Homeland Security Focus Areas

Critical Infrastructure Protection

Proposed Marine Surveillance System Could Boost Homeland Security

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced legislation on 15 July that would establish a national ocean observation system, which, in addition to aiding ocean research, could have significant homeland security applications. The Ocean and Coastal Observation Systems Act (S. 1400), which also includes funds to "implement a research and development program to enhance security at U.S. ports," makes "hundreds of millions" of dollars available to the Coast Guard, Navy, and other federal agencies in the next five years to develop the system, according to a statement by Sen. Snowe and the Homeland Security Reporter. The ocean observation system would be based on a prototype, called GoMOOS, Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System, which makes real-time data collected from a network of buoys, radars and satellites available to users on the Internet. A new Joint Operations Center involving at least half a dozen agencies would monitor the system and incorporate new technologies and research into the system as they are developed. Other sponsors of the bill include Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina).

ANALYSIS: The bill's proponents maintain that it will have various homeland security applications that will directly and indirectly enhance port security and might even provide a measure of bioterrorism protection. A high-frequency radar that tracks ocean currents, which is being incorporated into the GoMOOS prototype this year, could be used to monitor large ships offshore, the Portland Press Herald" reported. "If you know the direction in which the currents are flowing, you can predict where toxins go...whether those toxins are introduced intentionally by terrorists or whether they're naturally occurring," said Phillip Bogden, CEO of GoMOOS. If the bill is passed by Congress, Larry Atkinson of OceanUS, in Arlington, VA estimated that the ocean observation system could become operation between 2010 or 2015.

From the "Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security Daily," 16 July:

Former White House Counterterror Chief Blasts Bush Policy

Rand Beers told National Public Radio’s Juan Williams that 'voluntary' security measures for chemical and nuclear power plants don’t work.

• Listen to the Morning Edition interview

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE

July 11, 2003 - 5:52 p.m.
FCC Consolidates Security Programs in New Homeland Security Office
by Amy Menefee, Special to CQ Homeland Security

The Federal Communications Commission has created a new office within its enforcement branch to coordinate the agency's homeland security programs and is proposing to develop a formal pact with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to ensure the security of the communications infrastructure.
The primary mission of the FCC's Office of Homeland Security, according to agency spokesman Richard Diamond, is to make sure the nation's communications infrastructure is "there and working in the event of an emergency" - for public safety workers and the public.
Getting information to the public during an emergency will be a priority of the office, as will seeing that public safety workers are equipped with state of the art technology.
The new office will be headed by James Dailey, a 31-year FCC veteran,
According to an FCC homeland security "action plan" published July 11, the agency also plans to push for the international adoption of standards for protecting and restoring communications in the event of an emergency.
Those standards were developed largely by the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council (NRIC), a panel that advises the FCC on policy decisions.
The NRIC was formed in 1993 after a series of widespread service outages. It was rechartered in 2002 and charged with focusing on homeland security issues.
FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell, in a June 27 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, said his agency can "in effect deliver to DHS and its existing Telecommunications Sector Coordinators a coherent, ready-to-use best practices program for the telecom industry as well as first-hand knowledge of the current state of the industry."
In return, Powell said, DHS "can significantly augment the FCC's efforts to establish best practices awareness programs, bringing expertise in developing and implementing outreach campaigns that promote Homeland Security."
Powell said he hopes to sign a formal memorandum of agreement with Ridge by the end of the summer.

July 10, 2003
Panel chair will push for cybersecurity standards in private sector
By Ted Leventhal, National Journal's Technology Daily

A House subcommittee chairman on Thursday called the nation's preparations to defend against an attack on its computer networks "simply not acceptable" and vowed to offer legislation by the end of the year mandating computer-security standards for the private sector.
Florida Republican Adam Putnam, chairman of the Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology offered that criticism at an e-government conference jointly sponsored by the Business Software Alliance and Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Texas Republican Pete Sessions, vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cyber Security, and Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on that panel, echoed Putnam's point. They also said key immigration databases are not networked, leaving the nation vulnerable to infiltration by terrorists.
"We want to begin the [legislative] process before a major disaster happens," Putnam said. The bills on the issue will be "a meaningful approach to securing cyber architecture."
Putnam said he came to the issue with an open mind and was not predisposed toward "knee-jerk regulation." But he said the consistent failure of businesses to secure their networks warrants congressional action. "It is incumbent on the private sector to get their house in order," he said.
He also criticized the Bush administration and Congress for not taking the issue seriously. "There's a lack of attention and understanding by Congress and the administration as to the serious nature of the threat," he said. "It's not as sexy or engaging as protecting against the terrorist threat to airplanes or the Brooklyn Bridge."
He reserved special criticism for the security of federal computer networks, noting that all of them had failed annual security audits. "As much as I place blame on the federal government, much of the blame is due Congress," he said. "We are not exercising the level of oversight that we should have" over the government's technology purchases and security operations.
Lofgren and Sessions said their committee will hold hearings during the next weeks to take testimony from private-sector computer-security experts.
"I think many aspects of the government related to security are in the dark ages," Lofgren said. "Until we get technology deployed in the immigration area, we will be highly vulnerable." A "watch list" of potential terrorists has not been deployed, she added, and 100 key immigration databases cannot communicate with each other.
She noted that confusion about immigration policy has kept out the United States foreign students who otherwise will pursue higher education in Europe.
"Fifty-three percent of the universities in America reported that foreign students missed their first semester due to immigration problems," she said. "We are shooting ourselves in the foot if we allow the best minds in the world to go to Germany or France instead."
"It was inconceivable to me that 10 weeks after the [Sept. 11, 2001,] attacks the government admitted for citizenship two of the terrorists who were on those planes," Sessions added. That showed that on the issue of security, government was "completely asleep at the wheel."

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - WEAPONS
July 9, 2003 - 7:26 p.m.
Despite New Problems, Energy Department Won't Take Over California Nuclear Lab Security
By Martin Edwin Andersen, CQ Staff Writer

The Energy Department will not take over the on-site protection of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the top-secret nuclear weapons research facility near San Francisco, despite security lapses at the lab as recently as July 4.
DOE "is not going to take over lab security, but rather keep an eye on things there," said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the department's National Nuclear Security Administration.
The lab is operated for the Energy Department by the University of California, which manages all of the facility's operations, including security.
In May, a team of senior NNSA officials headed by veteran intelligence specialist Glenn Podonsky, who Wilkes described as "sort of DOE's IG for security," was sent to Livermore to probe security there following disclosures that a set of security keys and an electronic access card had been lost for several weeks before lab security officials reported them missing.
The keys opened as many as 3,000 locks at the lab. Livermore officials did not change even the most important locks for more than two weeks after the keys went missing.
Wilkes admitted that at the time the Podonsky mission traveled to California DOE officials debated whether the lapses warranted direct department intervention.
However, Podonsky's elite team, which reported directly to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, determined that the lab's security problems involved mid-level managers "who did not report things that should be reported," as well as inadequate procedures for correcting security deficiencies.
The problem with the managers, Wilkes said, was resolved by "personnel actions" that, according to previous press reports, included several 10-day suspensions without pay and the retirement of one of those involved.
Podonsky, he added, "verified that the [inadequate] procedures were being corrected and that lab and NNSA site managers were taking aggressive action to ensure that the root causes were appropriately corrected."
In a separate interview, Wilkes told the Contra Costa Times, a local California paper, that there was "no indication at this point that any property loss or security compromise" took place in the May incidents.
The decision not to move against the Livermore lab was announced even as Linton Brooks, NNSA administrator, ordered a series of stepped up security measures be taken at the lab, and its sister University of California-run institution, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The announcement also came as CQ Homeland Security reported an incident during the Fourth of July holiday involving a security gate that lab sources say was left "wide open," but which lab officials say was "ajar" for no more than an hour.
Sources at the lab, the repository of some of the most tightly-held secrets about the U.S. nuclear weapons program, said on July 7 that one of the lab's four vehicle perimeter gates was found "wide open" before noon on Independence Day and may have been open from 6 p.m. the previous day.
However, Susan Houghton, an LLNL spokeswoman, said Tuesday morning those sources exaggerated the incident.
Houghton said that the eastern gate door was left "ajar" - not "open" - for no more than an hour and that the culprit was nothing more sinister than strong winds.
The gate is near the LLNL visitors' center, which Houghton said "is one of the most open areas [at the lab] to begin with."
She said her version of the incident is supported by videotape from nearby security cameras. One well-placed source, however, hotly disputed that account, asserting the security cameras typically do not operate around the clock and would not be activated merely by the opening of the gate.
The source also questioned Houghton's use of the term "ajar", saying locking mechanisms prevent gates from lying partially open. Citing security reasons, he declined to elaborate on the gates' design.
There also are conflicting reports about whether lab managers reported the incident to the Energy Department.
Houghton told CQ Homeland Security the incident involving the gate -which she downplayed as forming part of "one of the first levels of security" at LLNL - was not reported to the Department of Energy because "it was not a reportable incident ... it doesn't meet the requirements for reporting."
But Wilkes, the NNSA spokesman, said early Wednesday afternoon that the incident was indeed reported to department officials - on Tuesday morning.
"Our site office was informed of this," he said, adding he was told the gate was "opened for just several hours."
Wilkes said there is no evidence the lab's security was breached by the open gate, as lab officials reviewing the cameras found that "nobody had gone near the fence in camera range."
In view of Brooks' announcement Tuesday, Wilkes said, "we certainly are going to be taking a hard look at Livermore the more these things happen."
In this case, he added, Livermore officials "did the right thing" in reporting last week's incident.

