Review - ChemLock Training

In addition to the chemical security fact sheets that I discussed last week, CISA’s new voluntary ChemLock program also provides chemical facilities with free chemical security training. These are designed to help chemical facilities not covered by the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program to establish a voluntary chemical security program. The list of free training programs now includes:

ChemLock: Introduction to Chemical Security, and

ChemLock: Secure Your Chemicals Security Planning

These two programs are designed to help facilities begin the development of their voluntary ChemLock facility security program. Future training programs may address other components of that security program.

Not Security Awareness Training

Neither of these two courses address chemical security awareness training for chemical facility personnel. There is a training course offered by FEMA via their Center for Domestic Preparedness. The 1-hour on-line course is primarily set up for independent study and requires an easy to obtain FEMA Student ID number. Facilities developing a ChemLock voluntary security program or are covered under the CFATS program may find that this training program for individuals would provide a good starting point for a facility chemical awareness training program.

Moving Forward

Facilities wishing to participate in these two ChemLock training programs should complete the ChemLock Services Request Form. Facilities wishing further information about these training programs or other facets of the ChemLock program should contact OCS by email at ChemLock@cisa.dhs.gov.

For more details about the training programs being offered by CISA, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/chemlock-training - subscription required.

 

Security Awareness Training

I didn’t spend much time on-line this weekend, but I did run across an interesting Tweet last night. It came from GSNGovtSecNews with a link to their article on a recent DHS information collection request submission (that I discussed here last week) for a security awareness training program. The Tweet added this comment:

“DHS thinks that online training for 47% of all chemical workers makes sense. Critics might disagree. What do YOU [think]…”

The article at GSNMagazine.com provides a very brief description of the ICR renewal notice that was posted in the Federal Register last week. Unfortunately, the author makes two errors of omission; failing to note that the ICR is a renewal for a program that has been running since 2007 and failing to note that the training is ‘security awareness’ training as opposed to ‘security training’.

Those two omissions clearly lead to the silly statement in the tweet. If the authors (I’m assuming different authors for the article and the Tweet) had taken the time to take the on-line training they would have seen that it is a generic-chemical-facility security-awareness interactive training program. While some trainers (myself included) would argue that a facility-specific program would be much more effective, it is simply not cost effective for such training programs to be developed for the vast majority of the chemical facilities in the United States.

As I said in a blog two years ago:

“The scenarios are well crafted and represent some common techniques used in surveillance and information collection activities leading up to a potential attack. This is not an exhaustive coverage of those techniques, but it is well suited to the average employee.”

I certainly recommend that anyone concerned with security training at high-risk facilities review this training program and figure out how to best integrate it into their facilities security training. I would still like to see the Chemical Sector Specific Agency adopt a version of this for group training, but for many facilities an on-line individual-based instruction methodology makes eminent sense.