Wednesday 20 February 2019

hatefulness/impish

On this day at this time in 1971, an erroneous Emergency Action Notification was dispatched to US broadcasters, directing stations to cease regularly scheduled programming immediately at the request of the government but no reason was given.
Listen to WCCO serving Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota area air silence here. The title refers to the codewords to give and them belay that order, and the bungle with the false alarm (the operator picked the wrong tape) revealed a lot endemic faults with the system—including that due to the fact the message coincided with a regularly scheduled systems test and many choose to ignore it and additional safeguards were added.