Securing America: From color codes to pat-downs

The U.S. government's homeland security message in the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks has changed to be less about raising the national threat level to red and more about keeping calm and carrying on.

While Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently remarked that Americans must remain vigilant against another major al Qaeda plot, President Obama and intelligence sources to CBS News have said that a smaller-scale attack by a lone wolf presents a likelier threat to the nation.

The difference between the massive attack on the United States in 2001 and what authorities urge Americans to be on the lookout for in 2011 shows how far the country has come since the days when Americans cleared out hardware stores of duct tape for insulating their homes against a biological or chemical attack.

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"Stash away the duct tape - don't use it!" then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told reporters at the launch of a public relations campaign on preparedness nearly a year and a half after the attacks.

To be sure, the government still urges Americans to keep duct tape on hand for sealing their homes in the event of an emergency. But Americans are more likely learn about that advice on the website Ridge launched for that 2003 campaign than from the mouth of a Cabinet-level official.

The website, Ready.gov, may well have a longer lifespan than another instrument introduced under the Ridge era, the Homeland Security Advisory System.

Introduced in early 2002, the system featured five different threat levels with a color assigned to each, but it turned out to only need three. During the advisory system's usage, the United States was never below a yellow level, or at less than a "significant risk of terrorist attacks," according to a 2009 Homeland Security report (PDF).

Ridge's indirect successor -- after Secretary Michael Chertoff's tenure during President George W. Bush's second term -- Secretary Janet Napolitano retired the system in April. It was replaced with the National Terrorism Advisory System, a colorless, text-based alert system with two levels -- "elevated" and "imminent" -- that would be issued for specific threats, a contrast to its predecessor that was usually applied to the whole country.

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While the color-coded alert system was widely mocked by comics, it didn't come without its own controversy.

Years after leaving the government, Ridge wrote in his memoir, "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege," that Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pressed him to raise the terror level days before Election Day in 2004, when Mr. Bush was seeking his second term. The officials urged such a step because Osama bin Laden had released a new videotaped message, Ridge wrote.

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"I wondered, is this about security or politics?" Ridge wrote about the encounter.

He later said that people exaggerated that part of the book because the threat level wasn't raised before the election and, therefore, wasn't an issue, even though he also wrote that it made him feel confident about his decision to leave government.

Of course, Ridge wasn't the last Homeland Security chief to say something that became fodder for critics: Napolitano came under fire in 2009 for her reaction to a failed terror plot.

She faced questions over whether Washington had made the same mistakes that led to 9/11 when she summed up how the crew and passengers on a trans-Atlantic flight subdued a man over Detroit on Christmas Day that year after a botched attempt to detonate a bomb hidden in the man's underwear.

"The system worked," Napolitano told CNN's "State of the Union" (at the 1:21 mark) Dec. 27, 2009. "Everybody played an important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action."

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man charged in the failed plot, is expected to defend himself at trial in October.

His case joined the ranks of others related to terrorism, such as those of Maj. Nidal Hasan, whose military trial has been set for March for the 2009 shootings in Fort Hood, Texas; Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber; and Najibullah Zazi, who wanted to bomb New York City's subway system.

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Still, the idea of a passenger boarding an overseas jet with the intent of detonating explosives above the United States exemplifies the difficulties the government faces in shielding travelers from threats.

The increased screening on passengers was one of the more significant ways Washington's response to 9/11 changed Americans' everyday lives. And of the 22 federal agencies corralled under the Homeland Security's roof -- including the U.S. Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Secret Service -- none have likely borne the brunt of more criticism than the Transportation Security Administration.

The agency recently announced efforts to calm privacy advocates' concerns about the detailed images produced by full-body-imaging scanners at airport security checkpoints. Under new procedures, scans of passengers would be run through a computer for analysis of possible threats instead of reviewed by a TSA agent, the agency said.

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Other recent instances that attracted attention to the agency include TSA's alternative to body scans - pat-downs. Some of the hands-on frisks -- such as those performed on a 6-year-old girl in New Orleans, a 95-year-old leukemia patient in Florida and a baby in Kansas City, Mo. -- sparked outrage during the past year.

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One man even received a personal apology from TSA chief John Pistole after a pat-down broke a urine-collection bag the man wore for a medical condition, spilling its contents on the man's clothes.

The agency modified its rules to screen children repeatedly through a scanner before patting them down but defended its approach with the leukemia patient. But being overly cautious in inspecting passengers hasn't been the agency's sole slipup.

Throughout the past decade, the agency has made headlines for:

• Failing to find fake bombs carried by undercover agents in 2002, when screeners still worked for private companies
• Continuing to let fake bombs slip by in 2007, after federal employees replaced the private screeners
• Screening only one-fifth of the annual amount of air cargo that arrives in the United States from overseas
• Letting a passenger fly cross-country on another traveler's expired boarding pass in June
• Letting a passenger board a plane in March with three box cutters, the same type of weapon used to hijack the planes on 9/11

A prediction Napolitano recently made shows that the agency still has room for improvement.

At a forum sponsored by Politico, the secretary reportedly said Tuesday that the requirement for travelers to remove their shoes at airport security checkpoints -- instituted after Richard C. Reid tried to take down a trans-Atlantic flight in December 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes -- will be lifted one day, just not soon.

Napolitano told the forum, according to Politico, that while the government wants to make screening at airports easier, technology that both allows people to wear their shoes and meets government requirements doesn't exist.

No doubt, if Americans had to issue an alert about whether they'd like to wear their shoes through checkpoints again, it would most likely be colored green for "go."