This illustrates an serious problem in Homeland Security. Most of the Federal databases pertaining to terrorism are classified, so virtually all local first responders and their municipal planners have no access at all or access only to sanitized reports on an untimely basis. To gain reasonable "need to know" access they would need Federal security clearances they can't get without Federal status.
Compounding their problem is a lack of funding to do their own collection, analysis and database creation. Less than half of the municipal governments across the nation have received anti-terror funding from DHS. That is partially because DHS has been dividing up grant funds evenly between the states so Wyoming gets just as much as New York, California or Washington DC. Thus big states with lots of towns have little or no funds to send to many of them, so a few get cash to fund anti-terror projects; most starve. They have to turn to private sector non-profit entities, such as the one I help out with, in order to gain access to sensitive but unclassified databases on terrorist activities and accomplish other Homeland Security projects and training. That has created a whole cottage industry of "helpers" for the local municipality sector. And that is likely to continue for some time until DHS gets its funding and budgeting act together. Considering the confusion in the 2006 budget for DHS, that does not appear to be any time soon. Probably the conclusions of the report below will most likely languish in limbo for some time; especially in view of the high turnover of IT leadership in DHS. David Bier http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/technology/19computer.html? March 19, 2005 Study Criticizes Government on Cybersecurity Research By JOHN MARKOFF SAN FRANCISCO, March 18 - A report released Friday by a panel of computer experts criticizes the federal government, saying that its financing of research on computer network security is inadequate and that it is making a mistake by focusing on classified research that is inaccessible to the commercial sector. The report, commissioned by the Bush administration, calls for the government to spend $148 million annually on Internet security research through the National Science Foundation, over the current $58 million. It also urges more research spending by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, and by the Department of Homeland Security. The report, "Cybersecurity: A Crisis of Prioritization," was prepared by a subcommittee of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, a group of industry and university experts. Research in Internet security is needed to protect systems that run the government and military operations, as well as other areas, including the electric power grid, the air traffic control grid and financial systems, the report said. "The federal government is largely failing in its responsibility to protect the nation from cyberthreats," said Edward D. Lazowska, chairman of the computer science and engineering department at the University of Washington and co-chairman of the panel. "The Department of Homeland Security simply doesn't 'get' cybersecurity. They are allocating less than 2 percent of their science and technology budget to cybersecurity, and only a small proportion of this is forward-looking." Michelle Petrovich, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, disputed the criticism. "We take cybersecurity seriously and have taken aggressive measures to address various needs," she said. "Our cybersecurity budget has gone up every year." Peter Neumann, an independent computer scientist at SRI International, a research center in Menlo Park, Calif., said that both Congress and the Bush administration had been neglecting civilian Internet security research. "The problem is that there is no sense of the importance of research in this Congress or in this administration," said Mr. Neumann, who consults for the government. The panel also found that the Internet security research community was too small to meet a government goal of at least doubling the size of civilian Internet security researchers by the end of the decade. Fewer than 250 Internet security researchers are now at United States universities, largely because of unstable funding levels, the panel said. The authors argue that because universities have provided many crucial ideas, technologies and talent, both the civilian and the military sectors are likely to be hurt by the recent trend. The panel also criticized a recent shift, at both Darpa and the National Security Agency, toward short-term classified research over long-term academic research. The report found that efforts to transfer federal research to Internet security businesses were inadequate and that there was a basic absence of leadership and coordination. The authors recommended that a federal interagency group take responsibility for coordinating Internet security research. The report says the current commercial approach to security problems tends to consist of a series of patches. "Even if all the best practices were fully in place, in the absence of any fundamental new approaches we would still endlessly be patching and plugging holes in the dike," the report states. The report also lists 10 Internet security research priorities, including authentication technologies, secure protocols, improved engineering techniques, monitoring and detection tools and cyberforensics. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Give underprivileged students the materials they need to learn. Bring education to life by funding a specific classroom project. http://us.click.yahoo.com/FHLuJD/_WnJAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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