Overall ACS Conference Observations
After a grueling week, I had a chance to collect my thoughts and have the following observations:
- The attendees felt the Conference was a major success and want it to continue.
- People will come if they think there is information of value. Despite the plethora of conferences including PCSF being 3 weeks away and Black Hat being the same week, there were almost 100 attendees representing 9 countries. Industries present included water, electric transmission, distribution, and generation, nuclear power, wind power, pipelines, and chemicals. In the area of vendor-dominated conferences, less than 20% of the attendees were vendors.
- Almost every presentation stimulated significant discussions – people were not sitting on their hands. The information exchange was detailed and addressed real incidents.
- There is still an erroneous feeling that each industry is unique and that information from one does not apply to the other. I have some thoughts on how to combat that problem and will do so at the 2009 Conference in Washington DC.
- There were a number of federal organizations present – NRC, FERC (and NERC), Pacific Northwest National Lab (nuclear), Idaho National Lab (renewables), Argonne National Lab, DOD, and the FBI. However, despite Congressman Langevin’s plea for cooperation, the following organizations did not attend even thought the information was of direct interest:
o DHS (NCSD or S&T)
o DOE (headquarters and labs working on security)
o EEI (Edison Electric Institute)
o Leadership from the NERC CIPC
o EPRI
o NEI (Nuclear Energy Institute)
o INPO (Institute for Nuclear Power Operations)
o EPA
o AWWA (American Water Works Association)
o API (American Petroleum Institute)
o NPRA (National Petroleum Refinery Association)
Since the information will not be made public, these organizations have simply missed out.
- Information sharing is a dismal failure. An interesting example was how many end-user attendees from multiple industries had not been informed about Aurora. Ironically, they knew more from CNN than from DHS or their own organizations.
- The FBI gave a presentation unfortunately demonstrating how out-of-touch they are with industry and how far we need to go to have a meaningful working relationship. FBI’s focus is criminal prosecution which means a close hold on all information - “cone of silence”. Industry needs enough information to defend itself. Actions are now being taken to help close the gap.
- Planning is starting on the 2009 Conference. Hopefully, all organizations will participate.
Joe Weiss