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - WEAPONS
July 8, 2003 - 7:21 p.m.
Energy Department Balks at Moving Plutonium From Los Alamos Canyon
By Martin Edwin Andersen, CQ Staff Writer

The relocation of bomb-grade nuclear materials away from an area of the Los Alamos National Laboratory considered most vulnerable to terrorist attack has been "temporarily" halted by a Department of Energy official who said the project would cost "in excess of" $310 million.
The plan had marked the first agency effort since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to move vulnerable nuclear materials to a safer location.
In a June 20th memorandum announcing the cancellation of the project, Everet H. Beckner, deputy administrator for defense programs at DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), said the costs associated with moving plutonium and bomb-grade uranium from Los Alamos' controversial Technical Area (TA)-18 to an underground facility at the Nevada Test Site were "excessive and unsupportable."
Beckner pointed out that earlier estimates suggested that $100 million was needed to do the job.
A copy of the memorandum was provided to CQ Homeland Security by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based public interest group.
Laying on the floor of a steep canyon, TA-18 has been identified by security experts as the part of the Los Alamos complex that is most vulnerable to terrorist attack.
The facility contains several nuclear reactors and tons of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.
In 2002, TA-18 failed a mock terrorist force-on-force test in which the intruders, had they been real attackers, would have been able to leave the facility with bomb-grade nuclear materials.
The flunked test was the latest in a series of security failures at the site documented in preparedness simulation reports.
Both the Bush and Clinton administrations have ordered the relocation of all weapons-grade nuclear materials and missions from TA-18 to the Nevada Test Site's Device Assemble Facility, but the Energy Department has thus far refused to comply.
Danielle Brian, POGO's executive director, took issue with using the trebled cost-estimates, provided by already hostile Los Alamos and DOE officials, as a reason for stalling the relocation project.
In previous DOE evaluations concerning the relocation of the TA-18 materials, she said, the only DOE office to recommend against moving the material was NNSA's Office of Defense Programs. Nine other DOE offices said TA-18 was an unsuitable storage site.
Defense Programs officials, she said, have now come up with the much higher cost estimates cited by Beckner.
Brian charged that hostile Los Alamos management and "lower level DOE bureaucrats" had been "dragging their feet every step of the way - and this memo proves it."
"Two Administrations have ordered the removal of special nuclear materials from Technical Area-18 because the site is so vulnerable to terrorist attack," Brian said. "It is extraordinary that parochial pride has been able to trump homeland security requirements for this long."
A senior Capitol Hill aide told CQ Homeland Security the Energy Department's refusal to move the material is unacceptable.
"TA-18 is one facility that clearly cannot be protected, period," the aide said. "They've failed every [security] test they've ever done, always coming up with compensatory measures afterwards that they say will fix the problem but never do, either because they are not implemented, or because they don't work.
"This is a lesson Los Alamos could have learned from the cowboys and Indians: it's hard to protect yourself when you are surrounded by a canyon--Gen. [George Armstrong] Custer found that out," he added. "If DOE can't get this [relocating TA-18] done, it shows that they can't do anything responsible."

Security Lapses at US Nuclear Weapons Laboratories Prompt DOE Security Overhaul

The failure by US nuclear weapons laboratories to prevent security breaches and an estimated two to five years needed by the labs to upgrade security measures prompted Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Spencer Abraham to initiate a "comprehensive security overhaul," according to press reports. A 24 June Government Accounting Office (GAO) report, which detailed the security lapses, stated that "it cannot be assured" that nuclear weapons labs' security teams "are working to maximum advantage to protect critical facilities and material from individuals seeking to inflict damage." Representative Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut) said, "The stern new realities of the post Sept. 11 world have been far too slow to penetrate the hardened bureaucratic maze of DOE offices, contractors, and (weapons) sites," Associated Press reported.

ANALYSIS: In what has been called "a laundry list of horror stories" by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), including stolen keys, computers, and radioactive materials at the nuclear weapons labs, the vulnerability of radioactive materials at US nuclear weapons labs could jeopardize security funding as well as efforts to prevent weapons of mass destruction from illegally entering the United States. Secretary Abraham stated that the new security overhaul will "put in place any immediate changes" necessary to stop-gap security vulnerabilities, according to a DOE statement. He added, "In light of recent security incidents at the labs, the administrator's plan for improved security must be aggressive and far-reaching, and must ensure greater accountability and confidence that corrective action will occur." While acknowledging it will take some time to upgrade security at the nation's nuclear weapons facilities, National Nuclear Security Administration head, Linton Brooks estimated that the security enhancements will be in place before the GAO's estimation of two to five years, AP reported.

NRC to Require All Nuclear Power Plants to Test Security Against "Commandos"

Starting next year, all US nuclear power plants will have to test their new robust defenses, implemented since the terrorist attacks of 11 September, against attacks by commando-style forces, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) disclosed recently. The NRC has trained forces to probe the security measures as well as security forces of nuclear power plants. The director of the NRC's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, Roy Zimmerman, said the commission is working to test plant security forces under more realistic conditions. He told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that "force-on-force" drills will be scheduled "every three years rather than every eight years." He also told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that not only will all of the nation's 103 commercial nuclear power plants be required to participate in these new training exercises, they will also be graded. About six power plants have voluntarily had their security forces matched against the NRC-trained "commandos."

ANALYSIS: The NRC issued an order on 29 April to change the design basis threat (DBT), which outlines what types of attacks the industry should be prepared for. The changes in the DBT were used to design the new force-on-force training exercises. While the NRC's Zimmerman would not disclose which of the plants volunteered for the exercises, he said of their performance, "They've got a ways to go," the Plain Dealer quoted him as saying, adding, "We will need more guns, gates and guards." Utilities have spent over $370 million on security upgrades since the 11 September attacks, a 29 June Associated Press report cited Steve Kerekes of the Nuclear Energy Institute as saying. Thus, there has been resistance to spending more on security under the new training exercise program. However, the Plain Dealer said NRC Commissioner Edward McGaffigan "rejected as 'horse manure' an industry proposal to use sophisticated computer modeling known as 'probablistic risk assessment' to determine the overall chances of a terrorist attack having any real impact."

June 24, 2003
Critics say management flaws jeopardize security at nuclear labs
By Amelia Gruber

Management problems at the Energy Department have prevented the agency from effectively ensuring the security of nuclear facilities, government watchdog groups and lawmakers said Tuesday.
The Energy Department took too long to modify its plan for protecting nuclear laboratories in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Robin Nazzaro, director of the General Accounting Office’s natural resources and environment team. In addition, the National Nuclear Security Administration, created by Congress in 2000 as a semi-autonomous agency within Energy, lacks a clear management structure and its site offices are understaffed, Nazzaro said.
“As a result, neither the Energy Department nor the NNSA can yet provide reasonable assurance [that] weapons-grade material is protected against a determined, well-trained adversary force willing to die in a nuclear detonation or radiological dispersion,” said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, at a Tuesday hearing.
Energy and NNSA need stronger management practices in order to keep an eye on contractors such as the University of California, which runs Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, according to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a Washington-based watchdog group. A POGO investigation recently revealed that Los Alamos failed to tell Energy Department officials that two grams of weapons-grade plutonium have been missing from the lab since 2001.
In a June 18 statement http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/news/releases/archive/03-081.shtml, Los Alamos Director George “Pete” Nanos acknowledged the missing plutonium but said the incident is no cause for concern. The “material has scientific and analytical research value, but is in a low hazard and threat category” he explained. POGO claims this quantity of plutonium is enough to pose a serious safety threat and the group said that Energy Department procedures require notification if more than half a gram of plutonium goes unaccounted for.
NNSA could better monitor the University of California and other nuclear facility contractors if the agency clarified the managers’ responsibilities and the chain of command, Nazzaro said. Confusion about duties has created a situation where NNSA managers conduct spotty and inconsistent evaluations of contractors’ compliance with government safety regulations, she said. A lack of security experts at the agency’s nine site offices, which are responsible for overseeing contractors, has contributed to the problem.
Energy issued a revised “design basis threat,” a strategy for preventing security breaches at nuclear labs, in May, nearly two years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Until May, the department operated under a 1999 strategy that was “obsolete” and underestimated the strength and capabilities of terrorist organizations, Nazzaro said.
Even though the Energy Department finalized its revised design basis threat a month ago, the plan will not be reflected in budget requests until fiscal 2006 and it may take nuclear facilities two to five years to “fully implement, test, validate and refine strategies for meeting [its] requirements,” Nazzaro testified. This timeframe is too long, according to Shays.
“The stern new realities of the post-Sept. 11 world have been far too slow to penetrate the hardened bureaucratic maze of Energy Department offices, contractors and sites,” he said.
Energy has enhanced security at nuclear facilities significantly since Sept. 11 and has hired additional staff to accommodate the increased workload, Glenn Podonsky, director of the department’s office of independent oversight and performance assurance, told lawmakers. But NNSA still lacks full staffing at some site offices, he acknowledged. A recent reorganization at the agency may help clarify managers’ contractor oversight responsibilities, he said.
Linton Brooks, undersecretary for nuclear security at NNSA, added that the agency has conducted “numerous” internal and independent evaluations of security at nuclear labs. These evaluations have included on-site inspections and have “verified that the overall security posture is strong” he said. “While we have made progress, we know that we can make additional improvements.”
Brought to you by GovExec.com

House Members' Visit to Port Highlights Challenges to Security

Six members of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security toured the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on 21 June and were "struck by the enormous [security] challenge ahead of us," the Chairman of the Committee, Representative Christopher Cox (R-California), told the Los Angeles Times. Aboard U.S. Coast Guard ships and law enforcement helicopters, the lawmakers made their way around the 15,000 acres of land and water that comprise the two ports, said to be the transit point for 40 percent of the nation's shipping. They were told by local Coast Guard, Customs and Port Authority officials that more funding is needed "to inspect the quarter of a million containers that arrive at the two ports each month." Only between 6-8 percent of these containers are X-rayed to check for nuclear or biological weapons, and more equipment and inspectors are needed to check to see if containers have been opened while in transit, the lawmakers were told.

