New Shoes

I bought a new pair of shoes this weekend. That's not particularly noteworthy, except that I noticed an interesting characteristic about them this morning. What I realized is that my choice of shoes was actually influenced by al Quaeda. Seriously. I bought a pair of slip on dress shoes because I have to take my shoes off twice a week for the TSA, because some Muslim extremists hijacked some planes back in 2001. Upon further investigation though, there's a bit more to it than that.

When you travel as much as I do, you notice the small things. For example, the PA system at Lexington airport (formerly and more appropriately known as Bluegrass Field) tells me every Monday and Thursday that "The Homeland Security threat level has been raised to orange, please be aware of the increased threat." In contrast, at ATL, CVG, and SFO, the PA says "The Homeland Security threat level is orange." There are a couple small differences there, but enough to get me curious.

In reality, the national threat level is at yellow (elevated). New York City has been at Orange since the inception of the advisory system (March 12, 2002). The threat level for the airline sector is at Orange, and THIS is the reason we all must remove our shoes. If it were yellow, for example, you would be allowed to walk through the metal detector with your shoes on, and you would only be asked to remove them if they set off the detector. There are blue and green levels to the scale, but they have never been used. Nice.

Back to that PA announcement though - especially the parts about "has been raised" and "increased threat." In fact that threat level for the airline sector was raised to orange in August of 2006. Overall, the national threat level has been raised to high (orange) five times. So they raise it, they tell you "we've raised it" like a broken record, and, statistically, they never lower it. Now the obvious question: why do we have a threat level advisory system that appears to do nothing more than scare people? Where are the statistics to back it up, such as "we raised it to orange because of specific intelligence about a terror threat, and we successfully thwarted 5 planned attacks by doing so?"

The simple answer: because he's the decider.