Get Your Terrorist Alerts on Facebook and Twitter
Colors are so last decade:
The U.S. government’s new system to replace the five color-coded terror alerts will have two levels of warnings elevated and imminent that will be relayed to the public only under certain circumstances for limited periods of time, sometimes using Facebook and Twitter, according to a draft Homeland Security Department plan obtained by The Associated Press.
Some terror warnings could be withheld from the public entirely if announcing a threat would risk exposing an intelligence operation or a current investigation, according to the government’s confidential plan.
Like a carton of milk, the new terror warnings will each come with a stamped expiration date.
Specific and limited are good. Twitter and Facebook: I’m not so sure.
But what could go wrong?
An errant keystroke touched off a brief panic Thursday at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when an emergency message accidentally was sent out saying an “active shooter” was on campus.
The first message was sent on the university’s emergency alert system at 10:40 a.m., reaching 87,000 cellphones and email addresses, according to the university.
The university corrected the false alarm about 12 minutes later and said the alert was caused when a worker updating the emergency messaging system inadvertently sent the message rather than saving it.
The emails are designed to go out quickly in the event of an emergency, so the false alarm could not be canceled before it went out, the university said.
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Petréa Mitchell • April 8, 2011 1:46 PM
Why not Facebook? For some people it’s the only way they get news.
As for the “errant keystroke”, this article has a copy of the e-mail describing the mistake:
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/technology/2011-03-24/ui-emergency-message-mistake.html
The crucial bit:
“The alert sent today was caused by a person making a mistake. Rather than
pushing the SAVE button to update the pre-scripted message, the person
pushed the SUBMIT button. We are working with the provider of the
Illini-Alert service to implement additional security features in the
program to prevent this type of error.”
Ideally, those additional security features involve untangling edit mode from alert mode. Semi-ideally, the quick fixes would be 1) don’t put those buttons next to each other, and 2) reword the labels (“submit” is commonly used as a synonym for “save”). But in actual practice, the change is likely to be an additional dialog asking “Are you sure?”. This is problematic because people tend to click “Yes” to confirm the action they think they are taking, rather than realizing they didn’t initiate they action they wanted.