DHS Updates Critical Infrastructure Protection Website

Today the DHS Office of Infrastructure Protection (OIP) updated the landing page for Critical Infrastructure Protection. This is part of their information sharing effort as part of the President’s proclamation of December as Critical Infrastructure Protection Month. There are links to four pages that have been revised/updated with new information on critical infrastructure protection. They are:

● Regional Directors and Protective Security Advisors

● Bombing Prevention Training
● Information Sharing for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience
● Information Sharing: A Vital Resource for a Shared National Mission to Protect Critical Infrastructure
● More About the Office of Infrastructure Protection

Regional Directors and Protective Security Advisors

This page used to just refer to Protective Security Advisors and I briefly addressed their duties last spring. The first change to this page deals with the title and that it now explains that Regional Directors are “Supervisory PSAs”. I’m not sure if these are new positions or if they were just overlooked in the earlier version of this page. The total number of field operatives, 93, has not changed since the earlier version of the page was posted.

This page does note that the PSA’s are responsible for three program areas and provides a brief description of the these responsibilities. They are:

● Enhancing Infrastructure Protection
● Assisting with Incident Management
● Facilitating Information Sharing

The information sharing portion of this page does provide a new section on ‘Strengthening Regional Resilience’. This is keeping in-line with the Departments increased focus on ‘Resilience’. The most important part of this new section is the link to the two new pages on ‘Information Sharing’ that I discuss below.

Bombing Prevention Training

The only change to this page is that it now references ‘Regional Directors and Protective Security Advisors’ instead of just ‘Protective Security Advisors’.

Information Sharing

The first of these two pages that focus on information sharing provides an overview type description of the various players in the field of ‘Infrastructure Protection’ with some links to more information. Of interest to the chemical security community is the brief description of the ‘Chemical Facility Inspectors’ (CFI). The ‘additional information’ link provided for there does not pertain much to the CFI, but to the CFATS program in general. It would be nice to see a more detailed page of information about the CFI program (organization, training, etc).

The second page on information sharing has a great deal more information and many more links to other programs. The most valuable part of this page can be found in the last section, “Tools to Support Information Sharing”. This section provides links to a number of important information sharing sites, including:

● Homeland Security Information Network-Critical Sectors (HSIN-CS)
● Homeland Infrastructure Threat & Risk Analysis Center (HITRAC)
● National Infrastructure Coordinating Center (NICC).
● DHS Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report
● Office of the Director of National Intelligence

More About the Office of Infrastructure Protection

This page provides information on the operation of the OIP. It has been completely reworked, providing more links to web pages describing the groups that work within the OIP. A great deal of additional information has been provided through this page.