Critical Infrastructure

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Five Years Later, Gulf Coast Reflections – Part Three

August 30, 2010

It’s hard to say what the real ground zero of Hurricane Katrina was. For most Americans, they think of the City of New Orleans. For as awful as each of those events were, similar catastrophes were experienced by St. Bernard and Jefferson Parishes, as well as Plaquemines and Slidell, LA. While the media certainly covered the earth-shattering events that occurred there, it seems to me that the Gulf Coast of Mississippi seems to have been lost in the coverage. The only word I used to describe what I saw back then was very simply Hiroshima. The destruction was beyond catastrophic.

Rich Cooper |

August 27, 2010

There are few places that you can drive in America where you can go over 50 miles and not hit a traffic light. Such is the stretch of highway along Louisiana Highway 23, running straight through the center of Plaquemines Parish. Located just south of New Orleans, Plaquemines is literally a peninsula with the mighty Mississippi River going right through the center of it. When Katrina struck, surges of water crossed over the levees, parking shrimp boats in the center of the Highway 23 and farmer’s fields while cattle and other farm animals were left dangling in the surrounding trees. It’s an open debate by many Plaquemines residents as to what is worse: the impact of Katrina, the BP oil spill or the drilling moratorium. One thing they can all agree on is their concern about their future.

Rich Cooper |

August 26, 2010

Five years ago, my life, like the lives of millions of others, changed. I was one of the thousands of people who went to the Gulf Coast to try to help, to do anything to address what can only be called the summer of ultimate hell. Two monster hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, smashed into the coastlines of Mississippi and Louisiana killing hundreds, costing billions and forever changing our nation. This week I’ve come back to the Gulf Coast to retrace many of the steps I took five years ago. For as much as the news media will offer their five-year retrospectives on the anniversaries of these two unprecedented and tragic storms, it can’t begin to capture how much lives have changed here.

Roles and responsibilities key to making cybersecurity work

Media Watch |

August 25, 2010

Roles and responsibilities key to making cybersecurity work – NextGov
Clarification of cybersecurity roles and responsibilities in the federal government remains the most crucial component of bills circulating in Congress, federal and industry executives said during a panel discussion on Thursday.

Steven Bucci |

August 24, 2010

Those who read my Security Debrief posts or my Tweets will recognize (maybe with a groan) that one of my “issues” is the lack of action in Awareness and Education with regard to cybersecurity. It is not a sexy, nor a potentially lucrative issue, but I believe with all my heart that it is the foundational piece of any eventual “solution” to our cyber woes. Bottom line of Bucci’s rant is this: we need to make Awareness and Education a real priority and expend the money, time, and personnel to do it correctly.

Homeland Security Still MIA on EMP

admin |

August 24, 2010

As an article by Security Management’s Matthew Harwood reminds us, Homeland Security has not “taken seriously the threat that a high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon could fry the nation’s power grid[.]” Dr. Michael J. Frankel is executive director of the EMP Commission, which was created in 2001 to study the national security threat an EMP attack could pose to the United States. If anything, Frankel underplays the scope of the threat. The catastrophe would not stop at our borders, and the Earth would likely recede into the “new” Dark Ages.

Maritime Cargo Scanning: The Wrong Approach for Avoiding Nuclear Attack?

Media Watch |

August 20, 2010

Maritime Cargo Scanning: The Wrong Approach for Avoiding Nuclear Attack? — CQ Homeland Security Nonproliferation experts say the congressional mandate to scan all maritime cargo for radiation before it reaches U.S. shores is a woefully ineffective way to ward off a potential attack and threatens to eat up resources that would be better spent elsewhere. […]

Steven Bucci |

August 18, 2010

Next week, the Heritage Foundation will host “Homeland Security 2010: The Future of Defending the Homeland.” This will be a week-long series of panels aimed at providing a good background for Congressional Staffers new to Homeland Security issues. Heritage did this last year, and it was an excellent event. I will be sitting on two of the panels – maritime security and cybersecurity. The panels are open to the public and all are welcome. I highly recommend it.

Chris Battle |

August 17, 2010

Back in 2006, before George W. Bush’s approval ratings dropped through the basement into somewhere around the fourth circle of hell, it made political sense for the congressional Democrats to attack the Republican administration on cargo security. They were fighting to regain control of Congress and had to show that they, too, were capable of protecting the American people from another terrorist attack. They found themselves an effective–if inaccurate–sound bite in accusing the administration of screening a mere 5 percent of cargo coming into the country. But are they seriously going to continue this bizarre effort? Even President Obama’s Administration thinks this is a terrible idea.

Distrust Hampers Public-Private Cybersecurity Partnerships

Media Watch |

August 17, 2010

Distrust Hampers Public-Private Cybersecurity Partnerships – CQ Homeland Security
Mutual distrust has stymied the creation of an effective cybersecurity partnership between the federal government and the private companies that own most of America’s critical infrastructure, according to a report released Monday.

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