Vital Systems Security

You just knew it had to be out there.

A report highly critical of ConEd’s performance in the Queens blackout has been released. Among many interesting dimensions of the report are: criticism of how emergency decisions get made about broader system shut-downs to prevent long-term damage to the network; the failure to assess system vulnerability in light of changing loads. The mis-estimation of the number of individuals affected is astonishing (ConEd was off by almost 100%). This along with the New York “smell” story — and the difficulty with identifying the source — are interesting indications of the state of preparedness for vital systems events in New York.

Read on for the NYT story on the ConEd report…
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In this February’s Harper’s, Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies heartily condemns the newly published Counterinsurgency Manual. Read the rest of this entry »

As the New York Times reports today, “Scientists infected monkeys with a virus that caused the 1918-19 influenza pandemic and said in the Jan. 18 issue of the journal Nature that it caused an illness like that suffered by patients with the bird flu now spreading in Asia.” Read the rest of this entry »

As the New York Times reports today, a strain of avian influenza H5N1 has been found in Egypt that is resistant to oseltamivir. This comes as no surprise, really. Other instances of resistance have already occurred in other places. It once again shows that the one-bug-one-drug approach is dangerous. Just as it is dangerous to focus exclusively on one specific virus, like H5N1…

As public health blog Effect Measure puts it, “It’s January and once again the bird flu news is unsettling.” Read the rest of this entry »

In her new book, “Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet,” Denise Caruso addresses the question how we should go about to properly assess “the risks of complex technical systems, given how little is known about them or how they interact with each other”. The author’s interest lies primarily with biotechnology, but the book might be interesting beyond that narrow topic. Read the rest of this entry »

The army has released General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency manual, including instructions on civilian-military integration (see sections on “Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan” and “Civil Operations and Rural Development Support in Vietnam”). Note also the definition of culture as a “web of meaning” (Section 3.36), the “muscle on the bones” of social structure.

At two recent press conferences, Chertoff explained the DHS risk management approach and talked about how critical infrastructure protection works. A snippet:
“So based on analysis that we have done through our infrastructure protection programs, we’ve identified a list of approximately a little over 2,000 individual national assets that have national or regional significance. These are truly the critical infrastructure across the entire country, and they reflect the kinds of things that you would imagine, in terms of power plants or dams that are located in an area in which an attack could have a regional or even a national impact. This does not include popcorn factories or hotdog stands or any of the stuff which came in for ridicule over the last year. It is a focused effort to put weight on those elements of infrastructure that represent something more than just the impact on population, but a regional or even a national impact.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg testified in Senate hearings today about the financing formulas for DHS funding. He has raised the same issues in prior hearings. The question is whether a new Congress means that these criticisms might actually go somewhere.