ANALYSIS: Port security continues to be a major homeland security challenge, largely due to the vast sums of money needed to protect the nation's ports. While the federal government has distributed port security grants, the funds have not been sufficient to. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Future congressional funding [for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach] may rely heavily on a study being conducted by Sandia National Laboratories," which was hired by the California harbor authorities for the two ports to assess their needs. Joining Representative Cox on the port tour was Representatives Jane Harman (D-California), Loretta Sanchez (D-California), John Shadegg (R-Arizona), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) and Donna Christensen (D-Virgin Islands). The tour was the second stop of a three-stop homeland security "field trip." Before arriving at the ports, the lawmakers had traveled to Colorado Springs, Colorado to get one of the first tours and briefings at the newly established Northern Command. The House members concluded their trip with a committee field hearing with Orange County First Responders.

June 23, 2003
Senator Questions Security at Nuclear Arms Laboratories
By MATTHEW L. WELD

WASHINGTON, June 22 - The Department of Energy has reneged on a promise to investigate security problems cited by two investigators at its Sandia National Laboratories says a senator, who also says Scandia's management punished the investigators.
The senator, Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, sent a sharply worded letter to the secretary of energy, Spencer Abraham, on Friday, citing a long string of reports of fraud and security problems at the laboratories in Albuquerque.
"You need to address these and other security matters at the nuclear weapons labs," Mr. Grassley wrote. His staff gave The New York Times a copy of the letter.
"The labs are in harm's way," Mr. Grassley wrote. "There is plenty of loud thunder. Lightning will surely follow. The labs are in danger of getting zapped."
A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department, said that "security at our weapons labs is the highest priorities of N.N.S.A. and the secretary of energy."
The spokesman, Anson Franklin, added, "We have multiple and redundant means at each facility to ensure that our secrets and materials are not at risk."
The security administration was established in 2000 after lapses at a nearby laboratory, Los Alamos.
Mr. Grassley's letter gives only a few details of the security problems reported at Sandia, including the loss of keys "to every lock at the lab right up to the glass doors to the reactor."
As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Grassley has no responsibility to oversee the Energy Department, but he has a history of championing government employees who say they faced retaliation for charges of incompetence or fraud.
The two investigators who raised questions about security at Sandia, Pat O'Neill and Mark Ludwig, say they were transferred from an office building to a rodent-infested trailer, reassigned to noninvestigative work, and had their annual raises reduced, Mr. Grassley said.
The laboratory commissioned a former United States attorney, Norman Bay, to investigate the problems. Mr. Grassley quoted from a summary of that report, which he received from the Energy Department. (He said he had obtained the whole report with difficulty but agreed to keep it secret.)
The letter from Mr. Grassley said the report covered investigations of 5 of 100 security problems identified by Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Ludwig. The summary identified six other problems that it said "did not merit heightened scrutiny."
One of these, Mr. Grassley's letter said, was the theft of a Verizon van that had been parked at Sandia.
"The van was stolen from inside a classified area and crashed undetected through perimeter fences at 5 a.m. in what is described as a `high risk' exit maneuver," the letter said. "It was discovered a day and a half later in a local department store parking lot."
The letter said that the authors of the Bay Report had ignored "very pertinent" facts, that a computer handling classified information disappeared at the time the van was stolen, that the security forces turned off some equipment needed to verify alarms and that although a set of master keys had disappeared three years earlier, the locks were never changed.
"These security failures add up to a red warning flag," Mr. Grassley wrote. "Does anyone at your department see the red flag? Management continues to turn a blind eye to serious breaches of security."
Asked if the Bay Report had been insufficient, Mr. Franklin, the spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, said: "We have multiple investigations under way looking at issues that have been raised at Sandia lab and other labs. N.N.S.A. has looked at it, the inspector general of the Energy Department, and the Office of Oversight and Inspections. There are numerous reviews and audits out there to ensure we have the best security that there is available."
Mr. Franklin added, however, that the department might announce some changes in security soon.

DOD teaming on critical infrastructure
BY Dan Caterinicchia

mailto:danc@fcw.com

June 18, 2003

The Defense Department is working with government officials at all levels, as well as with the private sector, to ensure that the nation's critical infrastructure assets are protected and that contingency plans are in place in the event of an attack or disaster.
Navy Capt. Robert Magee, deputy director for industrial base capabilities and readiness in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said infrastructure protection is really "mission assurance" for DOD because the failure of critical assets would disrupt operations.
DOD infrastructure includes everything from personnel and health affairs to command, control, communications, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, Magee said during a June 17 panel discussion at a National Defense Industrial Association security conference in Reston, Va.
The defense industrial base must coordinate critical infrastructure protection efforts from top to bottom, because their collective assets represent the "blue target fodder" that any U.S. enemy would love to have, he said. The private sector controls about 80 percent of the nation's critical infrastructure, including utilities, telecommunications and transportation networks.
Magee said that a critical infrastructure protection directive and instructions are awaiting the signature of the deputy secretary of Defense, and the documents would update DOD's formal policy and guidance in this area.
DOD has made solid progress in identifying its internal critical assets and those within the defense industrial base, Magee said, adding that about a month ago the department began performing vulnerability assessments at the first of three private-sector sites approved for funding this year.
He said that 10 to 15 more sites should be funded through a supplemental budget, and DOD is issuing commercial off-the-shelf self-assessment software for vendors it is unable to visit in person.
Paula Scalingi, president of the Scalingi Group, a Vienna, Va.-based consulting firm, said that members of the private sector in general, not just utilities, often feel left out of the information sharing process, which is why many interdependencies take longer to be identified.
Randy Smith, head of critical infrastructure assurance for the Marine Corps, said that the Marines have been developing their own critical asset list for the past 18 months. He called it a "work in progress" because things are often missed if the Marines do not own them.
For example, it's obvious to include an air base on the list, but the telecommunications switch located behind a gas station just off the base also is critical, Smith said, adding that the Marine Corps is expanding its integrated vulnerability assessment program with the Navy.
The Marine Corps performed a critical infrastructure response and protection tabletop exercise with the New York City Police Department in September 2002 that garnered numerous information-sharing lessons and the opportunity to compare tactics, techniques and procedures, he said.
The program proved so successful that the service is doing another one in San Francisco. It will include all city and county agencies and test the "commander's handbook," a knowledge management tool the Marine Corps has developed to help civilian agencies it may need to coordinate with in the future.

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES
June 18, 2003 - 6:34 p.m.
Hand in Glove: White House and Industry Unite for Voluntary Infrastructure Protection
By Christopher Logan, CQ Staff Writer

