[EAS] How to log the Indiana Tornado Warning Error

[David Turnmire]

On 3/7/2014 1:46 PM, Kenyon, Alfred wrote:
> Following an extensive investigation including examination of server logs by the alerting system provider we have found that there is no evidence of hacking or intentional false generation of an alert. It was simply a case where a garbled message was ingested by an alerting system provider and distributed according to the surviving message data header. There is no indication of fault on behalf of the alerting system provider.
>
...
As I recall, the reason why there are three data bursts is precisely to 
detect garbled messages... at least two of the three must match. If my 
math is correct, that is a minimum of 336 bits that must match 336 other 
bits (more if there is more than one county listed).  In this case, 
there were apparently several counties listed, so all the more bits.  
Too late at night for my brain to try to calculate the odds of that 
happening randomly, but I imagine that is pretty long odds.  On the 
other hand, only 24 of those bits represent the event code and perhaps a 
bit less to distinguish between another alert and the TOR.  But any data 
corruption would have to affect ONLY those 24 bits, and not any 
others... and do so in exactly the same fashion for two of the three 
data bursts.   Seems like pretty long odds to me.

I don't recall mention made of whether there was a voice message as part 
of this (as there should be)... and if so... whether that voice message 
was intelligible... and if so... what type of alert did the voice part 
indicate?  Listening to the voice part should give some indication of 
how garbled things were.  At least in the sense of garbled audio.

Still seems like some more info is needed on this.  If it wasn't human 
error, then it seems more likely to be software gone nuts rather than 
some kind of audio interference garbling the message that way.

Dave