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US May Issue Terror Alerts On Facebook, Twitter
CWmike writes "The US government may start issuing terror alerts using Facebook and Twitter, which were thrust again in the spotlight recently as lifelines in Japan. An AP report Thursday, based on a 19-page draft of the plan that the news service obtained, said DHS is working to overhaul the current color-coded terror alert system. 'The new terror alerts would ... be published online using Facebook and Twitter 'when appropriate,' the AP reports, 'but only after federal, state and local government leaders have already been notified.' Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at the Yankee Group, said the government entrusting something as critical as terrorist alerts to Facebook and Twitter shows how important social networking sites have become to people's lives. 'There are hundreds of millions of people using Facebook and Twitter. For many of them, it's their primary communication tool,' Kerravala said. 'That means it's a great way to get information to a massive number of people. Maybe the best.'"
The problem with terror alerts is that they are vague.
Even if they gave us more specifics, there's no associated reasonable response to them.
They look sort of like DEFCON levels, but they're not. DEFCON levels signal that it's time for specific groups to perform certain actions. At DEFCON 4 intelligence guys are activated and base security goes up. At DEFCON 3 you're organizing the troops and starting to make active preparations for war. And so on.
The terror alerts are useless. Let's say they give one that's pretty specific: San Jose is now at Red for this week. Does the SJPD set up inspection checkpoints for trucks? Does ATC divert all flights from SJC to SFO? Do they deploy guards to protect the reservoirs from poisoning? Are ANY specific actions indicated? If not, then all you're going to have is random fucknuts getting scared when they see a group of more than 3 of any ethnic minority.
The dumbest display I ever saw of this was a sign at a colo data center we used indicating that we were at level Orange. They weren't doing anything differently (just the same marginally acceptable security procedures as always). But they're a security checkpoint, and terror alerts have something to do with security, so they put up a sign.