U.S. has no plan to raise terror alert level after British move

The White House says it has no plans to raise terror alert levels in the United States, despite Britain’s decision to raise its threat level to “severe”. Britain raised its alert level on Friday to a level signalling that an attack was “highly likely”. Prime Minister David Cameron said he was certain that operatives of the Islamic State (IS) group, also known as ISIL, had their sights set on European targets. The British threat level is now at the second highest out of five possible categories. It is also at its highest since July 2011.

What we are facing in Iraq now with ISIL (IS) is a greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before.

Prime Minister David Cameron

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that senior US national security officials had been in close contact with the British over the issue. The Obama administration dispensed with its previous colour coded threat alert level system for terrorist threats introduced after the September 11 attacks in 2001, reasoning it rarely changed and was often unspecific. Currently, terror threat alerts in the U.S. are issued by the Department of Homeland Security on a case-by-case basis, but there are no current alerts.

World terror threat level