If there is one word that sums up the Bush administration's approach to securing privately owned infrastructure since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it is volunteerism.
The White House has quashed proposed regulations for the chemical industry, opposed legislation to increase security at nuclear plants, and steered clear of imposing new requirements to secure the nation's computer networks. In place of these top-down approaches, the administration has largely relied on the private sector, which owns an estimated 87 percent of the nation's factories, rail lines, power plants and computer networks, to come up with its own strategies to defend against terrorist attacks.
In June 2002, for example, the American Chemistry Council, the trade and lobbying association for the nation's largest chemical manufacturing companies, told its members to study the physical security of their plants and to fix any problems they found. The security enhancements were to be verified by independent third parties, such as firefighters, police officers, insurance auditors or federal or state government officials.
In March, the council announced that its 165 member companies had completed vulnerability studies for their 120 highest priority facilities.
The program is part of the chemistry council's Responsible Care program, described by the organization as "a voluntary program to achieve improvements in environmental, health and safety performance beyond levels required by the U.S. government."
But critics complained the program relied on the good will of the industry, and noted the plan has no requirement that facilities near large population centers stop using chemicals such as chlorine, which could form deadly gas clouds if released accidentally or by terrorist saboteurs. And, critics said, the industry group represents only a small percentage of the nation's chemical infrastructure. Thousands of water and sewer treatment plants, which use chlorine as a purifier, were not covered by the program.
Chemical Reaction
Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., meanwhile, launched his own campaign in late 2001 to impose tough new anti-terrorism security requirements on the U.S. chemical industry.
Legislation that Corzine introduced in the 107th Congress would have required chemical plants to carry out vulnerability assessments, limit the types and quantities of chemicals they keep on hand and, when possible, phase out the use of chlorine and other potentially dangerous chemicals. The bill granted the EPA a lead role in enforcing the new security restrictions.
Corzine's bill also had teeth. Plant operators who failed to comply with the new regulation faced up to a year in prison and fines of $25,000 a day. Repeat offenders faced fines of up to $50,000 a day and prison terms of up to two years.
The bill was approved unanimously by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in July 2002.
But after the committee vote, the chemical industry launched an aggressive lobbying campaign against the legislation. It argued that forcing the phase-out of some chemicals would result in costly process changes and strongly opposed the EPA's role, saying the agency had no experience as a security regulator.
Seven committee Republicans eventually opposed the Corzine bill on the floor. It never came up for a vote.
Security for Americans
Meanwhile, the EPA was writing new security rules of its own, using its regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act. But the rules never appeared. Several sources - all of whom favored an expanded EPA role - said last fall that the regulatory approach was scuttled inside the White House.
Corzine reintroduced his legislation early in the 108th Congress, with some changes designed to make it more palatable to the industry - notably granting the new Department of Homeland Security the lead oversight role.
By then, however, the White House was drafting its own bill, which Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., introduced shortly after Congress returned from its spring break.
The Inhofe bill looks a lot like the American Chemistry Council's industry program. It requires chemical plants to assess their vulnerability to terrorism and to develop plans to fill any holes. And, like Corzine's bill, it includes fines for failure to comply - $50,000 a day for each violation and administrative penalties of up to $250,000.
But as was true of the council-sponsored industry program, Inhofe's legislation sets no minimum security criteria. It includes no requirements for the protection of above-ground chemical storage tanks and says nothing about phasing out the use of chlorine and other dangerous chemicals.
"Unfortunately, the bill does very little to secure Americans who work and live around these facilities," Corzine said in response to the bill's introduction. "The bill may provide an illusion of security, but it's little more than a fig leaf that would leave chemical plants highly vulnerable to terrorism."
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has met similar hurdles in his efforts to push through stiff new security requirements for the nuclear industry. Legislation Reid sponsored in the 107th Congress would have federalized the private security forces that now guard the nation's nuclear power plants. Reid's bill also would have changed the so-called design basis threat, the number of intruders that guards are required to repel, to include more numerous and more heavily armed attackers.
But the nuclear industry, like the chemical industry, launched an effective campaign to derail Reid's legislation. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association, paid for full-page ads in Washington-area newspapers with large Capitol Hill circulations. The ads featured photographs of well-armed, menacing guards and descriptions of the guards' law enforcement and military backgrounds.
The ads worked. Although Reid's bill passed the Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously in the 107th Congress, it was never brought to the floor for a vote.
Reid, joined by Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., James M. Jeffords, I-Vt., Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., John Edwards, D-N.C., and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, reintroduced the bill in January. But Inhofe, now the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, had his own legislation ready to roll.
Inhofe's bill would require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), to assess the security of nuclear facilities under its authority, as well as the hiring and training standards for plant guards. The legislation also would require more stringent background checks for all individuals who have access to nuclear facilities.
But it would not require the industry itself to bolster security around nuclear facilities.
NRC's Revised Regulations
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the NRC, which oversees the commercial nuclear industry, endured withering criticism from a variety of public interest groups for doing little more than "recommending" that the nuclear industry increase the security around its plants.
The Washington, D.C.-based Project on Government Oversight (POGO) was particularly vocal, accusing NRC of ignoring whistleblower reports of overworked and lightly armed guards who would be hard-pressed to turn back one or two intruders, never mind an armed team of terrorists intent on stealing nuclear materials or causing a reactor meltdown.
This spring, NRC revised some of its existing regulations, changing the design basis threat to include more armed intruders and increasing the regularity of the force-on-force exercises used to test guards' abilities.
But critics said the new requirements are insufficient.
"The NRC seems to have this backwards. NRC appears to be tailoring its requirements to meet the existing capabilities of the plants' private security forces," said Peter Stockton, a senior investigator with POGO. "Instead, NRC should be determining the realistic threat, then sizing the forces to meet that threat."
Sean Moulton, a policy analyst at OMB Watch, a Washington public interest group, said the administration is relying too heavily on the private sector's willingness to share information about vulnerabilities and to fix its own security problems.
"The administration says this information is critical. If it's so critical, why not require that it be submitted?" Moulton asks. "They're trusting the companies to tell them what's wrong and then trusting them to do something about it."
Apparently stung by the criticism, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new strategy in April for dealing with the security of privately owned infrastructure. A rule it published April 15 in the Federal Register encourages the private sector to share information about security vulnerabilities, threats or attacks with the government by establishing a system to keep that information out of the public realm.
"The Department recognizes that its receipt of information pertaining to the security of critical infrastructure, much of which is not customarily within the public domain, is best encouraged through the assurance that such information will be utilized for securing the United States and will not be disseminated to the general public," the department said in the proposed rule.
But critics say issuing a blanket disclosure exemption for voluntarily submitted information could keep a lot more than security reports from the public. Companies with poor environmental or worker safety records could keep that information secret by "voluntarily" submitting it to the Homeland Security Department.
"The lack of accountability is staggering," Moulton said. "I'm not even sure Congress will be able to get the full story."
Robert P. Liscouski, the Homeland Security Department's point man for infrastructure protection, conceded that balancing the need to encourage industry to volunteer information with the public's right to know about safety and security issues is a tricky job. "We don't have the answer yet," he said.
Liscouski, a former security executive at the Coca-Cola Co. in Atlanta, sat down with reporters at the department's northwest Washington, D.C., headquarters on June 6 to discuss the department's new cybersecurity division, which will serve as a threat information clearinghouse for public and private computer systems.
The division will monitor threats, help private-sector companies prepare for attacks, coordinate the response to attacks, and provide assistance in recovering from attacks. But Liscouski said the department would not require the owners of the nation's cyber-infrastructure to do anything to bolster network security.
"We don't want to be a regulatory agency," he said. "We don't want to force the private sector to do this."
The best approach, he said, is to give companies as much information as possible and count on the market to force them to do the right thing. Not only will market forces reward companies who protect the physical, personnel and procedural security of their networks, Liscouski argued, they will encourage companies to find ways to assuage consumers' fears about the security of personal data, including credit card numbers and transactions such as bank transfers and online purchases.
Asked whether the department will set standards against which companies would have to perform, Liscouski said no. What it can do, he said, is build awareness within the private sector to existing threats. "We can set expectations for behavior," he said. "The federal government won't solve this problem on its own because everyone owns it."

Summit stresses chemical security

By Carl Prine
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, June 18, 2003

PHILADELPHIA -- With a growing sense of urgency, more than 400 of the nation's chemical, transportation and national security leaders converged here Tuesday to give America's chemical industry a brotherly shove toward beefing up security at their plants.

The three-day Philadelphia summit comes as Congress begins debate on a slew of new measures designed to shore up security at sites across the country that make, store or ship deadly toxins and explosives.

"Let me be very, very clear. If we do no talk about the actions we are taking, and publicly illustrate our commitment, then we will allow our detractors to attack this industry and erode the effectiveness of our efforts," Greg Lebedev, chief of the American Chemistry Council, said during his keynote address.

The ACC represents the interests of the nation's largest chemical manufacturers on Capitol Hill. In October, it spearheaded a successful drive to crush the Chemical Security Act, a bill that would have federalized securing at nearly 13,000 sites nationwide. Key to the bill was a measure forcing major manufacturers to shift production to "inherently safer" materials and technologies.

Without federal legislation, chemical security is being addressed by the new Department of Homeland Security.

Executives from Bayer, Nova Chemicals and Flexys America, a manufacturer in Monongahela, arrived from the Pittsburgh area. The summit was held a year after a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review probe found security dangerously lax at more than 60 major chemical sites in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston and Pittsburgh. The Trib's findings were replicated in follow-up investigations by the Department of Justice and the General Accounting Office.

"You and your employees must understand what's at stake," said Sally Canfield, a policy director at Homeland Security. "And that's half the battle. Too many companies believe security is a low priority, if it's a priority to them at all."

Canfield cited a recent federal study that found half of all chemical plants failed to implement "the basics" of security since Sept. 11, 2001, including instituting employee background checks, counter-terrorism plans and routine emergency drills with local fire and police departments. That, said U.S. Secret Service Agent Zachary Ainsworth, is why chemical plants remain a "tempting target" in "a target-rich society."

Throughout the day, industry leaders agreed, conceding that many of their largest and most dangerous facilities still lack armed guards, perimeter fencing or even nighttime patrols.

But they also insist they have upgraded protections for their workers and neighbors. Dozens of companies told about adding lights, barbed wire, hiring round-the-clock guards and, in a few instances, even substituting less-dangerous chemicals for toxic chemicals.

The larger the company, the more likely the reforms, with industry giants like Dow leading the way.

"The chemical industry recognizes it has a responsibility," said Joseph Acker, president of the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association, a trade organization. "We know we have to act quickly and we've come a long way.

"Obviously, now the game has changed since 9/11. We've looked at our sites from a new perspective, looking at their attractiveness to terrorists, and we're doing something about it."

While leaders in the environmental movement appreciate the industry's stab at better security, they say companies aren't going far enough.

"Clearly, the missing element of the chemical industry's summit is a willingness to reduce hazardous materials on site," said Paul Orum, a researcher with the private Working Group on Community Right to Know in Washington, D.C. "The best way to reduce the attractiveness of a chemical plant to terrorists is to reduce the chemicals on site."

