Drop-down menu used for alerts draws criticism

Techies and the general public are weighing in on the design, logic and layout of the drop-down menu the state employee saw before clicking on the wrong link, leading to the false missile alert sent by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency on Saturday.

Some equated it to community bulletin board craigslist.org, while others called it archaic and outdated in online and social media posts.

HI-EMA spokesman Richard Rapoza sent the Honolulu Star-Advertiser a screen image Tuesday that he said is a “close facsimile” of the menu of options before the state employee but not an actual screenshot.

“We can’t release an actual image of the screen itself for security reasons,” he said. “What we’re asking people to do is reserve judgment. We have a couple of investigations going on right now. We hope the public will let us complete our investigation, complete our review so we can give a complete picture of what happened, so people can look at the real facts of the event and not speculate online.”

Under a bold-face “1. State EOC” is a list of options that includes “DRILL-PACOM (DEMO) STATE ONLY.” That was the link the employee was supposed to have clicked on for the test. Listed farther below is the “PACOM (CDW) — STATE ONLY” link that led to the incoming ballistic missile alert sent to more than a million residents and visitors statewide.

As of Saturday, Rapoza said, a new “False Alarm BMD (CEM) — STATE ONLY” link was added as a mechanism to cancel a false alarm.

“It’s a menu,” he said. “People were suggesting a big, red button. It’s all computerized.”

After clicking on the link, there would be a confirmation message, and the employee had to click “yes.” The menu system has been in development for a while, Rapoza said, with the ballistic missile portion added in the past few months, and is regularly reviewed and updated.

The simulated screen was nevertheless a conversation piece far and wide.

Seattle-based writer Devin Col­dewey posted a story on Techcrunch.com on Tuesday titled “Hawaii’s emergency alert interface looks straight out of the ’90s.”

“Just a jumble of contextless plain links, with drills and tests heedlessly mixed in,” he wrote. “It’s easy to see how this happened. We all click the wrong link now and then, but the consequence isn’t destabilizing an entire state. You can’t hit the back button on a million text messages and broadcast warnings.”

Even U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz weighed in with a tweet Tuesday: “This is not the kind of interface you would expect to see for something this important.”