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Stumbling Toward Partnership

Effective information-sharing between the public and private sectors is still the exception, not the rule

October 01, 2006 — CSO — This is my favorite typical-day-in-security story. I was preparing some budget estimates when the supervisor of our security ops center dashed in and said that a crime had just been discovered and that our security response was evolving. In fact, a maintenance truck had been stolen. The truck was carrying equipment that was in use at the time of its theft and was a potential safety hazard.

Specifically, it could explode.

What's more, POTUS (that's the President) was visiting nearby facilities. So much for quietly working on retrieving a stolen vehicle. And it didn't help to have responding FBI and police units overhear our maintenance crews describing the truck as, ahem, a "rolling bomb."

So saying the response was "evolving" was an interesting choice of words.

Because you never heard or read about the massive explosion of a stolen truck near the president, you know this particular crisis ended well. We got on the phone with local police, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and U.S. Secret Service. Together we partnered as we had several times before in the interest of protecting both the public and our mutual interests. Within minutes, we provided pictures and had public broadcasts over local news stations advising people to report any sightings of our stolen vehicle.

That did the trick. The vehicle was spotted and recovered, thus ending the danger to the public and to

the reputation of the company.

It was information-sharing between the government and industry at its best. I have seen it happen other times, especially with time-sensitive problems like this one. Unfortunately, though, I'd have to say that this case was the exception, not the rule. In general, information-sharing is not working well. At best, we can say that it's "evolving."

The Information-Sharing Dilemma

From the corporate security perspective, the fundamental dilemma of information-sharing is not trivial.

CSOs really want to help struggling government organizations develop an effective defense of the homeland. But no one can guarantee that what's shared will remain confidential. I have attended several meetings with government officials where they adamantly warned that they could not protect the information and that we shouldn't share anything we didn't potentially want to see on the front page ofthe newspaper.

In one specific case a few years ago, the government requested highly sensitive information on a security event and, after an intense session with the CEO, we agreed to send it along, marked clearly as highly confidential, because it dealt with critical infrastructure data.