From the "Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security Daily," 13 June

Submachine Gun-Toting Guards Now a Fixture at Boston’s Logan Airport

Travelers may think twice about trying to sneak meat cleavers or other prohibited carry-on items past security at Boston’s Logan International Airport these days. Logan, the takeoff point for the two planes that destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, now is patrolled by police officers armed with MAP submachine guns, the Associated Press reported Thursday. Volunteers from the state police force guarding the airport were recruited in April to form a “proactive” Anti-Terrorism Unit, said Jose Jives, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Port Authority (Mass port), which runs the airport. Mass port spent “a lot of time and resources ... training troopers on protocol and familiarizing themselves with the weapon,” he said. Regular Boston travelers should’t be too alarmed at the sight - Mass port has been phasing in the new unit gradually since May. -Amy Menace

New California Task Force to Monitor Chemical Manufacturers

A California counter-terrorism task force will begin monitoring 25 major commercial chemical manufacturers in the state capable of producing chemical weapons, Los Angeles area officials said, according to Los Angeles Daily News. The California Law Enforcement Task Force on Environmental protection was established by presidential mandate following the 11 September terrorist attacks to strengthen homeland security on the west coast. The task force is comprised of the sheriff's departments from Los Angeles and Orange counties, the Criminal Investigation Division of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Los Angeles Air Port police, the California Highway Patrol, and the California Department of Mental Health. Mick D. Swanstrom, a director of the EPA's Criminal Investigation Division emphasized that the majority of the so-called "top, high-risk facilities" are complying with state and federal laws. Officials would not divulge the names of the 25 companies involved.

ANALYSIS: Officials maintain that the threat of misuse of chemical materials is sufficient enough to warrant the task force. Sheriff Lee Baca, who will head the task force, said, "The U.S. manufactures massive amounts of chemicals. These are potential weapons of mass destruction...right in their hands. The techniques and application of chemicals is a very high priority of mine and (Orange County) Sheriff (Michael S.) Carona." Emphasizing the importance of the joint task force, Swanstrom said, "This is a cornerstone issue of homeland security, our proactive phase, to make sure we share information and focus on prevention."

Nuclear plants near airports may be at risk

By Gary Stoller, USA TODAY

The nuclear industry beefed up security on the ground at power plants throughout the country after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But the plants today remain as vulnerable to a hit from a plane using a nearby small airport as they were then.

A USA TODAY analysis shows that thousands of airports are within 60 miles of plants; 52 are within five miles. Yet, aircraft based at many of these airports are largely unguarded and could reach a nuclear site within minutes.

Nuclear power companies say their plants, designed to withstand earthquakes and natural disasters, are well protected and wouldn't release radiation if struck by an aircraft. Even a jet crash wouldn't cause major damage, although it could affect the ability to generate electricity, they say.

But some scientists, safety experts and lawmakers say the real threat is the ever-increasing stockpile of used fuel stored in less-protected pools at the plants.

The worry about a plane crashing at a nuclear power site was heightened after hijacked jets were used in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Since then, various government agencies have sounded warnings that planes controlled by terrorists might pose a threat to the plants: The FBI alerted local law enforcement agencies last month to the possibility of terrorists using an aircraft to strike a plant; the government earlier this year urged small plane owners to look for and report suspicious activities; and in late February, the Federal Aviation Administration instructed pilots to "avoid the airspace above or in proximity to all nuclear power plants."

But Congress and the accountable federal agencies, facing high-cost solutions and political pressure, have done little to address the threat. The nuclear industry considers it an airport security issue. Aviation interests are opposed to restrictions that might limit access to the skies.

After Sept. 11, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began a study of what could happen if an aircraft strikes a power plant. The study hasn't been completed. It has "the highest priority," but science "does take time," says Alan Madison, a security chief at the NRC.

The NRC says it relies on airport security to protect against anyone commandeering a plane and using it for a deliberate attack on a nuclear plant. Although security at major airports was beefed up after Sept. 11, there is little or no security at many of the 18,000 "general aviation" airports that handle smaller planes.

"What would prevent some terrorist or criminal from taking a Learjet from a small airport?" asks security consultant Jalal Haidar, senior vice president of Virginia-based Aerospace Services International. "They have no security measures. They're a loophole in the overall aviation security system."

Using government data, USA TODAY and Pennsylvania-based CAP Index, a risk-forecasting and mapping company, looked at the proximity of airports to the nation's operating nuclear power plants at 65 sites in 31 states. The analysis shows:

*More than 6,200 airports and heliports are within 60 miles of the nuclear plants. Among them are 83 airports that have regular jet flights, including Chicago's O'Hare, the nation's busiest, and Boston's Logan and New Jersey's Newark, two airports from which terrorists hijacked planes on Sept. 11. But most of the 6,200 aren't bound by federal regulations designed to make larger airports more secure. About 1,200 are public; most of the rest are operated privately for companies, hospitals and local governments.

*Every nuclear plant is within 19 miles of at least one public airport. Two hundred public airports are within 20 miles of a plant.

According to USA TODAY's analysis, the nuclear plant closest to a public airport is Wolf Creek, operating since June 1985 in Lebo, Kan. It is 1.4 miles from Burlington, Kan.'s Coffey County Airport, which handles about 55 flights daily and is home base for 28 single-engine and two multi-engine planes.

Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, site of a 1979 nuclear accident, is the plant closest to an airport with scheduled commercial flights. Harrisburg International Airport is slightly more than three miles from the plant, handles about 200 flights daily, mostly airlines' multi-engine jets and commuter planes. Lancaster Airport, a busy private-plane facility with more than 300 flights each day, is 22 miles away.

Nuclear power companies say the numbers are meaningless. Most planes at airports near power plants are small, without the weight or speed to cause a crash that would release radiation into the atmosphere, they say. The concrete surrounding each nuclear reactor gives sufficient protection, and a crash elsewhere on a power plant site wouldn't lead to an environmental disaster, they say.

But given the proximity of the airports, including many of the USA's largest, to nuclear plants, some safety experts raise questions about the chance not only of terrorism but of an accidental crash, because most accidents happen at or near an airport.

An October 2000 NRC study calculated that the chances of an airplane damaging a spent-fuel pool, considered more vulnerable than the reactor itself, are between one in 17 million and one in 100 billion. As a comparison, a person's chance of being killed in a plane crash is one in 4.6 million.

The chances of a plane accidentally crashing into a pool are "at the far end of possibilities and low probability," says the NRC's Madison.

But the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, an arm of the NRC, has signaled its concern about the proximity of planes and nuclear facilities. In March, the board said it couldn't approve a license for a proposed nuclear waste facility in Utah, which would be built by utility companies, because it would be under an airway used by F-16 pilots during training flights from Hill Air Force Base, north of Salt Lake City. The NRC's technical staff disagrees with the board's decision, and utility companies have petitioned NRC commissioners to reverse it.

Jan Beyea, a nuclear physicist who agrees with the NRC's mathematical calculations for a conventional plane crash, says the odds "completely go out the window" in the case of terrorism. "After Sept. 11, the odds are much greater," he says. "There's also probably a whole number of events that could occur that we haven't thought about."

In a recent report for the 380,000-member Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, former Energy Department employee Robert Jefferson says common sense indicates that power plants' proximity to airports "does not increase their exposure to terrorist threats." He also says a small plane crash into any part of a power plant wouldn't produce enough damage to cause a radiation release.

Biggest worry

Still, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has been sounding alarms about the situation since Sept. 11, says that without a new NRC report or scientific proof, he's concerned about any aircraft, small or large, striking a power plant. "Is it a fixed-wing aircraft, a helicopter or a shoulder-fired weapon that can cause a nuclear accident? I don't know," he says. "Until we get information from somebody, I can only throw up red flags."

Of particular concern are the spent-fuel pools, used to cool nuclear fuel that once powered the reactors. The pools' roofs are either corrugated metal or concrete less thick than the shells surrounding the reactors. That makes them vulnerable, critics say.

Three Mile Island is the only plant required to have features protecting vital areas from a 200,000-pound jet crash, the NRC says. But safety watchdogs say the plant's auxiliary buildings lack extra protection. Exelon, which owns the plant, says its reactor is designed to immediately shut down in such an emergency.

Marc Feigenblatt, an airline pilot who flew fighter jets, says hitting a spent-fuel pool is possible. "It's more difficult than a World Trade Center target but not beyond the capabilities of any commercial airline pilot. It's also not beyond the capabilities of a Sept. 11 terrorist with some degree of training in a commercial aircraft."

Power companies say a December study they commissioned - which they say can't be released because of security considerations - showed that a crash into a spent-fuel pool wall could crush and crack it but not enough to cause a radioactive release into the environment.

Costs a concern

Providing better protection for the plants will be neither cheap nor quick. The U.S. government has invested billions of dollars and created an agency to make the country's large commercial airports secure. But at small airports, operators and private pilots say they can't afford the costs of providing more security.

Some security critics have suggested stationing guards with anti-aircraft guns at nuclear plants. But in Senate testimony last year, NRC Chairman Richard Meserve, who left the agency in March, said he's against the idea because, among other things, "the use of such weaponry could lead to significant collateral damage to plant workers and members of the public."

Nuclear safety experts agree that the most pressing need is to protect the used fuel. Many advocate removing it from the pools and putting it into concrete casks. If an aircraft crashed into the casks and radiation was released, the amount would be far less than would be released from a pool, they say.

Operators at 33 of the 103 operating plants have transferred a small amount of used fuel to casks. But it would cost up to $7 billion to transfer about 35,000 tons from all the pools and take about a decade, according to a January study by eight scientists and nuclear experts.

