Threat Levels and Dangerous Biscuits

I was rather entertained a few weeks ago when I read that former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said politics was never a factor in determining whether the nation's color-coded terror-alert level should be raised.

Chertoff was made his remarks in response to former GOP lawmaker and Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge who served as the nation's first Homeland Security secretary and who first made, and then backed away from, a claim that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to raise the threat level before the 2004 election, and how he opposed it.

A reason for my amusement is that for one, politics always enters decisions to raise or lower the risk state of an endeavor, be it a project, program or national threat level. No one may want to acknowledge it, but like an elephant sitting in the corner of the room, it can't be totally ignored. In fact, it is a legitimate factor that has to be considered: any risk assessment that does not taken into account politics by definition is fatally flawed.

Politics only becomes a worrisome issue when it trumps everything other factor in a risk assessment - i.e., politics moves from being the elephant sitting quietly in the corner to becoming a raging behemoth stamping into dust every other factor of consideration.

The current DHS flap over new border checkpoint construction stimulus-related projects where apparently low-volume crossings get priority over busier and higher-priority ones is an example which looks like Politics trumping common sense - anther important factor to consider in a risk assessment.

Therefore, I sincerely hope that Mr. Chertoff misspoke when he said, "Politics never entered into raising the alert during my tenure in any way, shape or form."

In fact, I'll wager that not raising the threat alert before the election in 2004, if it was indeed considered, was not done precisely because of politics. To do so would lead to wide-spread public demands as to why it was being raised at that specific time and on what grounds.

One real criticism of the threat alert system is that it is rarely raised - and never lowered below orange. The alert system was designed, according to Homeland Security Presidential Directive-3 that authorized it, " ... to create a common vocabulary, context, and structure for an ongoing national discussion about the nature of the threats that confront the homeland and the appropriate measures that should be taken in response."

If the threat never changes, you don't create much of a dialogue do you?

I would also be willing to wager that the reason that the threat level never changed is directly due to politics. As long as it remains "yellow" (significant risk of terrorist attack) or "orange" for flying (high risk of terrorist attack), you have political cover if such an attack does occur. After all, you said there was a risk.

As London School of Economics professor Michael Power writes in his book, The Risk Management of Everything, for the UK government, risk management has become a means to deflect blame from the government for things going wrong in exactly this way. It is sad to see the same misuse of risk management creeping into governmental decision making here too.

You would like to think that after spending hundreds of billions on homeland defense, and hundreds more fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the claim by the National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair that the intel community is much better at tracking terrorists, etc., that the threat level would have changed back to at least the "guarded" (general risk of terrorist attacks) level by now.

Similarly, never changing threat level doesn't, as Directive 3 also states, "inform and facilitate decisions appropriate to different levels of government and to private citizens at home and at work."

This idea was explored in some detail in an excellent New York Times multimedia opinion piece on the poor design of the alert system itself by writer Kurt Andersen, author of Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America. As Andersen notes, you would be hard pressed to find an average private citizen who makes their decisions based on the current threat level.

In fact, The Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation or BITE, developed by the research company Mindlab International at behest of Rocky, a chocolate biscuit bar, which lists the riskiest British biscuits to eat, does a better job than the current alert system. It identifies, at least, specific risks (for instance, Custard Cream is the riskiest biscuit to eat, whereas the Jaffa cakes pose almost no risk in comparison) which, having seen the number of comments about BITE across the Web, has sparked an ongoing discussion about the nature of the threats that confront eating breakfast and the appropriate measures that should be taken in response.

Hopefully, the current terrorist alert system will change to a three-tier system with "guarded" as being the new "normal" condition as was recommended this week and is not, as Mr. Chertoff says, so ingrained in governmental security procedures that it can't be changed.

If, alas, it is not, I do hope that politics enters into the decision making process about whether to raise the threat alert level, or maybe even lower it.