- NEW YORK — A top US domestic security chief announced Wednesday a strategy to make ordinary citizens the first line of defense against an increasingly multi-faceted terrorist threat.
- “For too long, we’ve treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation’s collective security,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a speech in New York. “This approach, unfortunately, has allowed confusion, anxiety and fear to linger.”
- Napolitano, who also announced an extra 78 million dollars in anti-terrorism funding for 15 mass transit systems nationwide, said modern communications had increased the sophistication of threats since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
- “The tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools to buy music online or restocking inventory,” she said. “If 9/11 happened in a web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a web 2.0 world now.”
- Napolitano urged a “much broader society response” in which the public helps curb a growing phenomenon of so-called home-grown terrorism.
- Referring to a spate of arrests around the country of US citizens and residents charged with jihad-type militancy, Napolitano said that ordinary people were often the best eyes and ears.
- “You are the ones who know when something is not right in your communities,” she said in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
- “Indeed if you look at the last couple of weeks, arrests have been made in places like Minneapolis and North Carolina,” she said.
- “So I think better education, about the breadth of the threat and how it can be carried out, is important.”
- In the latest case, seven people were arrested Monday, including an American-born Muslim convert and his two sons living in a quiet North Carolina suburb.
- Napolitano even called on children to join an effort previously shouldered by police and other security services.
(that was a patriotic public service announcement from Snitch Culture USA, a division of Continual Fear, LLC. -ledge)
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