Lovely.
L
If they find the culprit, he should sit in jail a minimum of 10 years. The millions of people who are in tornado country depend on the sirens to save their lives. It is not a joke to mess with that warning system.
I was a newsman in Dallas at the most popular radio station in 1971.
I was alone in the newsroom on
February 20.
On that morning at 9:33 AM Eastern time, Telex machines in every broadcast station in America that was part of the EBS suddenly rang urgently with ten successive bells–a signal only used for an imminent EBS warning.
It then spit out a sheet reading, “This is an Emergency Action Notification directed by the president. Normal broadcasting will cease immediately.” The telex included the code word, “Hatefulness.”
I opened up an envelope that contained a verifying word for the code word, and there it was. Hatefulness.
Trying to remain calm, I went into the control room and showed Weaver Morrow, the morning DJ, the message. He turned pale.
Dallas is just a stones throw from Carswell AFB, a SAC base for nuke armed B52s, and ideal nuke target.
It was a weekend and over half of the city was listening to the station at any given moment. We decided not to air the announcement we were ordered by the government to broadcast because of the panic it could and probably would create.
We called station management and they agreed. We believed if a nuclear attack had already happened somewhere on US soil or one could be pending here and possibly any minute, why create chaos. We just waited for the late morning flash of an exploding sunrise at Carswell to the west of us.
About 15 minutes later the AP and UPI telex machines printed in capitals that the message was a mistake
People were doing that with tape recorders and old taxi radios back in the 70s. Much easier now because you can buy the radios for $25 instead of having to know anything.
Wait til they send out the test signal every week or month, record the tones, then play them back at will. Trivial.
This does not sound very secure. I think they were using an old paging type system to set these off. All you have to do is transmit on the correct frequency and generate the right tone. This could be done by someone who copied the signal the last time it was used or found the documentation somewhere.
This is the same technology that has been used since the 60’s or 70’s to let Fire and Rescue squads know that there was a call. This one used the general alarm code instead of the tones for a certain station. Think of the old TV show Emergency and that distinctive sound was a pager tone that set off the station buzzer.
Why do they design and implement systems that have so little security? Anybody can transmit all the possible codes, and eventually hit the right one. Like voice mail systems with a four digit code. Just send all 10,000 numbers and you’ll hit it.
(Design the system so a failed attempt makes you wait 30 seconds. The third failed attempt 1 minute, and so on. Use a really long code word.)
Just jihadies testing defenses. But it’s Dallas they’ve got much bigger fish to fry. Like tax-payer funded trips for the elected to the hottest vacation spots to study something.