NIAC to Include Chem Sector in Information Sharing Study

Thanks to Patrick Miller’s Tweet about the National Infrastructure Advisory Council’s Information Sharing Study, I was reminded that the NIAC meeting was held yesterday. Reader’s might remember that I wrote about the scheduled meeting earlier this month. In that blog I wrote about the need to form a Chemical Fusion Center to provide CFATS facilities an intelligence sharing environment. I sent a copy of that blog as a public comment to be included in the discussion at yesterday’s meeting.

Since I wasn’t able to attend the meeting I don’t know how much attention was paid to my submitted comments. But, since I submitted my comments early I would like to think that the study committee had a chance to review them prior to the development of their presentation that was made at yesterday’s meeting. Again, we only have a copy of their slide presentation, which lacks the additional information included in the oral presentation accompanying the slides, but there are some interesting parallels between their presentation and my comments.

The study proposal presented at the meeting expects for the group to take a year to accomplish this study. It will primarily focus on ‘leading executives and subject matter experts (SME) in business and government’ as the primary information sources. Among other things it will specifically “identify initial set of issues related to private sector participation and interaction” (slide 9) with existing fusion centers and identify “initial set of information sharing challenges, gaps, and best practices”.

The study group also expects to do some case studies using five of NIPP critical sectors;

● Chemical Sector
● Commercial Facilities Sector
● Healthcare and Public Health Sector
● Oil & Natural Gas Sector
● Financial Services Sector

Interestingly CFATS covered facilities can be found in all but one of those sectors, the Financial Services Sector.