Infrastructure Security: Enabling vs. Endangering
The homeland security enterprise dedicates billions of dollars to protecting critical infrastructure from terrorist attacks. The government’s protection strategy includes commercial facilities, communications, manufacturing, dams, emergency services, energy, health care, transportation, water systems, and myriad of other functions.
A terrorist attack on a infrastructure facility can have two distinct and very different outcomes. An attack can kill or injure people who are present at the location or it can damage the system itself. The physical damages to infrastructure component can cause an outage and potentially cascading impacts to other systems. Protecting the people at a facility is a completely different task from protecting physical components of the facility.
Instead of thinking of infrastructure as a single category of vulnerability that requires protective measures, the homeland security enterprise needs to separate enabling infrastructure from endangering infrastructure.
Endangering Infrastructure
Places where people congregate allow the opportunity for terrorists to use simple means (e.g., knife, gun, bomb) to harm as many people as possible within a contained area. Sports stadium and arenas concentrate up to 110,000 people into a single facility. The nature of mass gatherings endangers the occupants by clustering them together.
Areas of public congregation that have been the target of attacks include soccer stadiums, night clubs, shopping malls, movie theaters, outdoor markets, subway stations, hotels, marathons, concerts, schools, amusement parks, and city streets. While all of the locations and types of venues are completely different, the target at each was the people, not the physical facility. Putting up a taller fence, encrypted keypad to restrict access, CCTV camera, or any of the other measures used to guard the physical aspects of an infrastructure facility would not have protected the people from these attacks.
Enabling Infrastructure
Systems that provide the underlying functions of our modern society allow us to power our homes and business, drink clean water, get to other places, and communicate with each other are the infrastructure that enable other systems. These enabling systems create a complex web of interdependencies. For example, the chain of events needed to get gasoline for your car, starts with ships transporting crude oil to a storage facility where it is pumped to a refinery. The refined product is distributed via a pipeline system that is directed by a control center. Petroleum products travel through second, third, and forth levels of storage until they are bought and sold to become fuels or other products. A trunk eventually brings the gasoline to a commercial station near you where you swipe a credit card to activate a pump and then fill up your car. At each point in the long chain of events, a disruption could result in an interruption of the supply of gasoline for your personal vehicle.
Four systems provide the underlying functions that enable all other infrastructure to operate. A disruption to these systems can hamper or disable the operation of every other function that is dependent upon them.
Energy
Major cities, small towns, offices, homes, factories, or businesses all need electricity to operate at a baseline level. Cars, buses, boats, trains, and airplanes all need a fuel source too. Energy encompasses sustainable (e.g., solar, water, wind), nuclear, and fossil fuel sources of power. A disruption in the ability to provide energy disrupts production and movement across the whole system.
Water
Water systems can have three levels of disruption — contamination, loss of pressure, and total outage — that cause different impacts to the systems that are dependent on them.
A water system can be contaminated due to a pollutant in the water source, a loss of pressure allowing untreated water into the system, or a corrosion of elements within the water distribution system (e.g., lead contamination in Flint, MI). Contaminated water can usually still be used for sewage, washing dishes/clothing, manufacturing, and consumed if it is boiled. Bottled water can be distributed to replace municipal water if dangerous chemicals or lead are in the water. Contamination of water systems is normally an annoyance but does not cause a major disruption to infrastructure functions.
The loss of pressure in water systems usually results from large water mains breaking or outages of pumping stations. When a system loses pressure, manufacturing, commercial buildings, restaurants, hospitals, schools, and other large facilities may not have the water and sewage services needed to operate. Fire hydrants will not function property and can endanger public safety. Loss of pressure has cascading impacts that are detrimental to the function of other infrastructure systems.
Total outages of municipal water systems cripple the impacted area and create a major public health crisis when the lack of clean water is combined with lack of a sewage system for human waste. Recent flooding in Houston, TX and Puerto Rico caused public health warnings for chemical contamination and disease outbreaks including Cholera. Total outages of the water systems have catastrophic impacts across the entire infrastructure system.