The fuel transfer also presents risks. A cask that is dropped, an NRC staff study concluded, could "catastrophically damage the pool."

Not all the fuel could be put into casks. Reactors keep producing more, and used fuel must cool for years before it can be transferred. Some experts say it would be safer in dry storage racks than in pools.

For decades, environmental concerns and scientific studies have derailed the federal government's promise to build a waste-disposal site for used fuel. But last July, President Bush signed a bill to develop Nevada's Yucca Mountain site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as an underground repository. The Energy Department is expected to submit a licensing application by the end of next year. Then the NRC, an agency within the DOE, must decide whether to approve it.

The proposed site is projected to open in the next decade. The cost, originally estimated at $6.3 billion, is now about $8.4 billion.

In late 2001, the NRC said its new study will include a detailed analysis of the consequences of a plane crash into a spent-fuel pool, as well as a "top-to-bottom" evaluation of "all aspects of the agency's safeguards and physical security programs."

Memos about classified information sent by the NRC to the CIA and the Office of Homeland Security show that the agency has at least looked at the potential of large commercial planes hitting nuclear facilities and the ability of plants to withstand plane crashes.

"We've increased security in general since Sept. 11, but we haven't been able to get into specifics," says NRC spokeswoman Beth Hayden. "We don't want to give our hand away."

Nuclear power companies say the public has nothing to worry about because their plants are well protected. "The nuclear power industry is confident that nuclear plant structures that house reactor fuel can withstand aircraft impacts, even though they were not specifically designed for such impacts," the companies said in their December report.

Such confidence infuriates Reid, who has introduced legislation with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., to create a federal force to assess the design, operation and protection of nuclear facilities and develop a plan for each plant. "For their own protection, they should be joining in on this," he says.

"There's a lot of blame to go around. Our pants aren't all the way down on this issue, but they're pretty close."

Contributing: Barbara Hansen

Posted on Mon, Jun. 09, 2003 ("The Charlotte Observer")

Chemical terrorism: Industry, agencies unprepared to prevent or respond to it

Who's really prepared for a chemical terrorist attack on U.S. soil? Just about nobody, apparently.
State public health laboratories are high on the list of defaulters, according to a nonprofit, nonpartisan group. A state-by-state analysis from the Trust for America's Health says a significant majority of labs don't have the equipment or skills to identify a broad range of potential chemical weapons.
No lab -- not one -- has the capacity to test for some of the most common dangerous chemicals. Only two states have the capacity to test for cyanide, although it is commercially available or found naturally in 41 states. Only eight states have drafted plans for responding to a chemical attack.
"If we have to respond to a chemical terrorism event, it will be a train wreck," said Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "We don't have a national plan or testing methods or a lead agency for many of the laboratory activities that will be needed when a crisis occurs."
Meanwhile, experts say, security at commercial chemical plants remains poor. Across the country, each of 123 plants could endanger more than 1 million people if a terrorist attack released toxic clouds. Another 700 plants could threaten 100,000 people each. Another 3,000 plants could threaten 10,000 people each.
Government investigators have warned that chemical facilities make attractive targets for terrorists because they're often located in densely populated areas where large numbers of casualties are possibilities. The CIA has warned that al-Qaida has considered attacks against industrial chemical facilities. The Department of Homeland Security has warned that chemical and nuclear power plants "remain viable targets."
Yet draft security regulations have stalled amid bureaucratic squabbling. Congress tried to weigh in last summer. The Senate considered a bill requiring plants posing the biggest threats to assess their vulnerabilities and develop safeguards. But some senators questioned details, and no vote was called before the session adjourned.
Many plants have voluntarily improved security, but the scope of their action is not comprehensively known. One trade group, the American Chemistry Council, favors a national strategy but represents only a fraction of the industry.
More legislation is afoot in Congress but again is slowed by disagreement. Democrats want mandatory federal measures including requirements that companies use less dangerous materials when they can. Republicans want standards drawn by the chemical industry.
And that's where matters stand. America's chemical industry is seriously vulnerable to attack, and the public health establishment is essentially unequipped to respond if one occurs. The government knows this, the industry knows this, and the public health community knows this. Yet little of substance is happening. This is a blueprint for catastrophe.

City Sewer Systems Vulnerable to Terrorism

While large buildings and major infrastructure have received much of the counter-terrorism attention, experts point out that officials may be overlooking a serious threat to security: city sewer systems, according to a 1 June Chicago Tribune article. "Sewer pipes form a vast underground network that can provide a terrorist with access to many public buildings, urban centers, private businesses, residential neighborhoods, military installations and transportation systems," according to Rep. John Duncan (R-TN), chairman of the House Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee. The Tribune reported that America's sewer systems comprise 800,000 miles of tunnels and 16,000 wastewater treatment plants. Bud Schardein, executive director of the Metropolitan Sewer District in Louisville, Kentucky, said, "We have sewers as much as 22 feet in diameter. You could drive a locomotive through there." Schardein also pointed out that while terrorists may have difficulty breaking into buildings downtown, they could more readily access the city's sewer system to transport dangerous materials and bombs that can be used to blow up any building. An attack on a wastewater treatment plant, which holds large quantities of chemicals, could cause major public health problems and paralyze a city.

ANALYSIS: Despite increased attention by local, state, and federal officials, experts warn that it is impossible to fully secure the nation's sewer systems. Legislation is currently moving through Congress which would provide $200 million to help cities identify vulnerabilities in their wastewater treatment facilities, the Tribune reported. The bill would also pay for such upgrades as securing sewer entry points and installing video cameras and fences, according to the report. One EPA official told the paper, "You don't have to secure every inch of the system," only the "priority points where if something happened it would be catastrophic."

From the "Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security Daily," 2 June:

Missing Keys, Lost Badge at Livermore Nuclear Lab Prompts DOE Investigation

Energy Department officials said late Friday they are launching an investigation into the management of security operations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. On May 12 CQ Homeland Security reported exclusively that a set of security keys had gone missing at the nuclear research laboratory April 17 and had yet to be recovered. Security officials did not tell the lab’s management about the keys for three weeks. The Energy Department said in its Friday statement that it would also look into the loss of a security officer's access badge, which occurred the week before the security keys were lost but was not reported to senior management until May 29. In addition, DOE said, “a member of the laboratory security force has claimed in news reports that the lab's special response team is not adequately prepared to defend against a terrorist attack.” -Chris Logan

From the "Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security Update," 23 May:

EPA Awards Grants to Help Small Drinking Water Utilities Defend Against Terrorism

The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $1.5 million in grants to five nonprofit organizations that will help small drinking water utilities assess their vulnerability to terrorism. According to a May 22 statement from EPA’s Assistant Administrator for Water, G. Tracy Mehan III, the grants will be divided among several localities: the Maryland Center for Environmental Training at the College of Southern Maryland in La Plata; the National Environmental Services Center at West Virginia University in Morgantown; the National Rural Water Association in Duncan, Okla.; the Rural Community Assistance Program in Washington, D.C.; and the Water Environment Federation in Alexandria, Va. The funding, up to $300,000 for each organization, will be used to build staff expertise in drinking water security and provide training at no cost to state, tribal, or local agencies that assist drinking water systems. The program is authorized under the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002. - Chris Logan

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - LOCAL RESPONSE
May 22, 2003 - 7:18 p.m.
Security of U.S. Embassies in Spotlight Again
By Anjali Cordeiro, Special to CQ Homeland Security

The security of American embassies came into question again this week when a tape thought to have been made by Osama bin Laden's top deputy called for Muslims everywhere to attack the diplomatic outposts of the United States and its allies.
U.S. spending on embassy security, maintenance and construction has doubled in the last five years, State Department figures show. In fiscal 2004 alone the administration plans to increase its spending on embassies by more than $200 million, or 16 percent, from current spending levels.
The State Department budget request for fiscal 2004 includes $1.5 billion for embassy security and maintenance - a total increase of $209.4 million over the fiscal 2003 budget of $1.3 billion.
The funding level "reflects the Administration's continuing commitment to protect U.S. Government personnel serving abroad, improve the security of overseas facilities, and address serious deficiencies in the State Department's overseas infrastructure," administration officials said in the request.
Since the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, spending worldwide on security upgrades for embassies has been high. Before the bombings, Congress had given Foggy Bottom only $640 million for combined spending on embassy security, construction and maintenance. Soon after the attacks, the funding jumped to more than $1 billion.
In fiscal 2002, the total expenditure on embassies was $1.52 billion, of which just over $1 billion was for worldwide security upgrades.
Yet the next year, Congress appropriated a quarter of a billion less, $755 million, for security upgrades. For the coming fiscal year, the spending will rise again to $861 million dollars.
The General Accounting Office (GAO) is not happy with the pace of security upgrades and new capital projects. A GAO report released in March said that at the proposed rate of funding, "it will take more than 20 years to fully fund and build replacement facilities."
The same report observed that "Only 12 [overseas] posts have a primary building that meets all 5 standards [of security]. As a result, thousands of U.S. government and foreign national employees may be vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and face an unacceptable level of risk from terrorist attacks and other threats."
But, the GAO said, "State has done much over the last four years to increase physical security at overseas posts."
Meanwhile, terrorists have continued to target U.S. diplomatic outposts.
Last year, a gunman opened fire on security personnel outside the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan.
Following last week's suicide bombings at three Western residential complexes in Saudi Arabia, and citing intelligence indicating that more attacks may be "imminent," the State Department closed its embassy in Jeddah and consulate in Dhahran. The United Kingdom followed suit.
The U.S. embassy in Norway was also forced to close for security reasons on Thursday following the airing of the tape on Al Jazeera, thought to have been made by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian cleric who has served as Osama bin laden's deputy.
"There is no question that embassy security has improved," said a State Department spokesman. "There have been improvements in physical and technical security. However, it is still an important and ongoing issue. Embassies abroad are constantly reviewing security and taking necessary steps. We are thankful we have been able to work with Congress and get its support on this issue."

