Terror alerts run risk of crying wolf

On May 20, when the nation went to Code Orange - the second-highest level in the national terror alert system - the US Capitol and the sidewalk in front of the White House remained open to visitors.

District of Columbia police stuck with eight-hour shifts, not the 12-hour tours they had worked during previous orange alerts. There was no run on duct tape at Home Depot, reflecting the collective public shrug that seemed to greet the latest warnings of possible impending terrorism, dubbed "Orange Lite."

The nation's capital had gone to a "lower level of elevated alert," local authorities explained, because of the lack of any specific threat against Washington. The nation is back down to Code Yellow, the middle of the five-tier alert system, but few people noticed when news of the change was announced Friday.

Fifteen months after the color-coded alert scheme was introduced, experts on terrorism and those on the front lines of protecting public safety are grateful that there have been no attacks on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. But this stretch of suspenseful calm, punctuated by government warnings of possible attacks that don't occur, risks what analysts call a "crying wolf syndrome," in which the public and even first responders lower their guard.

"Here's the difficulty: One color code is trying to give us too much information," says Randall Larsen, a senior fellow at the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security in northern Virginia. "If we go from yellow to orange, the threat of an attack is higher. But is that the threat of a small car bomb or a nuclear weapon? I'm going to worry about one much more than the other."

In reality, says Mr. Larsen, we live in a two-color world, yellow and orange. Code Red will mean an attack is under way, and the two lower levels are politically infeasible. All of which leads to speculation that the alert system is, in part, a means by which the government can protect itself from public criticism in the event of another attack.

Even if the orange alerts are largely met with indifference by the public, for safety officials they are still significant.

When the threat level was raised to orange by the federal government, state officials put California Highway Patrol officers on 12-hour shifts, instead of their regular eight-hour workdays, says Tom Marshall, a spokesman for the CHP. "We also set in place more frequent air patrols over power grids, aqueducts, nuclear powers plants, and major bridges," says Mr. Marshall.

Similarly, when the federal government toggled up to Code Orange two weeks ago, Washington D.C. shifted to Level II of its own three-level alert system. Even though the city didn't take all the measures it had taken in previous periods of heightened alert, it still took some precautionary steps such as activating closed-circuit cameras mounted in downtown Washington.

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