With 87 percent of Maryland?s critical infrastructure ? nuclear power and chemical plants, banks, utilities, telecommunications companies, etc. ? in private hands, the Governor?s Office of Homeland Security is tapping 50volunteer businesses from 17 critical infrastructure sectors to expedite office access to proprietary information likely needed during a national or regional emergency.
“The structure [of the overall task force] is to work alongside the federal Department of Homeland Security to protect [the state?s] critical infrastructure, which has many components,” said Mel Blizzard of the state office of domestic preparedness and law enforcement liaison.
“The system that we put into place is an oversight committee, [which] involves three people to review our processes; a steering committee, which is the operational work group that develops the operational procedures to push the program forward; and, more importantly … the private-sector component.”
The private-sector group ? known as the Private Sector Work Group ? works bimonthly in public-private partnership with the Critical Infrastructure Protection Program task force to resolve issues of sensitive information swapping and, in time of emergency or shut-down, to securely convey critical notices to authorized area businesses.
The process has legal top cover from the federal Homeland Security Act of 2002, which, among other things, exempts protected critical infrastructure information from disclosure through federal Freedom of Information Act filings. Maryland was the first state in the union to be certified as compliant under this law.
Reservations, however, remain among work group participants reluctant to share terrorist-assisting ? and possibly competitor-coveted ? information about their infrastructure vulnerabilities, and the partnership is designed to install protections and reassure members.
“I?ll be honest with you,” Blizzard said. “We?re still working out a lot of issues. … One company doesn?t want another company … to know their trade secrets or their vulnerabilities. … We look at issues such as what information we can share and can?t share. We look at it from [inter-sector and] sector-specific [standpoints]. … We?re at a point where some [companies] are [sharing the information].”
Blizzard would not identify any of the businesses on the work group, but one noncritical organization onboard is the Baltimore-based, 500-business member Greater Baltimore Committee.
“We?re encouraging our members to cooperate, but we?re also representing business interests when it comes to homeland security,” GBC Director of Communications Gene Bracken said. “We try to be problem-solvers … but my understanding is that it?s very early in the process.”
