DHS ConferenceOn.TV

I have been advocating for some time for DHS to provide video coverage of the Chemical Sector Security Summit. Now the folks at DHS don’t talk with me much, so I don’t know why they haven’t taken this obvious step, but I figured that there must be some legal or policy issue that prevented them from doing so. Then last week I received an email from the folks over at DHS S&T advising me of their latest offering on their Homeland Security ConferenceOn.TV Network. Their latest offering is from their 11th annual Technologies for Critical Incident Preparedness Conference and Exposition, cosponsored by DHS, DOD and DOJ. Not much in the way of production values, just a single camera focused on the head and shoulders of the presenters. There is good audio though and the bandwidth is acceptable for a normal high-speed connection. There are a couple of other DHS S&T presentations available on the site, so this isn’t an entirely new capability at DHS (and certainly not new on the web). I do notice that the only presenters are DHS employees, so I assume that there are some copywrite issues. That is a shame because there are a number of CSSS presentations made by individuals from the private sector (though their slides are available on the CSSS Presentation page). So I guess there really isn’t a good reason that DHS isn’t making real coverage of the CSSS available on the web. Just providing presentation slides tells the vast majority of the chemical security community less than half of the story about the presentations. If DHS is really interested in communicating with the regulated community this is an obvious way to accomplish that.