Infrastructure Protection
 The GAO released a report on Tuesday entitled CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION: Significant Homeland Security Challenges Need to be Addressed. The report focuses on the consolidation of six agencies that will be consolidated into the Division of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection. The six agencies and their current parent organizations are:
This should be an interesting consolidation, but could prove beneficial. As a trustee of the Infragard of the Wasatch, I have been monitoring the NIPC / Infragard notices for quite a while and include them on our state cybersecurity website. We have talked about developing something called UCIRC which would mirror the FedCIRC at the state level. Bob Woolley and I met with the FedCIRC people at last year's eGOV convention in DC as well as with Bob Bennett, Utah's Senator who is hot on infrastructure protection issues.
Yesterday, our state homeland defense agency held a meeting of our infrastructure protection subcommittee. It seems that we are still trying to reinvent the wheel. We put together a very effective plan for working with utilities, financial institutions, local government, and every other critical sector of the economy during the Y2k process. We did it again in preparation for the 2002 Winter Games. Now we're doing the same thing in the name of homeland security. The current approach is that state government is merely a coordinator and that much of the activity originates with the private sector. One problem that I see is that the private sector initiator may tend to focus narrowly on issues associated with his/her company's interests.
Several representatives from Utah attended a critical infrastructure protection town meeting held in Denver in May. Richard Clarke spoke on cybersecurity.
Critical Infrastructure Lessons Learned: A webcast of a 2-day conference in New Jersey
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