJay]

3. I Was Just Thinking

about that. We were on Kauai for it. It was one of the most bizarre 15-20-minute periods of my life.

We never fully bought into the 'this is it' idea, but we were headed down that road when they started sending out corrective tweets and the like.

Not hard to imagine a lot of fuckery happening with this idiotic idea.

[CincyDem]

12. So I'm sitting out on a beach lounger up on a deck from before sunrise...no phone...nothing...

...all of a sudden people are running up from the beach, carrying (dragging in some cases) kids. It's like 8am local time or something like that, I'm 2/3rds asleep and I'm thinking tsunami (?), shark (?).

Some guy is standing on the wall looking out over the beach working his phone so I walk over to him and ask what's going on.

In a few seconds, he looks at me like he's seen a ghost and screams (I'm like 2 feet away), he screams "Oh my god, NK has launched nukes at us...they'll be here in 15 minutes". and with that he jumps off the wall and starts sprinting to the hotel at a speed no man of his size should move.

So I stood there for a while, contemplated my existence and decided that if this chit is really hitting the fan, I should probably be with the boss so I went up to find Ms. CincyDem and we headed down to the ballroom with everyone else. It was a zoo. There were more grandmas in their nightgowns than you can shake a stick at. And the crying. Calling is a zoo is kind.

What I remember most about that day was that 3-4 years ago, with BHO we would have said "meh - operator error" and gone on with our morning. With DJT we said "ya know - he just might have f'cked this up to the point of nuclear war"...then we went on with our day.

[SDJay]

13. Good Stuff. I Was Hung Over.

I was up LATE with my brother-in-law partying like a rock star. My wife had given me that morning off from parenting our then 4-month-old twin boys and our then 5-year-old girl. I was pissed when she woke me up so early.

"WTF is going on? Someone better be on fire!" I said.

"Um... potentially worse," she said, and handed me her phone. I saw the alert, sat up, rubbed my eyes and looked again... yep, it looked real. I grabbed my phone and saw it there too.

Funny you mentioned Dump, because the first thing I said after seeing it was, "Well, it took barely a year for that fucking moron to end the world, I guess."

I got up and grabbed a beer from the fridge. Why not? We were all going to be French fries in 15 minutes anyway.

I started reading about this, and the TV was on, and I was confused about why not much was being said.

I was scouring Twitter and starting to think that yeah, this actually could be happening. A few minutes later we got the 'all-clear' and I went immediately back to bed.

[marble falls]

4. Bigger thought: what if President Obama or President Hillary Clinton had come ...

up with this stupid idea???

[shraby]

5. After the extent of Russian hacking has been exposed, I would have the same thought.

It could cause big-time mayhem.

[mythology]

6. Um, awkwardly Obama is the one who signed off on this

[marble falls]

9. !. Only because nobody anticipated a President Trump. 2. Even the RW never ...

anticipated a President Trump, they'd never have supported it under a President Clinton or a President Obama.

[mythology]

7. What if the existing system had been hacked?

Or the Amber Alert or the weather one? This isn't a new system.

[Hoyt]

8. It's not a bad idea, but who is going to listen to trump or admin directives?

[sarisataka]

10. You are right

Imagine if someone hacks the EMS, they could put out fake storm warnings. Or hacks the 911 system and sends emergency personnel out all over in fake calls. Or hacks the military and orders the army to invade a state under the pretense of training and has the military round up thousands, turning Walmarts into prisons.

The risks are far too great. We will be much safer if we shut down all emergency communication systems.

[brooklynite]

11. Did we lose the entire population of Hawaii in a missle panic?

People don't react that quickly. The Government would have time to respond.

[Tiggeroshii]

14. Or what if somebody presses the wrong button accidentally and instead of hawaii, everybody

Thinks a ballostic missile is about to hit them and the entire country is in a state of panic for 15 minutes?