Hawaii alert: Employee who sent missile warning reassigned

[Anon-C]

4. The change goes to far and increases the chance...

...that an alert will not be sent in a timely manner or at all in an actual attack.

The problem was not in having a single initiator able to send the alert, the problem was in having this desktop setup as a primary terminal for sending test alerts or alerts at all really.

FEMA should require IPAWS alerting agencies to have a peripheral physical red button with a separate Test button that can only send the test automated alert. Screens are a suboptimal interface for alerting for this very reason, they should be used for message configuration, not for message launch.

By adding another person to the alert chain, without an obvious override readily available to a single operator, Hawaii has increased the time it takes to send an alert and created a point of failure should anything incapacitate one of the two operators.