DSBlog

The White House has approved the first edition of its new National Preparedness Goal (NPG), one of several interagency documents called for in Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8) on National Preparedness.

PPD-8 was released in March, followed by its Implementation Plan in May (our analyses can be found here and here). Next up after the NPG is a National Preparedness System due in late November.

We will analyze the NPG in an upcoming post. Meanwhile, we’d like to hear your thoughts on it. About a month ago, the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided a short window for public comment on the NPG; if it does likewise for the NPS we will let everyone know.

View the National Preparedness Goal here.

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

Should governments pursue the cyber-space equivalent of the Cold War era’s doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or a similar form of deterrence?

At the Brookings Institution today, two experts debated the cases for and against cyber-deterrence. Dmitri Alperovitch, a former vice president at McAfee and author of the recent report Revealed: Operation Shady RAT, faced off against Ralph Langner, who led the team that cracked the code revealing the Stuxnet malware’s final target in Iran.

According to a Brookings summary of the discussion, Alperovitch presented a case “for a strategic declaratory deterrence policy to counter highly destructive cyber threats from nation-state actors against critical infrastructure and other crucial national security and economic assets.” (This sounds similar in some ways to what the White House declared in early summer.) Langner, on the other hand, argued “that deterrence is unlikely to prevent intense cyber war and cyber-terrorist attacks because they can be carried out by small international teams and prepared months or years in advance. He also [pointed] out cyber attacks against critical infrastructure and terrorist targets such as chemical facilities and nuclear power plants can and must be prevented by solid cyber protection.”
             
In a subsequent interview with a Washington Post blogger, Langner noted: “The bigger problem that we have with Stuxnet is not the virus itself – it is that various exploits used in Stuxnet can be copied and can be used against targets .... These systems remain vulnerable. These systems cannot only be found somewhere in Iran – they can also be found, for example, in U.S. power plants, chemical facilities, in production facilities for food and beverages, et cetera.”

To listen to a podcast of the Brookings debate (one hour and 20 minutes), click here.

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

The recent outbreak of listeriosis, which has been traced to cantaloupes from Colorado, is shaping up to be the deadliest food-borne outbreak in the U.S. in years, with the death toll expected to continue mounting through next month.

Already, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a nationwide warning for consumers to avoid fruit “marketed as cantaloupes harvested in the Rocky Ford region” of Colorado.

The CDC reports that since mid-August, “15 persons infected with the outbreak strain of Listeria monocytogenes have been reported from 4 states.” The agency is coordinating a multi-state investigation along with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and several state and local health agencies, and it says “listeriosis illnesses in several other states are currently being investigated… to determine if these illnesses are part of this outbreak.” (The map below shows the number of infected individuals identified so far in each state.)

By pure coincidence, the listeria bacteria were starting to spread just as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report entitled Actions Needed to Improve Response to Potential Terrorist Attacks and Natural Disasters Affecting Food and Agriculture, part of its mandate under the 2004 Homeland Security Policy Directive (HSPD) -9, which established a national policy to defend U.S. food and agriculture systems against terrorist attacks, major disasters and other emergencies.

In the report and in subsequent testimony on Capitol Hill, GAO reported that there is no centralized coordination or oversight of progress on HSPD-9 implementation across relevant agencies such as DHS, USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As a result, “the nation may not be assured that these crosscutting agency efforts are effective at reducing the vulnerability to, and impact of, major emergencies” involving the U.S. food and agriculture sector.

GAO made nine recommendations, among them:

• To help ensure that the federal government is effectively implementing the nation’s food and agriculture defense policy, the Secretary of Homeland Security should resume DHS’s efforts to coordinate agencies’ overall HSPD-9 implementation efforts.
• To help ensure that the federal government is effectively implementing the nation’s food and agriculture defense policy, the [White House] Homeland Security Council should direct the National Security Staff to establish an interagency process that would provide oversight of agencies’ implementation of HSPD-9.
• To help ensure that the federal government is effectively implementing the nation’s food and agriculture defense policy, the Homeland Security Council should direct the National Security Staff to encourage agencies to participate in and contribute information to DHS’s efforts to coordinate agencies’ implementation of HSPD-9.

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the anthrax attacks that closely followed 9/11, it’s worth remembering that nature can dole out far higher casualty numbers than most terrorists, and do so with some regularity (see H1N1, H5N1, etc.).

On this subject, the blog Visual News came across an interesting graphic (click on the image below to enlarge) called Outbreak: Deadliest Pandemics in History, which “details the ten deadliest pandemics both past and present, with a key explaining normal symptoms, estimated death tolls and the years they ravaged the world.”

Since we’re big on data visualization and maps and such, we’ve also made Visual News the newest addition to our Sites We Like (right). Thanks to Homeland Security Watch blog for pointing them out.

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Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.