Vital Systems Security

Yesterday news sources were announcing that the Army Corps of Engineers had made available, online, findings from its post-Katrina risk and reliability reports on New Orleans. The site is well worth a look, in part because the technology is cool. They have made flood map data available in a format that can be read by google earth, so “citizens” can choose a neighborhood in New Orleans, and then view flood maps for 50, 100, and 500 year events pre- and post-Katrina (the latter taking into account improved flood control installed since the hurricane).

These kinds of flood maps have been produced by the Army Corps for a long time, and they are crucial to contingency planning for agencies like FEMA (now part of DHS). Part of what is interesting here, however, is the explicit emphasis on making such maps publicly available so that “citizens”, as the report notes, “can make risk-informed decisions.” There is, as I have written in the past, a long history of efforts to make individual citizens take greater account of natural catastrophe risk in their decisions about where to build or buy houses. The 1968 Federal Flood Insurance Act was intended precisely to create a technology through which insurance companies would “price” the risk of flood, so that this risk would be built into housing costs through insurance premiums. The new technology, however, has afforded an apparently more direct way to communicate this information. One wonders, however, about the conflicting incentives created by federal programs aimed at New Orleans. One of the conditions for receiving federal aid is that one must live in your house (previously damaged by floods) for a period of time. The political pressure to promote reconstruction may come into conflict with the desire to govern citizens through their calculative decisions about flood risk.

A series by this name can be found here, assembled by the Federation of American Scientists. They also have a “strategic security blog” that might be worth a look. The case studies are particularly interesting — each is a kind of teaching module with information about the biology of the experiment and the pathogen in the case, some information about public reaction, and interviews with scientists involved.

In today’s Times David Brooks discusses a forum at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia on post-Bush foreign policy, which can be seen on video here. I have not had a chance to look at it in detail yet, and may report more when I do. Brooks sees a basic division in the participants, which he discussed through two exemplary figures. John Ikenberry presents what is curiously called a “milieu-based” approach (this seems to be Ikenberry’s word, not Brooks), where the U.S. works to strengthen international organizations that will work on problems like health care and poverty, as well as security. He seems to be proposing a kind of hybrid accommodation between population security and sovereign state security of the type seen after World War II. Robert Kagen, meanwhile, insists on the realist view of a “world of competing nations vying for power.” Classic sovereign state security. In any case, the videos seem very much worth watching as an index of where at least some of the more academically inclined foreign policy and security intellectuals are on these issues.

A recent series of NY Times articles has tracked novel risks emerging from the global food and drug supply chain. China, as has been mentioned before, seems to be the key source of threat. The major issue is that given the complexities of the supply chain (and the practice of erasing the original suppliers in order to protect the middleman) there is no way of tracking where ingredients come from - such as glycerin in toothpaste - and so if it turns out that there are dangerous counterfeit supplies, it is impossible to locate and punish the offending supplier. From the vantage of VSS, what is significant is both the sense that a global food and drug supply system generates novel risks, and the emerging demand to regulate this “global pipeline” of pharmaceutical and food ingredients. Developing a reliable tracking system will be a crucial step. There are similarities here to the solution proposed by Stephen Flynn to the problem of the uncertain origin of shipping containers - or to current European efforts to track the origins of GM foods, as described in this article by Javier Lezaun.

William J. Perry, Ashton B. Carter and Michael M. May write an Op-Ed in today’s Times about the prospect of nuclear terrorism. The threat of a bomb going off in an American city, they write, is “incalculable,” but higher than it was five years ago. Their argument recalls arguments of the early Cold War: we must find ways to make this unthinkable event thinkable.

All familiar stuff. But there is an important difference. In the early Cold War, the questions was whether the United States could survive a nuclear attack: whether it would have the capacity to launch a second strike, and whether the “vital nodes” of the industrial system would be destroyed. But now, these authors note, the prospect of nuclear terrorism does not threaten our entire system: “After all,” they argue, even in the event of a nuclear detonation “the underlying equation would remain a few terrorists acting against all the rest of us, and even nuclear weapons need not undermine our strong societies.”

The biggest threats, rather, concern auto-immune response: the instinct to immediately strike whatever country was the “source” of the material; the instinct to undermine the constitutional structure of U.S. government. It is to forestall these responses — and, of course, to minimize the loss of human life — that , they argued, preparedness planning is necessary.

One of the interesting commentators on the recently disrupted plot to blow up the fuel lines that supply JFK is Michael Boyd, an aviation security expert who is head of the Boyd Group, a security consulting firm. He shows up frequently on the news shows, and has an interesting analysis on his website that makes a number of points relevant to VSS. First, he notes that expressions of surprise on the part of officials and the misconceptions about the potential devastation from a blast (the whole pipeline is very unlikely to blow up) indicate a lack of understanding and anticipatory thinking about an attack on an obvious target like a fuel line. Second, and perhaps more interesting from our perspective, is that the emphasis has been placed on blast damage itself rather than the effects of taking out the fuel source for a vital system like aviation. But the “vital systems” dimension of the threat, he claims, is the important one:

Jet fuel pipelines are the supply arteries to the air transportation system. Cut any substantial part of it, and air transport goes into a tail spin. It’s not rocket science. Any comprehensive, professional airport vulnerability analysis would illuminate it. But that’s miles from anything done by Homeland Security, an organization run at the top by W’s buddies and other political appointees. Planning comprehensive, aggressive, and anticipative security programs is light years beyond their ability. The reaction to this latest plot proves it.

He continues to argue that the vulnerabilities of the aviation system are linked to specific features of the fuel delivery infrastructure:

So if the existing jet fuel pipelines are destroyed - say, in a plot to attack five or six major hubsite airports - the air transportation system could literally begin to shut down within days. That’s because, again, there is no adequate alternative system that can deliver fuel to these major airports in the event the pipelines are damaged or destroyed. Tanker trucks? Nope - there’s nowhere near any such excess truck capacity at major cities to funnel, say, one million gallons of jet-A, every day to a mid-size hub airport. Even if the existing inventory of tanker rolling stock could be immediately diverted and converted to supplying jet fuel to airports, it would leave gas stations high and dry, not to mention, if it’s winter, nobody to deliver heating oil.

Another thinker of vital systems.

I ran rather accidentally into two further examples of attempts to create what might be called “immanent surveillance systems” — in other words, systems that are engineered to produce information about themselves as they function, or in which the parts are self-surveilling. Both are Berkeley based. One is a project by a graduate student named R.J. Honicky in the computer science department. His dissertation project, as he describes it, is to build “a societal scale, distributed scientific instrument by integrating evironmental sensors (such as carbon monoxide) into location aware cell phones.” The basic idea is that sensors on cell phones would record environmental data and send it back via SMS (along with a geographic marker) to a centralized database. His thinking lies at an interesting conjuncture of surveillance and data management, on the one hand, and what he calls “participatory urbanism” on the other.

The other morsel was from Kris Pister, a professor of electrical engineering working on dust sensors. Here is a rather old article on the concept of using dust sensors to create energy-aware buildings. Pister also consults with a company called Dust Networks that is a (self-proclaimed, anyway) “leader in the wireless sensor networking market.” The applications include energy efficiency and, as one might imagine, defense and security.