DHS Announces ISAO Workshop

Today the DHS Office of Cybersecurity and Communications (OCC) published a meeting notice in the Federal Register (80 FR 38453-38454) for a public workshop concerning Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAO). The public meeting will be held in San Jose, CA on July 30th [date corrected, 07-03-15 10:20 CDT].

No agenda is currently available for this meeting. Advance registration is required, but the RSVP link mentioned in the notice does not yet exist. Public comments about this program may be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket # DHS-2015-0017).

Commentary

This will be the third ISAO workshop being held by DHS since the publication of  EO 13691; Promoting Private Sector Cybersecurity Information Sharing. I mentioned the second in an earlier post and noted that like this meeting announcement there had been no agenda provided in the meeting notice. Even though that meeting was held on June 9^th, there is still no meeting agenda provided for that meeting on the ‘ISAO Engagements’ page. There is more information available on the first meeting that was held in March.

All in all the OCC seems to be doing a really bad job of information sharing about this new program. It makes me wonder about how much commitment and support this program is receiving in DHS.

BTW: DHS does have an $11 Million dollar grant available for developing standards for ISAO’s. The application period closes on July 17^th, 2015. There is no direct link to the grant opportunity notice (DHS-15-NPPD-128-001), but here are the directions on how to get to the site:

A Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the ISAO Standards Organization Cooperative Agreement has been created and posted online to Grants.gov. To locate the NOFO and application package, please visit http://www.grants.gov/web/grants/search-grants.html and search “97.128” in the CFDA Number search bar on the top left of the page. The Funding Opportunity Number is DHS-15-NPPD-128-001.