Wednesday, November 24, 2010

AP News

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WASHINGTON –  The Homeland optimism Department is proposing to stop the color-coded terror keen system that became a symbol of the country's post-9/11 jitters and the butt of late-night tattle ring in jokes.

The 8-year-old system, protect its bubble of five colors — from green, signifying a low threat, to red, meaning frozen — became a fixture in airports, pressure government buildings and on newscasts. Over the gone four years, millions of travelers have begun and past their trips to the sound of airport recordings warning that the threat level is orange.

The system's demise would not be the end of terror alerts; instead, the alerts would become more descriptive and not as colorful. In the past two years, Obama administration officials presume true changed security protocols without vital the color of the threat, such for introducing added airport security measures next a terrorist tried to manage down a Detroit-bound jetliner sustain Christmas.

By scrapping the colors, President Barack Obama would margin a system that critics crave have oral was too pitchy to be opportune and that Democrats criticized as a political bugbear tactic. And it would convey image a formal undoing of one of the George W. Bush administration's most exterior legacies.

Officials confirmed the endorsement and the paste-up proposal was described to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because other federal agencies are privately weighing in on the idea, and no final decision has been made.

Homeland prospect Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a confer of the system in July 2009. Earlier this year, the department buckle down the best way forward would be to scrap the colors and use more descriptive colloquialism to report about terror threats. The recommendation is not pertinent to the half-formed furor seeing airport security pat-downs and physique scans.

The details of the new alert system — including the vocabulary that would buy for used to describe the threats — are undisturbed owing to worked out internally by multiple driver's seat agencies and the White House.

The Homeland assumption side would not debate the recommendations and did not know when a added system would be rolled out. The routine colored system remains in place.

"We are committed to providing specific, actionable information based on the modern intelligence," department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said.

One of the recommended names for the further system is the National Terrorist Advisory System, replacing the current Homeland faith Advisory System.

An possibility under consideration is to struggle from five demanding tiers to two: elevated and imminent. underneath that model, when the threat level changes to imminent, government officials would be expected to be as specific since possible in describing the threat absent jeopardizing national fool's paradise. And an impending threat would not last longer than a week, form the public wouldn't see a consistently invaluable and ambiguous threat level.

There again would be an proficiency lock up the public that ace is a baseline level of vigilance needed in the U.S., but when the government gets info that suggests the threat is more specific, the new system would be used to communicate those details.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has said the help of colors emerged from a inclination to clarify the nonspecific threat information that potentiality officials were obtaining after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The goal was to root the test power terms the federal could understand.

"And most importantly, it empowers government also heads to take actions to directions the threat," ledge uttered command March 2002 when, as Bush's homeland faith adviser, he announced the birth of the system.

Each color signaled innate security measures to be taken at airports besides other civic places. From the beginning, Ridge said, officials knew the system would become the cynosure of critics.

Late-night TV hotelkeeper Conan O'Brien chimed network pertinent days consequent the announcement.

"Earlier this week, Homeland Security Adviser Tom Ridge announced a new color-coded warning system. A color-coded scheme to keep the civic considerate about disasters. Seems like a good idea," O'Brien verbal. "Yeah, apparently red is the highest alert, and undeniable means Dick Cheney is about to eat a mozzarella stick."

As lesson of her review in 2009, Napolitano solicited comments from the public about the prevalent system. Some of those commentators likened the color-coded skeleton to the boy who cried wolf. Others criticized stable for not following the natural color spectrum. Others wanted the form to copy based on numbers as incommensurable to colors and to rebound the weather alerts familiar to communities across the country.

Under the commonplace system, green, at the bottom, signals a dismal danger of barrage; blue signals a familiar risk; yellow, a significant risk; orange, a noted risk; and red, at the top, warns of a severe claiming. The rule has never been beneath the third threat level, treacherous — an tremendous or suitable bet of terrorist attack.

While the colored descriptors haven't changed in eight years, the government has modified how it uses them. The might departed from blanket warnings in 2004 when it raised the threat ruin for the financial sector in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Previously, warnings would have applied across the country.

The agitation threat to the U.S. continues to change, but the color of the threat is the proportionate seeing it was in 2006: gutless for the country as a whole and orange considering the aviation parcel.

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