How Can We Adjust Ourselves To Growing Terror Threat
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The age of terror has seen many changes over the past years, with a prominent example being the phenomenon that most of us are still finding hard to comprehend – ISIS, and with it the lone-wolf terror. In order to ensure a proper response to the threat of changing terror, a senior at the Department of Homeland Security ordered that the national terrorism alert system be examined and changed, if needed, due to rising threat of terror originating from inside the US.
The U.S. has never used the National Terrorism Alert System, a two-level system that replaced the color-coded terrorism alerts installed after 9/11 to spread the word about potential attacks from abroad. But after a “homegrown violent extremist” killed five service members in Chattanooga, Tenn. — and amid the expectation of more terrorist-inspired attacks — the Department of Homeland Security wants to revise and jumpstart the system.
“I’ve asked our folks to consider whether we should revise that system to accommodate how the terrorism threat has evolved,” DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said. “That review is underway now.” Instead of the post-9/11 green-to-red progression, the NTAS has just two states of alert. An “elevated threat” means there is a credible threat against the United States. An “imminent threat” alerts the public to just that, “a credible, specific, and impending terrorist threat against the United States.”
Under the old system, DHS took much criticism that the nation was being held on constant orange alert for no good reason. But the department has since been criticized for never issuing any alerts. U.S. intelligence and national and local law enforcement officials have opted to keep the public in the dark to avoid panic with a sudden terrorism alert.
The review is the latest of several new security measures DHS enacted since last year to address the growing threat of terrorism that originates within the borders of the U.S., rather than from abroad. “There is a new reality,” Johnson said at AUSA. “The global terrorist threat has evolved from terrorist-directed to terrorist-inspired attacks.”
Johnson also highlighted the department’s focus on stopping foreign fighters from entering the US and was asked regarding the capability of DHS to handle the coming influx of 10,000 Syrian refugees due to arrive at the US in the coming year. Johnson said the department has improved its ability to vet them using intelligence databases while meeting international commitments with the United Nations. “We’ve gotten better at that over the last couple of years, but it is a time-consuming process and one of the challenges that we’ll have is that we’re not going to know a whole lot about the individual refugees that come forward.”
