Critical Infrastructure Protection
Situation December 17, 2003 the President signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-7 on Critical Infrastructure Identification, Prioritization, and Protection. This directive established a national policy for Federal departments and agencies to identify and prioritize United States critical infrastructure and key resources and to protect them from terrorist attacks. It requires that Federal departments and agencies identify, prioritize, and coordinate the protection of critical infrastructure and key resources to prevent, deter, and mitigate the effects of deliberate efforts to destroy, incapacitate, or exploit them. Federal departments and agencies will work with State and local governments and the private sector to accomplish this objective. This is a consolidation and updating of the requirements in PDD-63 from 1998 and the Cyber and Physical Critical Infrastructure Protection Plans issued by the White House in February 2003.
Analysis For an attack to be successful it only has to cause disruption, not loss of life, to a significant number of Americans. An attack does not have to be national in scope. Disrupting power in a single large city, or halting the operation of one large bank nationwide would have dramatic repercussions far beyond the number of people directly affected. Such a focused attack would become an immediate, and perhaps overwhelming, distraction for our national leadership as they try to determine who carried it out, why they did it, and where they might strike next.
Solution System 1 supported the implementation of CIP efforts across the Federal Government and private sector. System 1 participated on several technical efforts within the Project Matrix team and has also supported the identification of critical assets, functions, and services for Federal agencies. We supported the updating of CIP Plans and oversight of CIP. System 1 has also actively supported the concept of operations between Federal communities (civilian agencies, law enforcement, intelligence, and the military) on sharing homeland security information and between the Government and private sector on reporting incident information.