August 2010
| 
|
Thanks to our Gold-Level Corporate Patron
|
|
Need Your Own Copy of The Risk Communicator?
|
|
Write for Us
|
| Have you seen a story you would
like to see included in The Risk Communicator? Do you have a research project you want to share with your colleagues? If so, please contact
the newsletter staff at newsletter@sarma.org. |
Legal Matters
|
Copyright 2010
SARMA
All Rights Reserved
Privacy Policy
The views expressed in The Risk Communicator reflect the views of their authors, and do not neccesarily reflect the views of SARMA, the US Government or the employers or clients of the contributors.
|
|
|
President's Corner
|
| Dear Fellow SARMA Members,
As you know, SARMA has made some significant strides over the past twelve months. The last year has seen the Association adopt updated articles of incorporation and by-laws reflecting the changing times in which we practice our craft. Following close behind was a new structure for our 16 business and project committees. Today, I'm pleased to be able to report that SARMA has achieved another significant milestone in its growth and maturation: at its last meeting, our Board of Directors unanimously approved the Association's first strategic plan.
I think you will find SARMA 2.0: A Five Year Strategy for Growth and Development to be a truly representative document that provides SARMA with a much needed roadmap for its efforts. As with all such plans, charting a meaningful course requires the proper context. Thus, the plan begins by establishing an updated vision of the security analysis and risk management profession, and then articulates SARMA's role in helping to move this vision from a hoped-for future state to reality. Against this baseline, a series of well defined goals, objectives and implementation steps are identified. These are the means to the end. Importantly, they also provide us with the ability to measure progress and to implement course corrections whenever our actions are not producing the intended results.
Of course, no plan is ever truly complete. Circumstances change, and as a professional association, SARMA must always remain vigilant and, most especially, attuned to the needs of its stakeholders. Therefore, I have also charged the Strategic Planning Committee with reviewing this plan annually to ensure that it retains the necessary currency throughout its lifespan.
Finally, I believe it is important to acknowledge the hard work that went into the creation of this document. I can say with certainty that realizing this strategic plan would not have been possible without the perseverance of a core group of dedicated professionals who devoted vast amounts of their personal time and talents to this effort. Among the most noteworthy are our Board Chair, Phil Lacombe, our Strategic Planning Committee Chair, Dr. Michael Gresalfi, and our Executive Director, John Boatman. Many members of the SARMA Board of Directors, the officers of the Association, committee chairs and the rank and file also contributed valuable thoughts and comments at various stages of the process. We owe them all our gratitude for a job well done!
August has been a big month in other ways as well. In that regard, I am pleased to note that PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has become our first Gold-level Corporate Patron for 2010. As I have stated previously, the work of the Association would not be possible without such generosity.
Enjoy this issue of The Risk Communicator and the remainder of your summer!
My best,
Kerry
Kerry L. Thomas
President
|
Events
|
| Registration Open for 4th Annual SARMA Conference
Registration for SARMA's 4th Annual Conference is now open, and an Early Bird discount rate is in effect until September 7th.
This year's event, to be held from 5-7 October, will focus on achieving enterprise, societal and infrastructure resilience -- concepts that have become the centerpiece of homeland security efforts both in the U.S. and abroad.
The conference will bring together over 50 specialists on risk and resiliency, who will address current government, academic and private-sector perspectives, relevant policy issues, and standards development efforts. Importantly, the conference will also explore how public and private-sector interests can be collectively served.
Our six subject tracks this year are as follows:- Infrastructure Resilience
- Community Resilience
- Cybersecurity Risk & Resilience
- Public Policy for Risk Management & Resilience
- Resilience Standards
- Risk Methodologies & Practices
Registration fees are as follows:- General Registration - $395
Early-Bird Rate - $345 if registered by Sept. 7
- Government/Academic Registration - $295
Early-Bird Rate - $245 if registered by Sept. 7
- Student Rate - $75 (student ID required)
The conference will be held in partnership with the George Mason University School of Law's Center for Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security (CIP/HS) in Arlington VA, starting on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 8:30 am and running through Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 12:00 pm. ---------------------------------------------------- Note to Potential SpeakersWe still have some open slots for presenters and panelists, so if you or someone you know has insights into one or more of the above subject areas, we'd love to hear from you. Our speaker application form can be downloaded from the SARMA website at: https://sarma.org/events/pastevents/4thannualconferenc/speakerapplication/ |
Webinar: Surveillance Detection Awareness on the Job
The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Infrastructure Protection will host a webinar on surveillance detection on 9 September 2010. The event, which is designed for those in both the public and private sectors, is intended to raise awareness of suspicious activities and behaviors that might indicate potential surveillance. Following introductory remarks by Assistant Secretary Todd Keil, the program will take participants through five distinct scenarios of surveillance and detection: - Surveillance video and still photography by a pedestrian and from a vehicle.
- Employees allowing access to a restricted area for a stranger without official identification.
- A cleaning crew gaining access to a facility without going through appropriate check-in procedures.
