When Homeland Security Goes International: The CIP Program’s Next Chapter
BY EMILY FRYE
The Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Program began its work with a focus on protecting domestic infrastructures. However, many critical infrastructures are international in nature, and protection issues cross national boundaries. Banking, for example, now enjoys broadly interoperable systems across most developed economies; telecommunications are facilitated by undersea cables and satellites. Our energy infrastructure crosses multiple borders. Underpinning the global nature of most infrastructures is a common reliance on a digital infrastructure. Vulnerabilities in Japan, France, Korea, or Brazil can lead to identity theft or commercial fraud in the United States. Organized crime has become increasingly astute about using the anonymous nature of Internet traffic to pursue economic gain. Furthermore, crime perpetrated from a foreign country can be extremely difficult to prosecute. Most frightening is that terrorists appear to be gaining ground in the surreptitious use of digital-communications channels to seek materials for attack.
International infrastructures present a range of challenges. Most immediately, they present logistical challenges. People managing the global digital infrastructure speak myriad languages and operate under a variety of physical conditions. They also present governance challenges: everyone can participate in an open global network, but who is in charge of securing and maintaining the network? Who is responsible for setting operational and quality standards? Finally, international infrastructures present technical challenges. There are few people who understand the overall picture of any given infrastructure, and those few have not necessarily had opportunities to work together to strategize protective approaches.
In the past year, several of the CIP Program’s efforts have centered on international endeavors bringing related issues to the fore. For example, the CIP Program collaborated with the Center for Security Studies in Zurich, serving as the U.S. editor for the Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Handbook. In collaborating with the European publishers of the book, CIP Program staff members recognized that a small but talented group of internationals has begun to coalesce around CIP work. In the coming year, the CIP Program will begin to address some of the coordination and communication issues surrounding inter-national critical infrastructures.
Initially, the CIP Program seeks to identify and communicate with the international community of scholars working on critical infrastructure issues. The CIP Program aims to create a community of scholars and to bring them together at George Mason’s Arlington Campus in 2005.
Programmatically, CIP Program staff members are pursuing a flagship project and two conferences for the coming year. For some time, the program has contemplated building a database of international law related to critical infrastructure. The aim of such a knowledge-building exercise would be twofold: first, to assess the international level of awareness and common mentality around critical infrastructures; and second, to offer a search tool to interested professionals and policy makers in the arena. This year, the CIP Program is moving ahead with the tool. Due to the interesting synchronicity that often characterizes intellectual movements, the research tool has found an interested end-user in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which is building this critical data mass into a training tool for information professionals nationwide.
Over the next year, the CIP Program will also convene two conferences on pressing international issues. One will allow the identified international community of CIP scholars to convene and share their work, with a theme of “Security in Emerging Economies.” The second, scheduled for spring 2005, will focus on the impact of increasing offshore labor inputs into American products, particularly in software.
Concurrently, CIP Program staff members are coordinating with leading scholars and policy makers in the Washington, D.C., area as well as nationally to obtain feedback on priorities. The International Legal Database, two upcoming conferences, and these encounters with thought leaders will help shape a longer-term agenda for the CIP Program’s international agenda.
Emily Frye is associate director of George Mason University’s Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Program (http://www.law.gmu.edu/nctl/?q=techcenter/programs/cipp.html), housed within the university’s School of Law. The CIP Project integrates law, economics, policy, and technology disciplines to improve the security of physical and cyber networks, and to enhance the economic processes supporting critical infrastructure.