From the "Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security Daily," 20 May:

Nuclear Plant Security Target of Inhofe Legislation

Sen. James M. Inhofe’s, R-Okla., nuclear security bill, part of his four-part legislative package to address infrastructure security, was approved May 15 by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. -Caitlin Harrington

May 13, 2003
Senator introduces chemical, nuclear plant security bills
By Mike Nartker, Global Security Newswire

In an effort to improve security at U.S. nuclear power and chemical plants, U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., has introduced two alternatives to Democratic proposals.
Last week, Inhofe introduced the Chemical Facilities Security Act of 2003. Under the bill, the Homeland Security Department would have one year after the enactment of the bill to create regulations requiring chemical plant operators to conduct vulnerability assessments and to prepare site security plans.
To aid in the preparation of vulnerability assessments and security plans, the department would also provide chemical plant operators with relevant terrorist threat information. Chemical plant operators would be able to petition Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to endorse security standards developed by the chemical industry if they are “substantially equivalent” to the requirements of the act.
The bill would also give the Homeland Security Department the authority to review a plant’s vulnerability assessment and security plan, and to order revisions if they are found to be inadequate. In addition, the department would also be required to conduct routine oversight of chemical plants to ensure compliance with the law, according to an Inhofe press statement. Chemical plants found to be in violation of the act could face civil penalties of up to $50,000 per day for each day a violation occurs, and administrative penalties of up to $250,000. In addition, Ridge could also petition for injunctive relief, which could result in the temporary closing of a facility, according to the Inhofe statement.
“Let me be very clear,” Inhofe said in his statement. “No one gets a free pass under this bill, no one is exempt. Chemical facilities must abide by the legislation's security requirements and any rules, procedures or standards developed by the Department of Homeland Security,” he said.
The American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry trade organization, praised Inhofe’s chemical plant security bill.
“The legislation introduced today by Senator James Inhofe … is an important step to secure America’s chemical facilities-part of our nation’s critical infrastructure-against the threat of terrorist attack,” the group said in a statement.
Nuclear Act Introduced
Complementing the chemical plant measure, Inhofe yesterday introduced the Nuclear Infrastructure Security Act of 2003 http://epw.senate.gov/Releases/TRU03_291.pdf, which seeks to improve security at nuclear power plants. The bill would require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in coordination with Ridge, to examine the security, preparedness and response plans for nuclear facilities. Such an examination would include an assessment of federal, state, local or plant operator responsibility to defend against various threats, as well as a review of hiring and training standards for nuclear plant security forces.
After such a commission review, it would have three months to revise the "design basis threat"-the type of terrorist attack a nuclear facility must be able to defend against. Nuclear facilities would then have a one-year deadline to revise their security plans based on the new design basis threat and submit them to the commission for review. The bill sets a 21-month deadline for the NRC to review the nuclear plants’ emergency response plans.
In addition to facility security, Inhofe’s bill also seeks to improve employee security. The bill calls for the commission to review employee access and training standards and to establish new security procedures-in addition to the current criminal background checks and fingerprinting-to ensure that no one who could pose a threat to national security is employed at nuclear facilities. In addition, nuclear facilities would be required to fingerprint anyone who has unescorted access to the facility or to a radioactive material storage site.
The bill also calls for the creation of a federal program to improve the training of National Guard units and state and local law enforcement agencies to respond to terrorist threats against nuclear facilities. In addition, the bill would also require the NRC to assign regional federal security coordinators who would be responsible for threat-information sharing and for ensuring that nuclear facilities in their region maintain the appropriate level of security for the known threat level.
Inhofe’s bills are alternatives to legislation offered by several Democratic senators in the past year to improve chemical and nuclear plant security. Several Democratic senators last year sponsored the Nuclear Security Act, which sought to improve security at U.S. nuclear facilities. While the Senate environment committee unanimously supported the bill last year, the full Senate failed to act before the congressional session ended.
In March, during debate on the Price-Anderson Act-a nuclear industry liability and indemnification bill-Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., offered the Nuclear Security Act as an amendment. In a similar gesture, Inhofe offered his own amendment with language similar to that of the Nuclear Security Act, according to a Senate aide familiar with the issue.
Reid agreed to support the amendment in exchange for a markup hearing to be held on Inhofe’s language, the aide said, noting that Inhofe’s introduction of his nuclear plant security bill was mainly a procedural gesture to fulfill the markup pledge. Once Inhofe’s bill moves out of committee, there will be an attempt to replace his amendment to the Price-Anderson Act with final language of the Nuclear Security Act, the aide told Global Security Newswire Tuesday.
A Reid spokeswoman said that the senator was “pleased” that Inhofe’s bill adopted most of the language in the Nuclear Security Act.
Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., also saw the Senate environment committee unanimously approve his chemical plant security bill last year, but the full Senate again failed to act before the congressional session ended.
After Inhofe released a draft of his chemical plant security bill late last month, Corzine responded with criticism.
“Unfortunately, the bill does very little to secure Americans who work and live around these facilities,” Corzine said in a press statement. “The bill may provide an illusion of security, but it’s little more than a fig leaf that would leave chemical plants highly vulnerable to terrorism,” he said.
Corzine particularly criticized the provision in Inhofe’s bill allowing chemical plant operators to petition Ridge to endorse industry-created standards.
“The government should set basic standards and hold industry accountable for meeting them,” Corzine said. “We shouldn’t just pass the buck to industry to set public safety standards,” he added.
Corzine reintroduced his bill in January, but the committee does not plan to schedule hearings on it, committee majority spokesman Mike Catanzaro said today. “As far as the committee is concerned,” it will now work to move both of Inhofe’s bills to the Senate floor, he said. A markup hearing on both bills has been scheduled for Thursday.

Lab recognized for making risk assessment tools available

The Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratory received an award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) on 7 May for "successful efforts...to transfer government-developed technology to commercial industry." The award, granted by a "panel of experts from industry, state and local government, academia, and the federal laboratory system...recognizes the lab's effort to adapt security assessment tools and approaches traditionally used by Sandia to protect U.S. nuclear assets, to the challenge of preventing terrorists from doing harm to Americans by exploiting security vulnerabilities in U.S. critical infrastructures." These efforts included the development of "a family of risk assessment methodologies (RAMs) that can be used by owners and operators of dams (RAM-D), power transmission systems (RAM-T), and water distribution systems (RAM-W) to identify and correct vulnerabilities at their facilities."

ANALYSIS: To ensure the RAMs would make it into the hands of infrastructure owners and operators, Sandia "developed a unique licensing strategy and designed novel 'train the trainer' educational courses." For example, under an agreement between the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, Sandia agreed to "provide experienced trainers who will then offer [a training course for the RAM-W vulnerability assessment] nationally to consultants, water utilities, and government entities," with "all trainers licensed by Sandia...required to publicly offer this training course a minimum number of times."

From the "Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security Afternoon Update," 8 May:

House OKs Funding for Sewage Plant Security Upgrades

The House of Representatives on Wednesday agreed to help the nation’s publicly owned sewage treatment plants, some of which stockpile potentially deadly chlorine, defend themselves against terrorism. The House-passed legislation would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to spend up to $220 million to pay for the vulnerability assessments and security upgrades. Under the House bill, the federal government would cover 75 percent of the costs of each project; state or local governments would be responsible for the remaining 25 percent. There are about 16,000 publicly owned wastewater treatment plants in the United States, fed by 600,000 miles of sanitary sewer lines, 200,000 miles of storm sewers and more than 100,000 pumping stations. The House approved similar legislation during the 107th Congress, but that bill died in the Senate. The Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act authorizes $160 million for vulnerability assessments and security enhancements at drinking water facilities. - CQ Staff

May 8, 2003
Towers' Strength Not Tested for a Fire, Investigators Find
By JAMES GLANZ

