White House releases new infrastructure security directive

Computerworld - WASHINGTON -- The White House yesterday released the long-awaited rewrite of a 1998 document that established critical-infrastructure protection, including cybersecurity, as a core policy of the U.S. government. But two prominent senators from opposite sides of the political aisle disagree on the new policy's direction.
Homeland Security Presidential Directive-7 (HSPD-7) replaced Presidential Decision Directive-63, signed on May 22, 1998, by then-President Bill Clinton, as the main document outlining the public/private partnership needed to eliminate major vulnerabilities to the nation's critical physical and cyberinfrastructures.
Computerworld first revealed the pending rewrite on Nov. 7 (see story).
The new document is titled "Critical Infrastructure Identification, Prioritization and Protection." It calls for a concerted public/private effort to identify and catalog the nation's most critical infrastructure facilities and networks using geospatial imaging systems and requests detailed modeling and simulation studies to learn more about the potential effects of terrorist attacks against these infrastructures.
The HSPD-7 gives the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) another year to "outline national goals, objectives, milestones, and key initiatives," even though a cybersecurity plan released in February envisioned that such work would be done much sooner.
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine) praised the administration for the directive. "In the post-9/11 world, we cannot afford weak links in our critical infrastructure protection or gaps in our support for local first responders," she said.
But presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, lambasted Bush for allowing the DHS to take more time to put together yet another plan.
"This nation has been desperately in need of leadership to protect its critical infrastructure from terrorist attack," said Lieberman. But "the president has given Secretary Ridge yet another year to develop a 'plan' to develop a 'strategy' to identify, prioritize and protect key critical infrastructures," he added.
"This would almost be laughable were it not such a devastating failure for our country," Lieberman said. "The administration has repeatedly assured us it was at work on such plans and strategies. Now, we discover the administration has been running in place, leaving us no closer to having meaningful protections for the vital systems and assets the country depends upon each day."

Read more about Security in Computerworld's Security Topic Center.