Critical Infrastructure Protection: Advanced Citizenship

Public-private critical infrastructure partnership is an ideal-easy to love but hard to achieve. This roundtable conversation draws on the experiences of Bill Boni, Randall Yim, Howard Schmidt, Robert Rodriguez and Ted Dmuchowski

By Lew McCreary

October 01, 2004 — CSO — Like world peace, public-private partnership is an idealeasy to love but hard to achieve. A roundtable conversation, moderated by CSO Editor in Chief Lew McCreary, draws on five experienced partnership advocates and highlights some of the complicating issues.

One of the most confounding obstacles standing in the way of genuinely robust security in the critical infrastructure industries is the basic necessity of building solid partnerships between the mostly private-sector enterprises that own those industries, on the one hand, and federal and state government and law enforcement agencies on the other. Sometimes the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak; at other times, the flesh is plenty strong enough but the ways and means for getting the job done are open to debate.

In the spring, during CSO's inaugural CSO Perspectives conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Editor in Chief Lew McCreary moderated a panel discussion on how to achieve successful public-private partnerships.

What follows is a distillation of the panel's hour-long conversation. The next CSO Perspectives conference will be held April 10-12, 2005, in Huntington Beach, Calif.Lew McCreary: What are the minimum requirements for a successful public-private partnership? Partnership implies obligations on both sides. So what are the parties obliged to do?

Col. Ted Dmuchowski: We need to take two factors into account. The big one is trust. Partnership is not going to work unless we trust each other. The government looks at the motivating factors of the private sector and says, "Driven by moneywe can't trust them." We've got to get past that. The private sector looks at the government and says, "What's in it for you? Why would the army care about working with us? And what do I get out of the deal?" Once we have a dialogue, and you get beyond [suspicion], you find out that there's a mutual dependence. You've got to build that trust factor.

[A second factor is sharing.] One of the favorite [jokes about government] is: "We're going to have a partnership. You're going to tell me what I want to know. And then you're going to tell me more of what I want to know." And that doesn't work very well. And then [the government] wonders why everybody didn't jump on board and start sharing information. It's got to be two ways. The government has a lot of intelligence... and a vast army of people looking at the future and [evaluating] what's going on. And that [analysis] should be made available to all of us to do our part to secure the infrastructure. You in the private sector deal with this stuff all the time. You also have a great deal of intelligence from your overseas businesses, from the networks you operate, from all the people that you deal withyour suppliers and consumers and everything else.

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