Color Bind Color Bind Jacob N. Shapiro and Lessons from the Failed Homeland Dara Kay Cohen Security Advisory System From its inception in 2002, the color-coded terrorist alert system known as the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) has been both the U.S. government’s most visible do- mestic counterterrorism tool and the brunt of endless jokes and derision. Un- derlying these comic insults, however, remain serious questions about the system: Does it work? If not, what are the central problems? And how might these problems be eliminated, or at least mitigated, in an alternative system? In this article, we argue that compliance with a terrorist alert system must be based on conªdence in the value of the information it provides. The HSAS was not designed to generate such conªdence; rather, its designers assumed that the public would trust the national leadership and believe in the utility of the system’s information. Over time, as the system became increasingly perceived as politically manipulated, there was no built-in mechanism to recover lost conªdence, and as a result the HSAS has failed. An effective terrorism alert system has one central task: to motivate actors to take costly protective measures. In the United States, national leaders do not have the statutory authority to order speciªc actions from constituent govern- ments and private industry. Instead, the federal government must convince them that the desired actions are worthwhile. Conditional on an alert being is- sued, these actors must believe that the costs of protection are less than the ex- pected losses of not providing protection. Such beliefs can be generated in one of two ways: the government can share speciªc threat information to motivate protective action, or it can generate enough conªdence in the alert system that its word alone sufªciently increases actors’ beliefs about the probability of an attack that they willingly take the desired actions. The HSAS does not provide enough information to the actors involved and contained no mechanisms to generate conªdence in the system over time. Consequently, it came to be deeply mistrusted. In August 2004 a survey found Jacob N. Shapiro is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Dara Kay Cohen is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University. She wrote this article as a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. The authors thank James Breckenridge, Rudy Darken, Laura Donohue, Lynn Eden, Michael May, Terry Moe, Charles Perrow, Scott Sagan, Paul Stockton, Barry Weingast, and the anonymous re- viewers for their helpful comments and criticism. They are especially grateful to the Center for In- ternational Security and Cooperation for supporting this research. They also wish to thank Jacob Shapiro’s students at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security and the other homeland secu- rity ofªcials who took the time to help them, many of whom asked to remain anonymous. International Security, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2007), pp. 121–154 © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 121 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2007.32.2.121 by guest on 27 September 2021 International Security 32:2 122 that fully 38 percent of likely voters believed that the alerts might be used for political reasons.1 The HSAS had become so widely unpopular that in 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry promised to abolish it if elected.2 While the public derision and scholarly criticism of the HSAS highlight the failure to generate public conªdence in the system, they also contributed to that failure. Once the system began to lose credibility, the media treated it less seriously, further eroding its credibility and producing a self-reinforcing cycle. This dynamic contributed to signiªcant levels of non- compliance with the HSAS, ultimately leading to the current state: its complete marginalization by the constituent governments and the public. The problems inherent in the now failed HSAS have not been addressed in any of the exist- ing critiques, which tend to focus on how the HSAS deviates from the best possible systems for disaster warning and counterterrorism alerts.3 In this article, we discuss both the failure of the HSAS and the broader logic of terror alerts in a federal system of government. We identify a causal chain of events that must occur for any such system to be successful and argue that be- cause of the strategic environment for terror alerts, the links in this chain are much stronger if conªdence in the system is actively employed, rather than assumed, to motivate protective actions. Drawing on political science, organi- zation theory, and psychology to inform our argument, we propose an alterna- tive system that solves several major ºaws in the current system. Our proposal draws particularly on the notion of “procedural fairness,” which suggests that people are much more likely to follow orders from a central authority if they believe that authority has used a just process to make its decisions. This alternative system corrects the main problem that HSAS has experi- enced in motivating protective actions—the lack of trust in the value of the alerts—by requiring the federal government to prenegotiate a set of measures available at each alert level with private industry and constituent govern- ments. This requirement would ensure that the system would be sufªciently speciªc about the nature of the threat and the actions to be taken. That sense of value, combined with the trust developed during the negotiations, would 1. “Voters Unmoved by Terror Alerts,” Time.com, August 6, 2004, http://www.time.com/time/ election2004/article/0,18471,678367,00.html. 2. Corbett Riner, Liza Porteus, and Mike Emanuel, “Trail Tales: Color Code Conundrum,” FoxNews.com, October 21, 2004, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,136190,00.html. 3. See, for example, Stephen Flynn, America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Kenneth Allen, “The Homeland Security Advi- sory System: Threat Codes and Public Responses,” testimony before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations, Committee on Government Reform, 108th Cong., 2d sess., March 16, 2004; and Lawrence Freedman, “The Politics of Warning: Terrorism and Risk Communication,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 379–418. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2007.32.2.121 by guest on 27 September 2021 Color Bind 123 greatly enhance conªdence in the system. This alternative system would allow for more precise, more predictable responses from federal, state, and local agencies and, most important, would enhance the system’s ability to generate the federal government’s desired protective measures. The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. The ªrst section describes the Homeland Security Advisory System, examines its origins, and outlines its gradual failure. The second section brieºy explores terrorism alert systems in other nations. The third section examines the logic and purposes of terror alerts. The fourth section analyzes three key weaknesses of the HSAS. The ªfth section develops our alternative system and identiªes why it is preferable to the HSAS. The Rise and Fall of the HSAS: A Critical Review of Recent History At a press conference six months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist at- tacks, former Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, then director of the White House Ofªce of Homeland Security (OHS), announced the creation of the color-coded HSAS. Following on the March 12, 2002, announcement, the White House issued Homeland Security Presidential Directive 3 (HSPD-3) out- lining the system. HSPD-3 applies to all federal “facilities, personnel, and op- erations inside the territorial United States [and] all Federal departments, agencies, and ofªces other than military facilities.”4 Its stated goal is to “reduce vulnerability or increase response capability during a period of heightened alert.”5 The system, which became the government’s most prominent domestic counterterrorism tool, has ªve threat levels, each corresponding to a particular color: low (green), guarded (blue), elevated (yellow), high (orange), and severe (red). HSPD-3 describes “risk” as including both the probability of an attack occurring and its potential gravity. Importantly, these criteria are silent on what a “high risk” or a “severe risk” actually entails. This lack of explicit crite- ria is in stark contrast to older homeland security documents such as the January 2001 United States Government Interagency Domestic Terrorism Concept of Operations Plan—superseded in December 2004 by the National Response Plan—which contained detailed descriptions of what types of intelli- gence would trigger each level of alert. In the absence of information about the trustworthiness of a particular authority, people react more favorably to—and 4. “Homeland Security Advisory System,” Homeland Security Presidential Directive 3, March 11, 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020312-5.html. 5. Ibid. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2007.32.2.121 by guest on 27 September 2021 International Security 32:2 124 are therefore more likely to comply with—an authority’s actions when they be- lieve that authority uses fair procedures.6 Because it provides no information about the procedures behind its alert levels, or about the intelligence require- ments for them, the HSAS has not generated many favorable reactions. State agencies have tried to ªll this gap with more detailed subsidiary guidelines,7 sometimes containing criteria that conºict with HSPD-3.8 The lack of clarity as to what the color levels require is one of the major weakness in the HSAS. A further issue with the HSAS is uncertainty regarding what it actually in- cludes.