Secret Service warns of high threat levels before White House Correspondents' Dinner

Days ahead of the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Dinner, Secret Service officials warned nationwide threats have reached an unprecedented level — with agents opening roughly 10,000 protective intelligence cases since January, a nearly 40% increase from the same period last year.

"The numbers are numbers that this agency and certainly I have never seen in my 24-year career," U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran said Wednesday.

Officials who briefed reporters also said the agency has carried out nearly 10 times as many mental health-related interventions involving those making threats to protected individuals or venues, compared to last year. That includes both voluntary and involuntary commitments and efforts by agents and officers to work with relatives and mental-health providers to stabilize people in crisis.

Secret Service officials attributed the uptick to a combination of online threats, lone actors, ideological grievances, foreign threats and cases involving mental-health concerns. Officials say most threats now originate online, rather than through handwritten letters or other traditional forms of communication.

"The environment has become very volatile, and that's just across the board," Curran said. He added, "The threat picture and environment is as large as I've ever seen it."

The agency treats reported threats as potentially credible threats until investigators can determine whether a person has the intent, means and ability to carry out targeted violence, according to the Secret Service officials.

A person doesn't have to make a direct threat to draw the agency's attention. The threat assessment process relies on behavior, rather than a specific demographic profile. Agents look for potential warning signs like obsessive fixation, escalating grievances, stalking, harassment, paranoia, delusions, suicidality, significant behavioral changes and an unusual interest in violence.

Curran defended the security plan used at the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where an armed individual was stopped at a screening checkpoint outside the event.

When pressed by CBS News, he said the magnetometers were approximately 120 yards from the podium and argued that stopping the individual at the checkpoint demonstrated that the security system worked as intended.

"We have to start and end our perimeter somewhere," Curran said. "If it were up to me, I'd love to end it at the bridge, but that's going to inconvenience a lot of people," he added in an apparent reference to the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge in