The Chemical Facility Ant-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program was officially started on April 9th, 2007, when the interim final rule establishing the program took effect. Today, CISA started a web site to look at that 15-year history of the program. The first page of that site looks at the background of that IFR and the subsequent publication of the final rule and its accompanying DHS Chemicals of Interest (COI) in Appendix A to 6 CFR Part 27 in November 2007.
They note at towards the end of that page that:
“The publication of the CFATS Final Rule was just the beginning of our nation’s collective effort to secure dangerous chemicals at our highest-risk chemical facilities. From now through the end of the year, each month CISA will be highlighting important milestones in the history of the CFATS program. We’ll not only cover the impact these milestones had on the evolution of chemical security in the United States, but also the broader security landscape. We look forward to sharing more about the development of the CFATS program”.
I have been covering the development of the program since the publication of the §550 authorizing language for the program was included in the DHS FY 2007 spending bill in December 2006. I started that coverage in an early personal blog on the now defunct MySpace platform. On July 13th, 2007, I started the Chemical Facility Security News blog on the also defunct AOL Journals platform. In October of 2008, when AOL closed their Journals platform, I transferred Chemical Facility Security News to Google’s Blogspot.com platform where I have been publishing ever since.
While I have been supportive of the CFATS program from the onset. I have reported on most the activities that CISA will be covering in this series. In fact, I have been asked on a couple of occasions to discuss security issues in my blog as an outside sounding board. I have also called DHS to task on many occasions when I thought that they were dragging their feet or making missteps in implementing the program. As those issues are covered (or glossed over as the case may be) in this CISA look back I will provide links to those earlier posts for an outside view of the CFATS program history.
For example, here are some posts from that initial six months of the program (note: most of the internal links in these posts are now dead, I do not intend to change them at this point. Oh, Google transferred all of the AOL blog posts to their site when I moved to Blogspot.com):
7-23-07 DHS
CSAT Registration Change,
8-6-07 How
much is too much security?
8-11-07 First
Security Vulnerability Assessments to be done soon
9-9-07 DHS
adds Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page to website
9-12-07 DHS
responds to agriculture and propane industry complaints
9-24-07 How
do we know we are protected?
9-29-07 Slow
pace of CFATS implementation,
11-4-07 DHS
Revises Appendix A
Posts
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