State Rep. Gene Ward wanted Gov. David Ige to release “security tapes” from the morning of Jan. 13 when the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency issued a false missile attack alert, but a spokesman for the agency says there are no such audio or video recordings.
Ward (R, Kalama Valley-Queen’s Gate-Hawaii Kai) acknowledged he was unsure whether security tapes even existed, but on Jan. 25 he issued a public statement urging Ige to release recordings of the events that day in the HI-EMA facility.
“The people of Hawaii deserve to see the events that led to those frightful thirty-eight minutes,” Ward wrote. “For security reasons, faces can easily be blurred.”
HI-EMA issued a statewide cellphone alert Jan. 13 warning of an incoming ballistic missile, which caused public panic, and took 38 minutes to cancel the false alarm.
“Even the 7-Eleven stores have a total footage of everything that’s going on,” Ward said in an interview. “Any office of that importance, that is security-based, would have that. As for its own operations and/or a breach of security or a breach of protocol, I believe it would be a common technological part of their establishment.”
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser filed a formal request under the state’s Uniform Information Practices Act for video or audio recordings of events in the HI-EMA operations facility that morning, but HI-EMA spokesman Lt. Col. Chuck Anthony said no such recordings exist.
Anthony said the security cameras at HI-EMA’s Birkhimer Tunnel are facing outward and are used to see who is approaching the facility, not to watch employees perform their duties.
“There had never been a need, I guess, to have Big Brother-type cameras looking at the employees,”
Anthony said. “Should we all have cameras looking over our shoulder for every move that we make? I don’t know if that’s kind of video system that should be in place.”
While 7-Elevens and gas stations do routinely use cameras to record video, that is for security purposes and not to look at the employees, Anthony said.