Transportation
Roads, bridges, subways, railways, ports, and airports make up the transportation system that is required to move people, equipment, and commodities around a local area or across the country. A disruption to one part of the transportation system occurs routinely and causes delays (e.g., a car accident on the highway that results in a traffic jam). System-wide outages are rare due to the amount of redundancy in transportation networks. If you normally take the subway to work and there is a train service outage, you can drive your car, take a bus, call an Uber, ride a bike, carpool with a coworker, use a different subway line, or walk.
When total transportation system failures occur, the impacts cripple all functions of the affected area. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, all of Puerto Rico’s transportation systems were impacted preventing emergency personnel, fuel, equipment, food, water, and emergency supplies from both arriving and being distributed. When the port and airport were reopened, damage to roads and bridges still prevented the supply chain from reaching most parts of the island. A lack of fuel prevented vehicles from traveling on the few roads that were accessible. Outages to multiple transportation systems cause compounding impacts due to the interdependencies.
Telecommunications and IT Systems
Both the physical elements of the fiber optic and cable networks as well as the IT systems they connect to are vulnerable to outages. Physical cables and towers can be damaged. Servers can lose power. Servers can crash from cyber attacks, errors in the programming, or higher than expected web traffic.
Telecom and IT systems are used to automatically and manually control a vast array of infrastructure systems including power plants, pipelines, refineries, water treatment facilities, traffic lights, subways/trains, air traffic control, and countless other systems. Telecom and IT also facilitate almost all monetary transactions and are the backbone of the global financial system. The government, business, and citizens all rely on these systems for all types of communications.
IT systems outages impact the ability of other infrastructure systems to function. Delta airlines entire transportation system failed due to an IT systems outage. Although the planes were functional, had fuel, pilots, waiting passengers, and all other airport equipment was working, the outage of the IT-based scheduling system negated all of this and caused the entire system to fail.
Terrorism is all about Danger, not Disruption
ISIS has successfully recruited follows from around the world through social media engagement with Hollywood quality production of YouTube videos and an endless stream of tweets. The videos show ISIS followers firing rocket launchers and blowing up buildings. They do not show ISIS damaging water pipes, clipping fiber optic cables, or downing power lines because those type of attacks are not sexy and exciting…and they are not even useful. ISIS depends on the same enabling infrastructure systems to run their operations and spread their messages.
Historically terrorists have not been interested in attacking infrastructure because it doesn’t advance their message or align with their agenda. Terrorists target places where people are, not functions of the infrastructure system. Groups of people in accessible areas create soft targets and infrastructure that is designed to congregate masses of people becomes a location that is desirable. The desirability of the target rich environment has nothing to do with its functionality.
The enabling infrastructure that underpins all aspects of society — including the violent fringe — to function needs to be viewed differently from endangering infrastructure that creates a desirable target due to its openness and accessibility to the public masses who frequent it.
Natural Disruptions
Hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, and floods — compounded by global climate change — are the most significant and ongoing threats to disrupt enabling systems. Natural disasters have the size, duration, and intensity to damage huge portions of these systems. Even with a compromised electrical grid, a terrorist attack would not have the capability to knock out 100% of the power to Puerto Rico for weeks but a rapidly intensifying hurricane caused catastrophic damage overnight.
The impacts of natural disasters to power, water, transportation, and telecommunications systems can be mitigated by adding redundancy, hardening physical facilities and assets (e.g., building seawalls, underground powerlines, emergency pumps, backup generators), and relocating key components away from hazards (e.g., elevation in flood prone area). These measures are completely different from what would be needed to protect the facilities from terrorist attacks. Adding security cameras and motion sensors to a coastal fuel refinery will not provide any mitigation against flooding.
Need for Two Completely Different Strategies
Terrorists aren’t interested and don’t have the capability to attack enabling infrastructure, they target open and accessible public areas where people gather. Endangering infrastructure needs protection, detection, and response strategies to deter, identify, and address the impacts of attacks.
Natural disasters have the power to damage entire systems of enabling infrastructure but are generally predictable hazards with known areas of impact (e.g., the Gulf Coast is a hurricane prone area, Southern California is on a major fault line) which allow for mitigation and resiliency strategies to ensure that underlying functions can continue during natural disruptions.
David Riedman is an expert in critical infrastructure protection, disaster preparedness, and emergency management. He is a co-founder of the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s Advanced Thinking and Experimentation (HSx) Program at the Naval Postgraduate School.
