Bogus Homeland Alerts Hit the Air
By Kevin Poulsen
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68363,00.html
02:00 AM Aug. 01, 2005 PT
As if Florida didn't have enough to worry about this hurricane season, some
residents of the Sunshine State were alerted to a nonexistent radiological
emergency last Wednesday after a National Weather Service operator
fat-fingered a routine test of the Emergency Alert System.
The EAS, a 1997 replacement for the Cold War-era Emergency Broadcast System,
transmits emergency audio and text information to the public over
weather-alert radios and by interrupting commercial television and radio
broadcasts.
A digital header at the top of every EAS alert dictates how long it's in
effect and how far the message should be propagated. It also identifies the
type of event by a three-letter code.
The Florida gaffe occurred when an operator at the National Weather
Service's Tallahassee forecast office inadvertently entered the code "RHW"
instead of "RWT," keying a radiological hazard warning instead of a required
weekly test.
The warning was broadcast to the Florida panhandle and parts of southern
Georgia, said National Weather Service warning-coordination meteorologist
Walt Zaleski. Fortunately, it failed to cause panic, in part because the
audio accompanying the message still identified it as "only a test," and the
office moved rapidly to quash the false alarm.
"They quickly alerted every radio and television station within their
viewing and listening area that the ID had gone out incorrectly and there
was no emergency to speak of," said Zaleski.
A similar glitch at a Las Vegas radio station a day earlier falsely alerted
cable companies, radio and TV stations in five counties to a national crisis
that didn't exist.
That error occurred Tuesday afternoon when KXTE-FM tried to send out a
message canceling an earlier Amber Alert, and instead transmitted an EAN, or
emergency action notification -- a special code reserved for the president
of the United States to use in the event of a nuclear war or similar extreme
national emergency.
KXTE ("X-treme Radio"), which didn't return phone calls about the incident,
serves as the local primary feed for southern Nevada and parts of
California, which means broadcasters in that region are tuned to the station
24 hours a day to pick up and propagate EAS messages.
Under FCC regulations, those broadcasters must interrupt their regular
programming when they receive an EAN code. But anomalies in the header, the
absence of accompanying audio and the fact that there has never been a
genuine national activation caused stations to question Tuesday's message,
said Nevada EAS chair Adrienne Abbott. "A lot of stations caught it and did
not forward it out," Abbott said.
The error apparently resulted from a hardware problem in the station's EAS
encoder-decoder. "We think that the internal battery had failed, the
programming had scrambled itself," said Abbott.
The FCC is in the midst of a comprehensive review of the EAS network, with
an eye to updating the system for the internet age. But experts say the
public has already developed some immunity to bogus warnings. "Research into
the behavior of warning recipients suggests that a single false alarm,
without corroboration from other credible sources, generally elicits only
limited reaction from the public," a report from the nonprofit Partnership
for Public Warning noted last year.
Carolyn Levering, plans and operations coordinator for the Office of
Emergency Management in Clark County, Nevada, says equipment failure is a
fact of life in a system as complex as the EAS. "There wasn't a lot that
could have been done to avoid it," Levering said.
But the human error behind Florida's false alarm is more easily dealt with.
The National Weather Service said last week that as a result of the
Tallahassee incident, it's adding a confirmation process to its alerting
software nationwide that should make issuing a serious alert at least as
difficult as deleting a folder from a Windows desktop.
"Now when the operator calls up on their computer screen what particular
three-letter ID they'd like to send, another window will pop up and say, 'Do
you really want to issue this radiological hazard warning?'" said Zaleski.
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