MEASURING THE THREAT
Washington wants Americans to be alert about potential danger. But how much do our spies really know about the threats we face?

They were, in some small way, supposed to make us feel more secure and informed, perhaps even confident in our leaders. But by the time officials had ringed nuclear power plants with armed roadblocks and West Coast commuters had begun detouring around some bridges, the latest round of terrorist-attack warnings—from Washington's vague bulletin to California's detailed advisory—left many people feeling quite the opposite: confused, afraid and in some cases downright angry. "We're drinking all the coffee we can," Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said with a large dose of black humor. "How alert can we get?"

Barely two weeks after Washington sounded a similarly vague alarm based on nonspecific information, no one seemed to have a good answer. Just as we were getting used to what the Bush Administration is calling the "new normalcy," civilians and law enforcement alike braced for what they feared might be another horrifying strike on the home front. Before, they had trained watchful eyes on the weapon of the week, from crop dusters to haz-mat trucks; cops and civilians now had to view anything and everything with suspicion. The new normalcy was being redefined every minute.

That may be fine for lots of people who would rather be treated as adults than as children and be left to make up their own minds about how to react to government warnings. But with no solid information to divulge about the terrorists' possible methods, targets or timing, Washington risked either crying wolf one time too many or sending a nation from low-grade anxiety into full-blown panic. As a retired FBI counterterrorism official put it, "If you start warning about everything you hear, you become part of the terror, as opposed to part of the solution."

It's no wonder, then, that a number of cops and other public safety officials all over the country are so grumpy. They have been on the highest levels of alert and are being forced to deal with more false alarms than real information; something may be better than nothing, but not by much. Though the faa did impose a limited no-fly zone for private planes around nuclear power plants, the government did not counsel many other specific measures to the 18,000 law-enforcement agencies that received the advisory. "I wish I could say the FBI is doing a better job of communicating with us," says a state law-enforcement chief in the South. "It's frustrating because I can't tell my people what to look out for."

There was no better example of the confounding, Keystone Kops approach to security than California Governor Gray Davis' decision to go public on Thursday with an uncorroborated threat targeted at suspension bridges in eight Western states. "The best preparation is to let terrorists know, ‘We know what you're up to. We're ready,'" Davis said Thursday. But what exactly did he know? In this case, the threat to attack bridges at rush hour between last Friday and this Wednesday, based on a raw, overseas tip to the U.S. Customs Service, wasn't considered credible by the FBI—despite Davis' characterizations to the contrary. Like countless other reports that go out every day over the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS)—the authorities' national Intranet tip sheet—this one was never supposed to be made public.

Davis cited the Golden Gate and Bay bridges in San Francisco, among others, as likely targets, though they were never specified in the various warnings put out by the FBI, Customs Service and Coast Guard. Some counterterrorism officials were flabbergasted by Davis' disclosure, but President Bush refused to criticize his actions, diplomatically stating that "as a former Governor, I didn't particularly care when the Federal Government tried to tell me how to do my business."

Deciding to publicize a threat is only half the battle, of course. Assessing its credibility is the real challenge, and it has never been greater. On any given day, the various human and electronic sources the CIA consults, many of dubious reliability, generate 40 to 100 new threats. These are now compiled in a daily report known as the "threat matrix," which is distributed to top national security and intelligence officials.

Since September 11, U.S. agencies have picked up different conversations by suspected terrorist associates on imminent nuclear, biological and chemical attacks. The problem is that most threats are bogus, and as a senior U.S. intelligence official admits, "you can get bogged down in the detail." Just two weeks ago, another Administration official tells TIME, the threat matrix contained warnings that terrorists might try a major attack against a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia or the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. But since then they have received countless reports of new potential threats, a distressing number of them right here at home. In the end, Americans are left to decide for themselves just what to do when the government tells them that danger is lurking around the corner.

Questions

1. What is the "threat matrix"?

2. Which foreign allies provide the strongest intelligence information to the U.S.?