Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano Explains the New Terror Threat Warning System
New System Replaces Color Coded Terror Alerts
Politico 44
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano unveiled a new terrorism alert system on Wednesday, which will eliminate the Bush-era color-coded chart that had been criticized as ineffective.
The new National Terrorism Advisory System, which will go into effect on April 26, aims to provide details of potential threats, like locations, types of transportation or infrastructure affected, actions taken in response, and recommendations on how the public should respond. It will categorize alerts in one of two ways: “elevated threat” or “imminent threat.”
“We face a consistent and evolving threat — part of it is international and part of it now is homegrown – and we have to deal with both,” Napolitano said on MSNBC Wednesday morning. “We want people to be safe and want people to help participate in our own safety by being better informed and better prepared. That’s part of the reason have moved beyond the color-code system now.”
The department plans to use social media to alert people about potential threats, and the warnings will tend to be specific to a region, Napolitano said.
“That old analogy about connecting the dots … that’s not the problem anymore,” she said. “The problem is that we have so many dots coming in — what’s the pattern, what’s the trend and what are the tactics that we need to anticipate?”
The new system will gather information from many sectors of the intelligence community, including the FBI and the CIA, Napolitano said. “They will be helping digest the data and making recommendations to me about whether we have something specific enough, credible enough, imminent enough that we need to put out an alert,” she said.
Announcing the change in New York, Napolitano cited a “significant day as we continue to build and strengthen our homeland security architecture.” She also thanked the city’s transit agency for creating the “See Something, Say Something” campaign, which she said brought attention to having ordinary people be “aware of their own surroundings.”
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Wild Thing’s comment……..
“We face a consistent and evolving threat — part of it is international and part of it now is homegrown …”
Hello Janet…..part of is this so-called “administration!!!!!
Black Panthers with billy clubs at a polling place, no threat.
Am I the only one who noticed about a month ago Napolitano had work done on her face and her voice pronunciation of words had improved? I knew then that somehting was in the works, but I never imagined it would be her recording videos. What a scam and a sham this government is! This whole security thing is just preparing us for getting searched anytime anywhere because they want to. They let middle easterners go through all the time with no check. Get real people, this is not legal
The color coding system has been used by the military for decades to assign threat levels on military installations. It’s too bad civilians had such a hard time distinguishing what the four different colors meant.
Sure, part of the threat is homegrown; an army major who killed 12 at Fort Hood who was born and raised in the US.
Well Janet certainly explains the evoloving threat environment. Wake me when they replace Janet with a human bering.