Department of Homeland Security

After reading the case study and viewing the Homeland Security document, I don't feel my perception of the whole system has changed. The bureaucracy that permeates every aspect of our government has been something I've always been cynical about.

My main problem with the entire idea of a color-coded system, which supposedly describes the threat level to our country, is that it's a waste of our country's resources. When the nation's threat level is raised from yellow (elevated) to orange (high) what does that really mean?

The answer is that it could mean different things for different places. But, that is the flaw of the system. The people in the D/FE metroplex may be wasting our resources on threats that don't exist for our area.

And, while I do like the idea of a unified message being sent out, I also think that it's impractical for a country of our size to treat a threat the same in New York City as we do a threat in Topeka, Kansas.

However, I can see the other side of this as well. The idea of localizing a threat to a specific area would cause mass panic in that area, which is not something a city should have to deal with if the threat was false in the first place.

My life, and the lives of many other people, changes very little, if any, when the threat level is raised from gaurded to elevated. While I don't believe that the current system is working, I also don't have a respectable alternative.

But, being the cynical person that I am, I feel the current system will stay in place until the government finds a better way, at least in the eyes of the citizens, to pick and choose the information that is getting out to us.

Brandon Brooks