Fun Size Bytes

Redesigning Homeland Security's Advisory System

kurafire:

I disagree with Kurt Andersen on his conclusion (slide 5):

“There are really only two states of affairs that are worth signaling in this graphic way: Caution, which should be the perpetual default…

(I haven’t read the original article, just Faruk’s post here…)

The problems with this “system” are two-fold:

1. As Ron White says, his mother doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do differently when the security level changes.

2. No administration will ever let it go to “0” or “green” or blank or whatever “all clear” means, because if they did and something happened, the other party would mention it at every single chance they had before the next election.

“The potential for terrorism” is not something you can gauge like the likelihood of a forest-/wild- fire based on things like temperature, humidity, rainfall, etc. But even if it was, we’ve all seen how suddenly and unexpectedly fires can occur.

It’s not like DEFCON where we indicate our readiness for action where 5 is “peacetime” and 1 is “war is expected any moment.”

It’s a meter for what we think other people are going to do, and how we think their actions will effect us.

Well, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

I’ve worked in offices where I couldn’t predict the mood from one day to the next. Sure there were some times when you expected things to be good or bad, busy or slow, but there are always going to be unexpected events, some of which could shake things up for quite a long time.

So what choices do you really have? Absent any clear indicator warnings, the chart either goes to “all clear as far as know” or stays at “be alert!” forever. Politics being what they are, I don’t think we’ll ever go below “Be Alert!” so we put up signs on major bridges that say “See something, say something.” It’s not a bad sentiment, but it’s a constant reminder that something might happen at any moment.

We know that’s true, September 11th proved to Americans what much of the world had already known: terrorists can strike at any moment.

But isn’t causing other people to live in a constant state of some level of fear the whole point of terrorism?

In Freakonomics they talked about the KKK (America’s original locally grown terrorists?) and the use of lynching to keep African Americans living in fear. Having gone back and looked at the actual number of people who were lynched, there were very few (let’s not mistake this for saying that any number above ZERO is acceptable). It was the threat of lynching, the danger of it, which gave the KKK its power, more power than it deserved.

“If we do X, then the terrorists win” hasn’t been used as anything but a punchline for years, but it seems to me that the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) has been fairly meaningless in the past 8 years or however long it has existed. THAT it exists, however, is a symbol of our attempts to protect ourselves from the terrorists. IF it actually served some purpose, maybe I could accept it as useful. But I’m not sure that’s true. I’m not sure how it could move beyond being a new generation’s version of Duck and Cover.

“Duck and Cover” was an attempt to make people feel prepared in the event of a nuclear bomb going off. It is highly unlikely that “duck and cover” would offer any real protection, and it’s debatable whether or not you’d even have time to duck and cover in the event of a nuclear blast. Did “duck and cover” make people feel safer, despite being a fairly inept and meaningless defense? Or did it remind them that every moment they lived at risk of dying a fiery death?

I don’t know, but eventually we stopped doing “duck and cover” drills in schools. It wasn’t because the threat of nuclear war went away, just that it seemed less likely. I wonder how many people fought to keep the drills. Was there ever an announcement that the drills would no longer be done, or did one school after another just stop doing them?

Whatever that process was, I’m starting to wonder if the HSAS was ever anything more than a PR piece used by the government to try to give its citizens some sense of participation and information. And I don’t say “PR piece” here entirely negatively. I’m not sure what else they could have done, and they were trying to do something which, at the time, might have helped some people feel a little more informed, a little more secure.

I just think that time has passed. Maybe it’s time to retire it, and leave the DEFCON scale to the military, and if there’s some actual reason for us to be on some sort of “heightened alert” (for reasons other than a national holiday or large gathering of people at the Super Bowl, etc), just put out word through the media.

But living in a default state of “Caution” sounds like living in a default state of “Worry.” I’d rather live in a default state of “the chances of me being killed in a terrorist attack are less than me winning the lottery” or whatever the extremely-unlikely odds are. I’m much more likely to get in a car accident. So I wear my seatbelt, and I look both ways, and I try to drive reasonably, but I don’t spend all of my time behind the wheel worried about being in an accident (except when I’m in Chicago or NYC :-) because it would ruin my enjoyment of driving.

It’s not that I deny or ignore the possibility of being in a car accident. It’s that I refuse to let the possibility of a car accident be the default state of mind in which I drive.

I refuse to let worry be the default state of mind in which I live. I’ve tried it before. It was miserable. I was miserable. Misery dripped onto those around me. Are there times when I worry? Fuck yeah. Regularly. But I try to get back to a place of enjoying life.