“Elevated” and “imminent” have replaced orange and the rest of the coded colors as the words that will alert Americans to terrorist threats. Fewer choices, less fodder for late-night comedians, but what is the real impact of the change?
The change was announced in late January and state and local governments, airports and other transportation hubs were given 90 days to make the transition to the new alert system. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security rolled out the system to the general public.
Under the system, an elevated threat “warns of a credible terrorist threat against the United States,” and an imminent threat “warns of a credible, specific, and impending terrorist threat” against the country. Americans will be able to subscribe to a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) and follow the government alerts on Facebook, Twitter, or through an email alert system.
So, is the system an improvement? That remains to be seen. In one sense, any system that replaces the benighted color coded threat system is an improvement. And the new NTAS may be little more than a politically expedient way-station for the government as it walks away from an alert system that is no longer sustainable but that cannot be eliminated completely without political fallout.
It is also possible that the NTAS may actually prove useful to the public. If the new alert system is more specific than the earlier color-coded system in defining the threat it is to be effective. The system has that promise – DHS says it will try to give threat information that is narrowly targeted at a geographic region or a specific sector of the economy, and that’s a good thing. It will be of great value to know, for example, that there is an elevated threat to, say, dams in the Rockies. It’s of far less value to know that the overall threat to the country is elevated.
One other clear improvement is planned. Each new NTAS alert will come with a built in sunset provision that says how long the alert lasts. No longer will we have to live with expired alerts that linger simply because nobody has the authority to end them. So in the end, NTAS will give us something good: At a minimum we should stop hearing the incessant announcements at the airport that “DHS has determined that the current threat advisory level is orange.” What could be bad about that?
