DHS CVI Website Updated

Some early today or late yesterday the folks at ISCD updated their Chemical-Terrorism Vulnerability Information (CVI) web page. The landing page now has a reference to the Executive Order that President Obama signed last year concerning Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). It also includes links to a page addressing the CUI issue as it currently stands at ISCD.

Readers might remember that back in November when the EO was signed I opined that:

“It is clear that chemical-terrorism vulnerability information (CVI) will fall under the provisions of EO 13556. As the CVI category is established by regulation (6 CFR 27.400) it is certain that it will survive the initial review of the Secretary and the EA [Executive Agent]. The disclosure provisions should also remain unchanged. There may need to be some revisions made to the CVI Procedures Manual, depending on the review of the marking and protections provisions by the EA.”

Well this new web page indicates that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (the Executive Agent for this EO) has decided that the CVI program will remain as a CUI program. As such we can expect that some revisions will have to be made to the CVI manual to bring it up to the new standards. DHS will publish the new manual when it is ready and will certainly revise their on-line training program. All of that will happen at some point in the not too distant future (hopefully).

Web Page Dating

ISCD is continuing to have problems with the dating of their web pages. This has been a hallmark of the ISCD web site; page dates show at a glance when the page has been updated saving the casual reviewer (or even the more serious one such as myself) from having to constantly read an unchanging web page, waiting to see if new information becomes available. Until just recently, (not too long after the recent reorganization, coincidentally I’m sure) these dates reflected the dates that the new pages have been posted on the web site.

These two pages have very suspicious dates. The landing page date is certainly wrong; it shows that this page was changed/reviewed on February 24th of this year. I know that is not true, I check this page every morning at about 8:00 am EST/EDT. Yesterday the date read August 6th, 2009. Today it reads February 24th, 2011. I suspect that it was approved on February 24th but not actually posted for some reason until today.

The EO 13556 page shows a date of March 21, 2011. That date may be correct; without the link to page provided on the new landing page I would have no way of knowing that this page even existed to check on it. Still, I doubt that March 21st was when the page actually went live; it is very likely in my mind that it actually went live this morning with the updated CVI landing page that pointed to it.

These page dates are really a very minor thing; in fact only anal-retentive people like me are even probably aware that they exist. It does however reflect a general decrease in the appearance of professionalism in ISCD. The CFATS web site was something that ISCD had always taken pride in and deserved accolades for their innovative use of the web as a communications tool. I really hate to see it slipping down to the standards of the rest of the Department.