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DHS Funding: Dueling for Dollars

The big-money question in securing critical infrastructures is: Who pays how much, and for what? Or, in the case of the electric power industry: Where do you draw the line between ratepayers and taxpayers?

At the same time, he and others want DHS to help them recoup the costs for measures (like security divers) that they feel are not really their responsibility, but the nation's. DHS has offered grants for special security projects, but companies insist that these are not enough. (DHS's Libutti declined to be interviewed or to answer e-mail questions for this story, but he did provide a statement, available at CSOonline.com.)

"We are spending millions of dollars of our own money to enhance our security, and this is part of protecting the U.S. economy," says Bobby Gillham, retired manager of global security for ConocoPhillips, who has served as an official coordinator between the government and the oil and gas industry. "So a lot of us would like to encourage the U.S. government to at least provide some kind of tax relief for money spent to enhance the security of what has been identified as a critical component of the U.S. economy."

The question is where to draw the line: Where should the DBT levels be set in hundreds of types of businesses, in thousands of types of situations?

Gillham has a rough idea. "If we're doing something to benefit just the refinery itself, I think that's a corporate issue," he says. "But when we have large increases in security because of the terror threat to the United States, that's when some tax relief should come into play. It's not a clear line, and I don't think anybody thinks of it as a clear line. We're facing something we've never faced before."Talking 'Bout a RevolutionInaction, evolution or revolution. These are the options people face when dealing with upheaval, and homeland security is no exception. "You have the people who are vested in keeping the infrastructure running in the way they understood it and grew up in it," says McCarthy, from the Critical Infrastructure Protection Project. "They were trained in a certain way, and this idea of cyberthreats or people blowing up towers wasn't part of their cost modeling. Then you have a layer of people who are trying to protect the existing infrastructure using the existing [incentive] models. Then you have people talking about how to radically change the model and go to the new way of doing it. You have all those [forces] struggling with each other, and that's just the nature of things."

It's this third groupthe revolutionariesthat holds the most hope and excitement for McCarthy. He isn't really sure what this new economic model would look like. In terms of reliability, at least, it might mean that instead of just asking people not to turn on their air conditioners during an energy crisis, interactive technology built into air conditioners could render them inoperable during a crisis. Or you could at least charge more during those time periods to discourage unnecessary energy consumption. "It's doing business in a different way that could account for security needs," McCarthy says.