The problem isn’t the alert itself, it’s that cops put Twitter links in the alert. If you want to see what the car, suspect, or victim look like, you need to be able to access Twitter.
Police have been doing this for years now. It’s a fast a cheap way to microblog without buying or supporting something with the city’s budget.
“Half a century” is the big challenge in that sentence. The Manhattan project started in 42 and Japan was bombed in 45.
They also had near slips with the press and foreign espionage happening within the project. That would’ve been real tough to keep secret from the public for decades.
It’s not the size of the organization, it’s the size of the team with a particular piece of information, and the monetary or moral pressure to release a particular piece of information.
Also, the NSA famously has had leakers. The biggest and most notable being Snowden in 2013.
If you’ve ever tried to coordinate more than 50 people to do a thing, you quickly realize why people refer to management and leadership jobs as “herding cats.”
If someone gave me the option of faking the moon landing or going to the moon, I’d gladly strap a submarine to a missile.
It be fucking impossible to coordinate hundreds of people on the world’s biggest secret, then make them and their families abide by media training for half a century.
My only problem is that matter support usually means “basic functionality” for your IOT devices. On / off, hot / cold, etc. You typically still have to create an account with a proprietary app to configure more nuanced things. For example, the shape and soil characteristics of my irrigation zones, the motion section trigger areas of my cameras, the fade and trim setting of my light switches, etc.
I don’t know how you sort this mess out. I’d love to never install a 3rd party app for IOT stuff, but I don’t see that happening anytime remotely soon.