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. [ … ]

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