Jamie Barnett was quoted in Communications Daily on February 6, 2018, in an article about the House Homeland Security Communications Subcommittee hearing that is likely to mirror a recent Senate Commerce Committee one in focus on the false alarm warning about a possible ballistic missile headed for Hawaii that caused panic.
In remarks to the reporter about the hearing, Mr. Barnett said, "We know more" about the Hawaii incident "than we did at the last hearing." He continued to say that, "Clearly, this was a human error, emphasizing that controls and safeguards were not in place." House Homeland Security will likely "hear about the damage that false alerts do to the efficacy of alerts in general" since they "cause doubt about any future alerts and perhaps complacency."
Barnett said: An "additional tragedy" of the incident "is that it takes away from the highly useful and effective alerts that went out to people in the path of wildfires and hurricanes" in 2017 and this year.
He added that governance of emergency alerts is still "very loose, very distributed necessarily and it is underfunded. The solution to false alerts is to fund better exercises, assessments and controls at the state and local level. There needs to be better oversight that protocols are adopted, personnel trained and exercises evaluated. That takes money, and I do not hear anyone talking about more resources."