Warning fatigue

FBI Alert for Five Men Based on Hoax - ABC News

Jan. 6

— WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI has concluded the information that led to a hunt for five men thought to have entered the United States illegally on Christmas Eve was fabricated by an informant, ABC News reported on Monday.

Citing unnamed sources, the report said the informant identified as Michael John Hamdani, who was arrested in Canada, made up the story about 19 men who sought false passports in an attempt to get himself off the hook on criminal charges he was facing in the United States.

In the months since the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, we have heard countless warnings and alerts about "possible" terrorist attacks or other terrorist activity.  To date, none of them have amounted to anything.  Whether this is because there was nothing to them to begin with, or that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have managed to thwart them, or, perhaps, because once their plans were announced, the terrorists decided to back off, is unknown.  What is known is that the more often we are warned or alerted and see that nothing has happened, the less likely we become to pay attention to the next warning or alert.

In this most recent case, the FBI asked for the help from US citizens and residents to find 5 people who may have snuck into the US for unknown or undetermined reasons.  While I doubt that too many people went out of their way to try and find these guys, I don't doubt that there were at least some people keeping their eyes open, and even more who were frightened by the possiblity for another terrorist attack raised by the manhunt.  Yes, as before, nothing happened.  Worse, we now learn that the whole incident was based on a hoax from a prisoner trying to make his own situation easier.

Its been speculated that several of the other warnings came from another prisoner, who may have made them up either to gain more lenient treatment for himself, or to try keeping us off-balance and in a constant state of fear - in effect, trying to help his compatriots even though he's been captured and imprisoned by the US.  There's no proof that this is the case, but it has been a concern.

It's hard to know, any more, how "alert" one should be.  We certainly can't trust that the FBI is only going to pass on reliable warnings - especially since they, themselves, seem to be unable to confirm a warnings reliability until much later - in many cases, not until after the date the alert warns about.  Yet we don't want to fall into complacency, becuase the threat of future attacks is very real.

One possible solution would be for the FBI, when issuing a warning or alert, to assign it a "reliability level" - similar to the "threat assessment level", but - hopefully - without the colour scheme - so that people will have an idea of how serious an issue it is.  If the warning is issued with a reliability level of, say, 1 - meaning that it's unverified or unverifiable - and is based on a statement from only one person, then we know that we should probably take some extra care, but it's not time to panic by any stretch of the imagination.  A warning with a reliability level of 5 - meaning that they have verified this threat through multiple sources or have other reason to believe that it is a very significant possiblity, would let us know that this is something to take very seriously, to the point of considering changing any plans or routines if necessary. 

Without something of that nature, I'm afraid that we may start treating all warnings and alerts as routinely as we treat the weather -- and if you think about how many people you see dashing through the rain with no umbrella or other head covering, you'll have a pretty good idea of just how seriously that is.