New DHS CIKR Website

There has been a wide variety of discussion (see for example) over the last couple of days about Secretary Napolitano’s recent meeting with “private sector leaders to discuss critical infrastructure security”. She emphasized that the national approach to critical infrastructure security was built around a public-private partnership based on “promoting vigilance, preparedness and risk reduction”. The DHS press release also mentioned the opening of a new web page for critical infrastructure protection. There isn’t really much new information on this page, but it does serve as a pretty decent landing page for infrastructure protection. There are three links to chemical security pages, (chemical security, CVI training, and CSAT). There is also links for transportation and maritime security that may be of interest to the chemical facility security community. Unfortunately, this set of links is not nearly as comprehensive as I would have hoped. A glaring omission is the lack of a links to legal documents that affect infrastructure protection; I would have added the Laws & Regulation page from Counterterrorism. This should certainly be on the landing page. I disagreed with the selection of pages that was listed for the representation of the chemical security program. Instead of the chemicals security page listed, I would used the Chemical Security landing page for counterterrorism. This provides a link to the page given as well as four other sources of chemical security information. Since not all chemical facilities (by a huge percentage) are covered under CFATS, I would have also added a link to the VCAT (Voluntary Chemical Assessment Tool), if I could find one. The best I have been able to find is a brief reference on the MTI page and a link to a video presentation. One last complaint; there is no date reference on the bottom of the page to allow serious surfers, like me, to tell if there have been any recent changes on the page. Still, even with my nit-picking complaints, I still think this IP landing page is another example of DHS trying to use the internet to ensure that they communicate with their served community. Good job; just keep trying to improve.