Homeland Security Drops Color-Coded Terror Alerts

Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that the Homeland Security Department is poised to end its five-tiered, color-coded terrorism warning system, a post-Sept. 11 endeavor that has been called too vague to be useful and has been mostly ignored or mocked by the public. The domestic security advisory system was created in 2002 under then-Secretary Tom Ridge and in 2004, the department began assigning color threat levels to general targets such as aviation, financial services and mass transit. However the Department hasn't changed the alert level in four years, even after the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 and the alert level has only been elevated to red once, on Aug. 10, 2006, when British police disrupted a plot to detonate liquid explosives on airliners. Although it is unknown what, if anything, will replace the color-coded alerts, a senior Homeland Security official, who did not want to speak on the record about a decision still under review, says that 'the goal is to replace a system that communicates nothing.'" Can't we just re-use the big DefCon displays from Wargames?

Comments

Re:Obsolete because we will always be at Orange Al

[MBCook]

It's Blakley's Law:

"Every public alert system's status indicator rises until it reaches its disaster imminent setting and remains at that setting until it is retired from service."

Re:Obsolete because we will always be at Orange Al

[gstoddart]

Obsolete because we will always be at Orange Alert

Yes, this is the problem.

The last time flew into Denver from Canada, they kept saying over the loudspeaker in the airport that we were at Threat Level Orange. I assumed this was something new and that I should brace for even worse security.

When I asked my US counterparts what was up, they basically said the same thing ... they've been at Threat Level Orange (it sounds much more official with the caps) for most of the last decade, and that they've stopped listening to it -- pretty much the whole country. In fact, they joked about it because it had ceased to be meaningful in any way. It seems to have become a perpetual state from which nobody will ever be moved. I fear, as you say, they would never allow us to go back to normal, because they'd have to give up their new-found control.

We have always been at war with Oceana (or is that us? I get so confused).

Re:Lies and damned lies

[winwar]

"Simple, we go to Def Con 5!"

We already are at DefCon 5.

Please turn in your Geek card now.

Re:Obsolete because we will always be at Orange Al

[amRadioHed]

Actually that's not funny if you read the post. He is contrasting the WHO flu warnings which actually work to the public alert systems like the DHS color alerts which don't. That the avian flu warning has gone down since his post while the DHS alert is still at orange (for flights) backs up his point exactly.

Re:Obsolete because we will always be at Orange Al

[Lanteran]

Oceana is the Americas, Australia, GB and shifting territory around the equator. Eurasia is- Eurasia minus china, plus the shifting territory. Eastasia is china, japan, the pacific that's not oceana and shifting territories.