Experts: Action needed now on homeland security network

Computerworld - The federal government could create a nationwide homeland security information-sharing network for as little as $1.25 million, according to a former director of the Critical Infrastructure Protection program at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Paula Scalingi, a former DOE security expert who now heads her own consultancy in Tysons Corner, Va., recently proposed to officials in the Office of Homeland Security that they sponsor 10 regional public/private "Partnerships for Homeland Security," similar to what currently exists only in the Pacific Northwest. Each regional partnership could be established with $125,000 in federal funds and $25,000 in seed money from the private-sector owners and operators of critical-infrastructure systems, she said.
"What this would provide is interoperability continentwide," said Scalingi, speaking yesterday at a security conference sponsored by the Council of Security and Strategic Technology Organizations (COSTO) in Washington. "You really can't look at the state level because infrastructures cross states ... and interdependencies don't stop at borders."
The Pacific Northwest already has an evolving public/private partnership: the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER), which spans five U.S. states and three Canadian provinces. The group plans to hash out its plans at a meeting set for Oct. 23 in Seattle, where dozens of officials who took part in this year's Blue Cascades interdependency exercise will form eight working groups to prioritize the detailed recommendations that emerged from the exercise (see story).
Blue Cascades, the first cross-border critical-infrastructure protection exercise, took place June 12 in Portland, Ore. It demonstrated in frightening detail the lack of knowledge about how terrorist attacks or failures in the power and telecommunications infrastructures could spiral out of control, affecting other sectors of the digital economy and slowing emergency response efforts.
While most attendees at the COSTO conference reserved comment on the PNWER example, all agreed that massive changes in IT and management policies are needed at the state and local level. More than a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks highlighted significant infrastructure vulnerabilities that have the potential to cause massive problems for emergency response teams, terrorism response programs remain woefully inadequate and low-tech, said experts.
"While many people think we know how to do this ... we really don't," said John Powers, chairman of Corporate Communications Resources Inc. in Alexandria, Va., and the former executive director of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection. To this day, one of the major challenges remains finding a way to "bring a semblance of order out of the initial chaos" that results from a major terrorist attack, he said.
Powers