- Co-workers sharing sensitive information in a social situation, unaware that their conversation is being listened to and recorded by someone else.
- An employee falling victim to a "phishing" scam when accessing information on a facility network.
After each scenario, a panel of subject matter experts will discuss potential responses and outcomes and answer questions from attendees. Scheduled panelists include Charlie Payne of DHS's Office of Bombing Prevention, Jim Rosenbluth of Cushman & Wakefield, and James Haughom of Network Security Services LLC. To participate in the webinar, please visit DHS's registration site. After the webinar is complete, readers can access a recording of the proceedings here. |
Book Review
|
| Resilience and the 'Global' City:
How London's Institutions Exert Control
by Christine Pommerening
Terrorism, Risk and the Global City: Towards Urban Resilience. By Jon Coaffee. Aldersgate Publishing, 2009.
This book is an updated and expanded version of a 2003 book titled "Terrorism, Risk and the City." It focuses on the strategies developed by political authorities, financial institutions and law enforcement to exert control over selected parts of the City of London over the past 15 or so years. It is organized into three main parts: Part one discusses risk and security in the urbanization and globalization literature, including concepts of risk society, territoriality and defensible space. Part two applies these ideas for the case of the terrorist threat to the City from IRA car bombs in the 1990s to 9/11 reaction to the 2005 transit attacks. Part three comes full circle, linking the City's response first to wider counter-terrorism ideas, and then to their utilization in other locations such as Manchester and New York City.
The first part of the book will be of interest primarily to sociologists and political scientists in its normative discussions of postmodern theory, globalization, new political economy and institutionalism. The more descriptive latter parts dealing with how the City of London has changed in response to diverse terrorist threats and attacks over the last 40 years will provide valuable insights for city planners and law enforcement officials. Especially useful is an overview of the stages of the "ring of steel" from apprehension and containment in the early 1990s to extension and re-appropriation in the early 2000s. There are interesting parallels, and differences, in how U.S. cities have built their defenses since 9/11 that could be analyzed based on this taxonomy. As an institutional arrangement, the London Resilience [Forum] is also described in some detail, which is instructive for the emerging regional partnership focus in the U.S. policy and planning context.
Despite what the title might suggest, this is not a comparative case study of how different cities around the world deal with terrorism and risk. The titular global city is London, and specifically the City of London, or Square Mile that is the financial, commercial and political heart of the British capital. Neither is it a systematic study of different terrorist threats or other risks. Rather, its purpose is to examine the impact of such phenomena on the physical and institutional arrangements of cities, ranging from closed-circuit television surveillance to the role of the insurance industry to organizing regional partnerships.
There is some mention of U.S. policy and response regarding the 9/11 attacks and its impact on urban planning in New York City, but the fact that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's name is misspelled indicates that the U.S. was only of marginal interest to the author. Interestingly, there is quite a bit of reference to Los Angeles -- not because of terror threats but because of its reputation as "Fortress L.A." which had gained considerable attention among urban planners and sociologists in the 1980s for its seemingly dystopian reality of heavily fortified enclaves designed to protect individual and corporate economic interests first and foremost rather than creating livable space for all residents.
In that field of study, which is the author's scholarly domain, urban security is viewed as a matter of design and managerial intervention of space, and the institutional forces that determine its shape. Dr. Coaffee's main contention is that there has been an increasing "militarisation and privatisation" of public space, originally for fear of crime, and now for fear of terrorism. Cases in point are gated communities and privately secured shopping malls that constitute "defensible spaces" where "form follows fear."
This perception is quite common in European academic and policy debates. The theoretical underpinnings of such debates can be found in works by Anthony Giddens and German sociologist Ulrich Beck, both of whom the author discusses at some length. Beck, in particular, has written extensively since the 1980s about the emergence of a postmodern Risikogesellschaft (risk society) and how it shapes public policy and discourse. The relevance for Dr. Coaffee's study of the U.K. is through the notion of how societies in general, and its elites in particular, organize their institutions and design their environments to deal with risks real or perceived. This strand of political theory indeed sees risks primarily as socially constructed and produced, resulting among other things in the unequal distribution of environmental risks and in the exclusion of the generalized "Other" -- outsiders, criminals, terrorists -- from city centers and economic value.
It is in this theoretical context that Dr. Coaffee's extensive examination of the role of the insurance industry makes sense, which otherwise would seem disconnected from the rest of the book. Yet the insurance industry plays a pivotal role in shaping a cityscape, the author argues. The problem of insuring terrorism risks is that they are "immeasurable, non-homogeneous, and not limited in time and space." In the case of the 1970s Belfast bombings, this even "forced the British government to pay all insurance and compensation claims related to acts of terrorism." Another result is redlining and adverse selection by the insurance industry, again forcing the government to step in and create special legislation and reinsurance pools.
