The federal government’s intelligence community needs to do a better job of sharing intelligence information with the country’s critical infrastructure sector, according to a recent report from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council.

The council’s 227-page report (pdf download), “Intelligence Information Sharing,” is a follow-up to a similar study it conducted in 2006. While information sharing between the federal government and private critical infrastructure sector has improved since the 2006 report, it still “is not sufficient to maximize the protection and resilience of the nation’s infrastructure,” the current study states. The council, which provides the president with advice on the security of 18 critical infrastructure sectors, calls information sharing “perhaps the most important factor in the protection and resilience of critical infrastructure.”

Read more @ securitydirectornews.com

Speaking at the International Disaster Conference and Exposition, Craig Fugate, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), urged emergency planners to take a broader view of disaster response and include the private sector.

“Why is it one minute after the disaster, we think government is going to do everything?” Fugate asked the audience of public and private sector emergency mangers. “The more goods and services that the private sector is able to provide to meet the needs, then (government) can focus on the most needy and vulnerable areas.”

To illustrate his point, Fugate discussed what he called the “Waffle House indicator.” Prior to serving as FEMA’s chief administrator, Fugate was the director of Florida’s emergency  management agency, which is where he and his staff noticed that whenever they visited an area hit by a disaster a Waffle House diner would always be open for business while other businesses would still be crippled.

Read more @ homelandsecuritynewswire.com

Every federal agency could benefit from engaging more on social media, but different agencies ought to engage in different ways, said Gadi Ben-Yehuda, who will be teaching a 12-week government-sponsored course beginning in February.

Social media engagement can run the gamut from taking public input on new policies through Twitter, Facebook and custom-built wikis to adding new social media customer service components for taxpayers or Social Security recipients to simply doing a better job of broadcasting agency information, said Ben-Yehuda, who is also the social media director for IBM’s Center for the Business of Government think tank.

“The government is not monolithic,” he said. “An agency like the State Department is all about engagement . . . Another agency like [the Justice Department] is not about engagement per se, it’s about enforcing rules . . . They have such widely divergent goals that necessarily their social media tools are going to be different.”

Read more @ NextGov.com

Rather than applying across-the-board budget cuts to intelligence spending, federal authorities should take advantage of disruptive new technologies to decrease costs while also maintaining high quality, according to a new report from Deloitte’s GovLab research center.

The government should leverage two disruptive developments — computer analytics technologies and the availability of open-source information on the Internet — to maintain high-quality intelligence results while also reducing the $80 billion annual price tag for civilian and military intelligence, the report said.

“Given today’s budgetary environment, the meteoric rise in intelligence spending is over — in fact many intel­ligence agencies are already planning for significant budget cuts,” the report said. “The question then becomes: Can these same agencies provide critical intelligence capabilities at a lower price? The combination of two developments suggests the answer to this question may be yes.”

Read more @ FCW.com

From the HLSWatch.com blog

The chart is taken from a December edition of Fortune Magazine.  These estimated costs — almost certainly underestimated — reflect a record-setting $380 billion in global economic losses; nearly two-thirds higher than in 2005, the previous record year. (See more from Munich RE.)

This week’s leader in The Economist is entitled, “The Rising Cost of Catastrophes” (see below and for a link to a more detailed article).  In the run-up to the 2012 Davos Summit the World Economic Forum has identified key global risks and gives special attention to the implications of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear emergency in Japan.  They warn about “seeds of dystopia” being planted worldwide.  Fortune, The Economist, and WEF… in the business world this is a thoughtleader trifecta.

The unprecedented scale and recurrence of these losses may — but I emphasize, may — have begun to influence strategic decisions by some major players.  A once-upon-a-time client lost nearly $1 billion as a result of the floods in Thailand. They are certainly learning from hard-knocks what a decade-ago I tried to communicate as a competitive opportunity as well as competitive risk.

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