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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?

1 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A programmers approach by ColdWetDog · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Where did this article come from?

    It's not vaguely tech related.

    It's not 'on line'.

    It doesn't run Linux, it doesn't even run Windows.

    It has nothing to do with Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer or even Larry Ellison.

    There is not a peep about SCO.

    You can't hack it.

    I can't even come up with any humorous take-offs of the topic save a couple of stale 'In Soviet Russia" references.

    kdawson didn't do it.

    It has nothing to do with Nomads, memory or size.

    Maybe someone can find a spelling mistake or two.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!