Discontinuing the simplistic color-coded terror alert system, as Homeland Security officials recently suggested, is a good ideaso long as they don’t replace it with something equally useless.
The familiar, eight-year-old system employs a rainbow of five colors ranging from green (low threat) to red (severe alert) to alert Americans to terrorism threat levels.
The problem is that it is too simple and never changes. Have you been to an airport any time recently when the terror alert level wasn’t orange?
That is all but unusable information. We know there is some danger in flying, but what kind of danger? Travelers are left to their own devices to assess their risk.
When Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano visited with The Post’s editorial board recently, she spoke about the potential of replacing the color-coded terror alert system with actual information. She said people do better with specifics.
The goal, she said, was “not to live in fear but live with information.”
We’ll be interested to see the details of the replacement for the color-coded terror alert system, which has been the punch line for many a late-night talk show joke. The system shouldn’t be one that’s easily manipulated by politics.
“We are committed to providing specific, actionable information based on the latest intelligence,” DHS spokeswoman Any Kudwa said last week.
Depending upon how such a system is set up, it could be useful. The balance that security officials will have to strike is between providing information so people can make informed decisions, and giving too much away to the bad guys.
It is an unenviable task, but an important one. Given the furor over the abrupt introduction of enhanced pat-downs and new screening machines, Homeland Security needs to get this one right.