Dr. Coaffee also extensively discusses the background and trajectories of the concept of resilience, in particular how anticipatory planning and designing-out contributes to urban resilience. While this part is informative and well referenced, it should be pointed out that other scholars see anticipation and resilience as distinct and alternative strategies. There also appears to be a curious divergence of how the understanding of resilience has evolved in the U.K. versus its recent application in U.S. homeland security policy planning and directives such as the National Infrastructure Protection Plan and the revision of HSPD-7 now underway. While in the U.S., resilience moves away from the terrorism-focused protection paradigm of the early 2000s to an all-hazards view of risk, the author observes an opposite trend in that "the emerging notion of resilience [is] the metaphor of choice for governments in outlining their national security and counter-terrorism planning [and] represents a classic example of anticipatory and pre-emptive policy, where intervention is justified upon predictive intelligence and the assumption of inevitable attack."
It would be worth examining such distinctions in principle, although in homeland security, these are often distinctions without a practical difference. This is evidenced by the detailed description and numerous maps and photographs (e.g., of elements of the "ring of steel" security cordon around central London), which in fact started out as a maze of traffic cones directing vehicles and was thus dubbed the "ring of plastic" by locals. Those on-the-ground measures are not much different around the world regardless of paradigm, which makes the findings of this book universally applicable.
Finally, while not everyone will be comfortable with Dr. Coaffee's normative assertions regarding militarization and private control of public space, his introduction and adaptation of Ulrich Beck's risk society concept to urban security debates adds a valuable macro-perspective to the field.
Christine Pommerening is Research Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy, George Mason University.
This book review was originally published in Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and is available online at http://www.bepress.com/jhsem/vol7/iss1/30/. The journal is a primary source of new, peer-reviewed research and information in the fields of homeland security and emergency management.
|
Key Reports
|
| GAO: Explosives Detection Technologies to Protect Passenger Rail
A new General Accountability Office report recommends that "the decision as to whether or not to deploy explosives detection technologies should be made consistent with a risk management framework to ensure that limited security budgets are expended to address the greatest risks."
Get the report
State Department: Country Reports on Terrorism 2009
This annual report by the State Department reviews terrorist activities worldwide and names al Qaeda in Pakistan "the most formidable terrorist organization targeting the U.S. Homeland."
Get the report
IPT: U.S. Terror History Map
Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism uses Google Maps technology to track and identify "cases of terror plots, terror financing and other radical activities in the United States during the past 20 years." The map plots three categories of terrorist activity in the United States: court cases, mosques/Islamic centers and radical activities.
Get the report
|
Jobs
|
| ABS Consulting: Senior Cyber Security Consultant
ABS Consulting
is seeking seeking qualified individuals to provide chemical security
analyses of vulnerability assessments and security plans for chemical
facilities regulated by the Department of Homeland Security.
View the notice
ABS Consulting: Senior Chemical Security Consultant
ABS
Consulting is seeking qualified individuals to provide chemical
security analyses of vulnerability assessments and security plans for
chemical facilities regulated by the Department of Homeland Security.
View the notice
ABS Consulting: Chemical Facility Security Consultant
ABS
Consulting is seeking talented individuals to provide physical
security, chemical security, and/or cyber security analyses of
vulnerability assessments and security plans for chemical facilities
regulated by the Department of Homeland Security.
View the notice
Senior
Physical Security Consultant
ABS Consulting is seeking qualified
individuals to provide physical security analyses of vulnerability
assessments and security plans for chemical facilities regulated by the
Department of Homeland Security.
View the notice
NMR Consulting: Senior Risk Officer
NMR Consulting is seeking candidates for a position responsible for developing and managing a risk management program in support of a large government contract involving infrastructure upgrades and enhancements at Ft. Meade, Maryland.
View the notice
NMR Consulting: Senior Risk Officer
NMR Consulting is seeking candidates for a position responsible for moving a project from Northern Virginia to the Ft. Meade, Maryland area. The successful applicant may also support efforts on other contracts.
View the notice
SRA: Security Risk Analyst Position
SRA International Inc. is seeking candidates for a security risk analyst position. The successful candidate will use their experience to plan, organize and carry out analytical studies of complex security risk management problems, as well as plan and implement potential technical or programmatic solutions to those problems.
View the notice
Corporate Security Analyst Position in Switzerland
SMR Group, an international executive search firm whose global practice is focused exclusively on professional- and executive-level corporate security positions, is seeking candidates for the position of Corporate Security Analyst, located in Switzerland. The Corporate Security Analyst will be responsible for protecting business operations and associates throughout the organization from external threats by the collection, analysis and dissemination of strategic and tactical threat assessments, and production of both analytical and intelligence products designed to support investigations and protective security operations.
View the notice
Risk Analyst Position With Centra Technology
Arlington, VA-based CENTRA Technology, Inc. is seeking talented professionals to provide technical and national security analysis for the U.S. Government, especially in the area of homeland security risk analysis. Successful candidates will perform security risk analysis; threat, vulnerability, and consequence analysis supporting risk analysis; and security risk management. They also will develop, assess, document, institutionalize, and apply risk management processes and methodologies to inform policy and programmatic decisions.
View the notice
|
|
|
|
|
