Homeland Security Drops Color-Coded Terror Alerts 183
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?
Re:Replacement (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obsolete because we will always be at Orange Al (Score:1, Interesting)
What's humorous is that the avian flu, which this guy cites, is actually down to a 3, from a 5 when his post was written.
Re:Obsolete because we will always be at Orange Al (Score:3, Interesting)
Stop winging.
At "green" condition in the days when I was living in Brezhnev's Soviet Union at the age of 10 (year 4 in their school system) I was supposed to know all the first aid stuff, be able to disassemble an AK47, service it and reassemble it in under 3 minutes, know how to use a gas mask, shoot at least 70+ score (1-10 additive, 10 shots) with a sport .22 or an air rifle as well as know all civil defence codes. I left around that time, however based on what I was told by my ex-classmates it actually got worse during Andropov's days with kids at the age of 12-13 being trained to use AK and PK for real and drills in schools.
The modern western world has not seen what a "forever war" means just yet. It has a long way to go to that and even longer to get to the Stalin's "war against the Trust" of the 1930-es.
It also is yet to see the real effect on the population of "not giving a f*ck". We are still far off from the days of "Brezhnev's despair". We are getting there though. It looks like some of the candidates to rule the biggest powers of the western world are demonstrating his educational level and IQ.
No Emergency Broadcast System Alert 9/11/2001 (Score:5, Interesting)
I also note that on 9/11/2001 there were no Emergency Broadcast System alerts issued, even in NYC, or in DC, as both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were violently attacked. Despite several generations of Americans being trained that such an attack would be followed by such an alert, "in the event of an actual emergency".
I wonder if those nuke warheads even work.