Friday, April 29, 2011
Homeland Security gets religion and will tweet, but our Pacific Tsunami Warning Center remains mute
by Larry Geller
I learned on the Colbert Report last night that Homeland Security is going to give up that color-coded terror alert system and replace it with social networking alerts, among other methods. The end of the old system was announced in January with a target date of the end of April. Here’s the new system snapped off the screen from last night’s show:
Yes, email, Facebook and Twitter are effective and economical ways to reach millions of people these days. So Homeland Security will take advantage to inform us of terror alerts.
Did figuring that out really take them three months? Napolitano could probably learn to tweet in a couple of days, if she really concentrated on it. Nevermind. They probably need a 300-page training manual, protocol, policies, and security clearances before they’ve done a proper government job of it.
And of course, any technology can be misused in government hands…
Colbert is concerned that they may forget about the 140 character limit…
One of my pet peeves is that here in “high-tech” Hawaii, our own Pacific Tsunami Warning Center still refuses to tweet. Heck, it wouldn’t even cost them anything, and lives could be saved. They tweet, we retweet. People run from the beaches. What’s not to like about that?
Well, what can you do...
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