CG Announces NMSAC Meeting – 9-24-25-13

The Coast Guard published a meeting notice in Monday’s Federal Register (78 FR 44089-55091; available on line today) for the next meeting of the National Maritime Security Advisory Committee in Washington, DC on September 24^th and 25^th, 2013.

Some of the agenda items for this meeting are a little out of the ordinary, but that probably makes them more important than normal. The agenda includes discussions about:

• Cybersecurity Executive Order (EO 13636);

• Presidential Policy Directive-21;

• Chemical Facility Safety and Security Executive Order;

• TWIC Reader Rule;

• Fall Regulatory Agenda;

• Boston Marathon lessons learned;

• Hurricane Sandy lessons learned;

• FSO training initiative; and

• Future security issues.

Actually the notice states that the first two items are continuations of discussions that were started at the April 2013 NMSAC Meeting. There is also a repeat of the comment from the April meeting notice that: “NMSAC will meet to review the Executive Order and begin initial work in developing a framework for the maritime community.” As I mentioned earlier the NIST Preliminary Cybersecurity Framework will apply to the maritime community as well as all other critical infrastructure communities. It will be interesting to see what comes of this NMSAC effort.

The Coast Guard has been working with the Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) of NPPD to work out a memorandum of understanding about how the two organizations will coordinate their chemical facility security efforts in MTSA and non-MTSA facilities. Interestingly, I have heard that the Coast Guard is intending to scrap its proposal to implement a Top Screen reporting rule (1625-AB64) for MTSA covered facilities (which are exempt from CFATS coverage). This will probably be addressed in the discussion of the Fall Regulatory Agenda.