Guiding Principles For The Nation S Critical Infrastructure

The Critical Infrastructure Guidance Task Committee presents guiding principles to ensure quality in critical infrastructure systems that may involve multiple constituents, multiple jurisdictions, and complex financing.

The National Strategy for Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets serves as a critical bridge between the National Strategy for Homeland Security and a national protection plan to be developed by the Department of Homeland Security.

As Hurricane Katrina so forcefully demonstrated, the nation's critical infrastructures and key resources have been vulnerable to a wide variety of threats. Because about 85 percent of the nation's critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector, it is vital that the public and private sectors work together to protect these assets. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for coordinating a national protection strategy including formation of government and private sector councils as a collaborating tool. The councils, among other things, are to identify their most critical assets, assess the risks they face, and identify protective measures, in sector-specific plans that comply with DHS's National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP). GAO examined (1) the extent to which these councils have been established; (2) the key facilitating factors and challenges affecting the formation of the councils; and (3) the overall status of the plans and key facilitating factors and challenges encountered in developing them. GAO obtained information by reviewing key documents and conducting interviews with federal and private

In the face of increasing failures, comments attributed to Albert Einstein loom large: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” There is a pervasive feeling that any attempt to make sense of the current terrain of complex systems must involve thinking outside the box and originating unconventional approaches that integrate organizational, managerial, social, political, cultural, and human aspects and their interactions. This textbook offers research-based models and tools for diagnosing and predicting the behavior of complex techno-socio-economic systems in the domain of critical infrastructures, key resources, key assets and the open bazaar of space, undersea, and below-ground systems. These models exemplify emblematic models in physics, within which the critical infrastructures, as well as society itself and its paraphernalia, share the profile of many-body systems featuring cooperative phenomena and phase transitions – the latter usually felt as disruptive occurrences. The book and its models focus on the analytics of real-life-business actors, including policy-makers, financiers and insurers, industry managers, and emergency responders.

This publication defines the road ahead for a core mission area identified in the President's National Strategy for Homeland Security—reducing the Nation's vulnerability to acts of terrorism by protecting our critical infrastructures and key assets from physical attack. This publication, the National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets, the Strategy, identifies a clear set of national goals and objectives and outlines the guiding principles that will underpin our efforts to secure the infrastructures and assets vital to our national security, governance, public health and safety, economy, and public confidence. This Strategy also provides a unifying organization and identifies specific initiatives to drive our near-term national protection priorities and inform the resource allocation process. Most importantly, it establishes a foundation for building and fostering the cooperative environment in which government, industry, and private citizens can carry out their respective protection responsibilities more effectively and efficiently. This Strategy recognizes the many important steps that public and private entities across the country have taken in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks to improve the security of their critical facilities, systems, and functions. Building upon these efforts, this document provides direction to the federal departments and agencies that have a role in critical infrastructure and key asset protection. It also suggests steps that state and local governments, private sector entities, and concerned citizens across America can take to enhance our collective infrastructure and asset security. In this light, this Strategy belongs and applies to the Nation as a whole, not just to the federal government or its constituent departments and agencies.

Introduction to Infrastructure: An Introduction to Civil and Environmental Engineering breaks new ground in preparing civil and environmental engineers to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The authors use the infrastructure that is all around us to introduce students to civil and environmental engineering, demonstrating how all the parts of civil and environmental engineering are interrelated to help students see the "big picture" in the first or second year of the curriculum. Students learn not only the what of the infrastructure, but also the how and the why of the infrastructure. Readers learn the infrastructure is a system of interrelated physical components, and how those components affect, and are affected by, society, politics, economics, and the environment. Studying infrastructure allows educators and students to develop a valuable link between fundamental knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge, so students may translate their knowledge to new contexts. The authors' implementation of modern learning pedagogy (learning objectives, concrete examples and cases, and hundreds of photos and illustrations), and chapters that map well to the ABET accreditation requirements AND the ASCE Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge 2nd edition (with recommendations for using this text in a 1, 2, or 3 hour course) make this text a key part of any civil and/or environmental engineering curriculum.

This book is the complete guide to understanding the structure of homeland security – its underlying law and policy. Created from a broad and in depth, yet edited collection of statutes, policy papers, presidential directives, and other documents, it cultivates a detailed understanding of the foundations of homeland security. It is arranged in a topic-by-topic format structured to include only the documents and statues that affect a particular subject, making for much easier understanding. Thus, the chapter on FEMA contains only the portions of the statutes and other documents that relate to FEMA. There are twenty-five topic areas. It contains hundreds of end notes, references, and suggestions for further study. This book offers important legal guidance that students, law enforcement officers, lawyers, and other homeland security professionals need to accurately interpret, understand, and apply homeland security policy. The Introduction provides an in-depth overview of the subject of homeland security and includes a discussion of what is homeland security, definitions of homeland security and terrorism, what is homeland security law, its development, and what is a homeland security curriculum. There are contributing chapters about homeland security in Europe, and homeland security in China and Japan.