Federal investigators studying the collapse of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, say they now believe that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the government agency that built the towers, never performed the fundamental tests needed to determine how their innovative structures would perform in a fire.
The preliminary finding, if it holds up, will undermine decades of public assurances by the Port Authority that the twin towers met or exceeded the requirements of New York City's building code, and therefore would be structurally safe in a large fire. The codes are based on tests of each building component in furnaces that subject the structures, and the fireproofing insulation that protects them, to the harsh conditions of a major fire.
"At this point, we don't know why the tests were not done," said Dr. S. Shyam Sunder, who is leading the eight-month-old investigation at the Building and Fire Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But Dr. Sunder added, "To the best of our knowledge, they were not done."
The investigators took great care yesterday to say they were nowhere close to definitively determining how and why the towers collapsed after they were struck by hijacked airliners, and some experts have argued that the buildings were so badly wounded by the impact of the airliners that their ultimate demise was inevitable.
But investigators, speaking at a news conference near ground zero, said their findings about the fire tests were an important development in their examination of one theory for why the buildings collapsed when and how they did: that the huge fires set by burning jet fuel weakened the lightweight floors of the towers, and that the failure of at least several floors in each building set off a chain reaction culminating in the total collapse of the complex.
The investigators have said that it is unclear whether, even if the tests had been done and the buildings been found to have met standards, the lightweight floor structures, called trusses, and the fluffy fireproofing on them could have been expected to withstand the intense fires of Sept. 11.
But the absence of the central tests has robbed the investigators of the ability to even say whether the buildings performed as their designers had specified in their original plans and as the city's codes required of other buildings like them.
Yesterday, independent experts as well as relatives of those who died that day said they were dumbstruck or outraged that such prominent buildings - where fires had occurred more than once and that had been the target of a previous terrorist attack in 1993 - could have been first built and then maintained without such a basic test of its safety having been conducted.
A Port Authority spokesman, Greg Trevor, said yesterday that he did not have enough information to "definitively" comment on the question of whether the fire tests had been done. He added that the Port Authority had given to investigators all documents that it had been able to locate.
The Port Authority has long maintained that it is not legally obligated to comply with the city and state's building codes, but has always insisted that it nonetheless did so in all its major construction, including the trade center.
"I would stress," Mr. Trevor added, "that none of the people who were involved in the making of those decisions at that time are currently working for the Port Authority."
One of those people, Guy Tozzoli, who oversaw all major aspects of the World Trade Center for the Port Authority at the time of its construction, said that his memory was imperfect, but that he thought full-scale tests on the floors and their supports most likely had not been done.
"I don't remember that being done, to be honest with you," Mr. Tozzoli said. "I know there was testing of the fireproofing material. But you are asking a different question. Whether we built a truss and tested that? I'm inclined to say no."
Many yesterday found that startling, even unthinkable.
"How did they arrive at that decision that the floor system complied" with the building and fire codes? asked Dr. Glenn P. Corbett, a professor of fire science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "The only way they can do that is go back to the tests."
Dr. Corbett is a member of the federal team's advisory committee, though he said he was speaking as an independent researcher.
Others were less measured.
"It's horrific that they were allowed to do these 110-story mammoth buildings without proper fireproofing," said Monica Gabrielle, co-chairwoman of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, who lost her husband, Richard, in the collapse of the south tower. "How could they not have tested this to make sure those lives were safe?"
The preliminary findings could affect everything from legal actions against the Port Authority to structural analyses of the disaster to historical assessments of how well the buildings protected their occupants against the 9/11 attack.
Marc S. Moller, a lawyer at Kreindler & Kreindler, which has brought a liability lawsuit against the Port Authority in connection with the 9/11 attack, said at least one of his firm's legal theories could be bolstered by the findings: that fireproofing in the towers was defective and so the buildings were not safe.
"It remains for us to prove our allegations," Mr. Moller said. "The NIST study suggests that we are on the right track."
He added that for now, about 450 people had joined the lawsuit, but that "the litigation option becomes more viable as more becomes known about design deficiencies in the buildings."
By law, the institute's findings cannot be used directly in lawsuits or other actions to recover damages.
In the briefing, Dr. Sunder described a variety of other findings in what has become a wide-ranging investigation.
He highlighted new evidence appearing to support the theory that the lightweight trusses played some role in the collapse. Dr. Sunder showed a high-resolution photograph of the east face of the south tower, 12 minutes before it collapsed. The picture revealed what appeared to be a floor truss sagging deeply, like a clothesline overloaded with wet clothing.
Heat-softened steel would be expected to sag in just such a way. The south tower was the first to collapse, and an earlier investigation determined that the deadly sequence started on the east face near the 83rd floor, where the sagging truss was.
Dr. Sunder also said that 37 pieces of steel from near the impact zones of the airplanes had been recovered from scrapyards and other sources.
In a vivid illustration of how images of 9/11 have advanced the work, he showed how a sophisticated electronic analysis of videos that were shot by a photographer, Scott Meyers, revealed the structural convulsions of the south tower just after it was hit.
The analysis, revolving around a kind of wavy moiré pattern that came and went in the computerized images, showed that the building shuddered, swayed and convulsed for more than four minutes after the strike.
The investigative team is appealing to the public for additional video images. In particular, the team says it is lacking clear views of the south face of 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story skyscraper that collapsed later in the day on Sept. 11.
The standards institute received formal federal authority to investigate building disasters in October 2002 when the National Construction Safety Team Act was signed into law. The act was written largely as a result of the collapse of the towers.
Yesterday's briefing covered a 122-page progress report on the trade center investigation.
In it, investigators have included evidence that confusion, ambiguity and uncertainty surrounded the question of the complex's fire safety protection almost from the start of its design and construction.
In May 1963, more than five years before steel construction for the trade center began, the Port Authority ordered its engineers to comply with the New York City building code. The engineers decided early on that they were obligated to show that the steel and fireproofing used in the buildings could withstand at least three hours of intense fire without failing.
But by early 1969, after construction began, one of the trade center's architects, Emery Roth & Sons, complained that the Port Authority had arbitrarily changed their guidelines for establishing how much and what kind of fireproofing was required to ensure the complex's safety.
"We cannot be expected to accept responsibility for specifications which have been revised in such a manner," the architect wrote.
Then, in a mysterious communication a few months later, the Port Authority wrote to Louis DiBono, president of the company that was applying the fireproofing, to say that it should be applied to a thickness of one-half inch on the floor trusses.
Dr. Sunder said today that "we are unable to determine the technical basis" for choosing half an inch of fireproofing. He said no records had turned up to indicate that the trusses were subjected to any standard furnace tests at all with the fireproofing in place.
The confusion continued in 1975, several years after the towers had opened, when a sizable fire spread from the 9th to the 19th floor of the north tower. The fire caused buckling of some parts of the trusses on those floors. An engineering firm called in to assess the fire damage concluded that only fire testing and analysis by fire experts could determine if the floor systems were safe.
But again, there is no indication the tests were ever done.
The same engineers concluded that the fireproofing specifications - requiring half an inch of fireproofing - might simply have been read out of a fireproofing manufacturer's product catalog. But the federal investigative team determined that the truss systems, new and innovative in their day, were not included in those catalogs when the decisions were made.
A Port Authority engineer named Frank Lombardi finally did discover that the fireproofing was inadequate in the mid-1990's, and attempted a more serious study of what might be needed to best protect the buildings, although he did not perform furnace tests involving floor trusses.
He ordered that the thickness of the fireproofing be increased to an inch and a half. And about 30 floors in the upper reaches of the two towers - including virtually all the floors in the impact zone of the north tower - had been at least partly upgraded at the time of the attack.
The report, though, calls the later analysis incomplete.
"I think it's very bad that that's the process," said Dr. James Quintiere, a professor in fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland. "This was an area that people didn't pay attention to. They thought everything was fine. Buildings don't fall down in a fire. The World Trade Center was a tremendous wake-up call."

From the 2 May 03 edition of the "Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security Daily:"

DOT Security Units Didn’t Connect, GAO Says

Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, engineers at the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Research and Special Programs Administration (RSPA) were thinking about ways to improve the security of the nation’s bridges, tunnels and rail lines. Meanwhile, inspectors with DOT’s Office of Intelligence and Security were roaming the country, checking out bridge abutments and rail switches, looking for security flaws and putting plans into place to fix potential terror targets. The trouble, according to a General Accounting Office report released Thursday, is that the two DOT units weren’t connecting. “Prior to March 2003, RSPA did not fully coordinate their activities with the Office of Intelligence and Security in selecting the vulnerabilities to be assessed, or in implementing the assessments for the program,” the auditors found. But the problem seems to be solved now, GAO said. Its investigators report they “discussed this problem with officials from both offices who agreed that closer coordination would be beneficial, particularly to discuss options for addressing the challenges facing program researchers in conducting the program’s vulnerability assessments.” Officials from the two offices began meeting regularly in March, GAO said.-Chris Logan
• Text of the GAO report http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d03502high.pdf

April 23, 2003
Homeland official foresees security embedded in 'fabric of society'
By Molly M. Peterson, National Journal's Technology Daily

The Bush administration plans to provide "embedded economic incentives" to encourage the private sector to do its part in securing the nation's critical infrastructures, a top homeland security official said Wednesday.
"The whole aspect of security will become embedded in our economy," Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Gordon England told industry leaders during a conference at the Chamber of Commerce.
England, who formerly served as secretary of the Navy and was an executive vice president of General Dynamics, predicted that companies eventually will adjust to the "era of terrorism" in much the same way that they have adjusted to "the era of environmentalism."
"Just as our society is now more environmentally conscious, security measures will, over time, likely become embedded in the fabric of our society," England said. "Security will be ... part of the cost of doing business, and it will make some businesses more desirable than others in terms of investors and employees and insurance."
England said the Homeland Security Department will play a key role in promoting that type of security-conscious society. "Our preferred approach is to use embedded economic incentives as a stimulant to encourage homeland security measures," he said.
The department also will help private companies, local government agencies and emergency-response officials develop methodologies for assessing threats and vulnerabilities and obtain the most effective counter-terrorism technologies, according to England.
He said administration officials have had "some preliminary discussions" about the regulatory aspects of security but that he favors "as little regulation as possible."
"I don't know what that approach will be, frankly," he said. "Personally, my view would be that ... I would like to rely on embedded economic incentives but work with the regulatory agencies where necessary."
A government-industry partnership would be more attractive to industry than new reg