THE UNITED STATES’ Department of Homeland Security is nearing a decision on whether to replace its colour-coded terrorism alert methods – with a new system that could see updates disseminated through Twitter and Facebook.

The new two-tier advisory system being considered by the department, CNN reports, would discern between “imminent” and “elevated” threats – and could use the most popular social networks to spread news of higher alerts more quickly.

The AP reports, however, that the new warnings would only be revealed directly to the public in some circumstances, with other more delicate alerts being distributed only to police and security forces.

Certain warnings in relation to aviation threats, for example, might only be distributed within the environs of a specific airport – with passengers merely being asked to exercise due caution. The new warnings would also be labelled with an ‘expiry date’.

The new scheme comes on the back of a 2009 conference which discussed a reform of the colour-coding terror alert system, when one member told CNet that the current system could be tweaked to better suit the modern methods of communication:

Let’s say there’s another [Hurricane] Katrina, a huge weather alert, or a terrorist attack, and you want to get the information out to everybody. Right now the only way to do that is to activate the whole emergency broadcast system or the emergency action system and have everybody’s radio tell you -which they didn’t even use during the World Trade Centre attacks.

So what if you could have a feed coming from DHS and other government agencies, say, to Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or whatever? And you subscribe to that channel or that feed?