Sharing with the Private Sector

The National Strategy for Information Sharing recognizes the importance of private sector involvement in the ISE, particularly critical infrastructure owners and operators. Consequently, the PM-ISE, working with DHS and other stakeholders, confirmed that DHS’s Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR) information sharing approach would be fully integrated into the national ISE. The resulting “CIKR ISE” provides a unifying, integrated framework for stakeholders from all levels of government and critical infrastructure owners and operators to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate through the efficient exchange of timely and useful information pertinent to their shared mission of protection and resiliency. In order to facilitate such an information exchange, owners and operators may participate in DHS’s Protected Critical Infrastructure Information (PCII) Program, which was created by Congress to offer protection to private sector infrastructure information voluntarily shared with government partners with the confidence that it will be protected from public release. More information can be found on the DHS website here. Recent accomplishments in private-sector sharing include:

•     The Transportation Sector Information Sharing and Analysis Center content portal was established to provide tactical and planning functionality for sharing suspicious activity reports, situational awareness, and terrorism analysis affecting the Transportation Sector;
•     The Healthcare and Public Health Sector adopted the CIKR ISE as the centralized information sharing capability for all its critical infrastructure initiatives and programs;
•     The Food and Agriculture Sector integrated Food Shield and the Homeland Security Information Network-Critical Sectors (HSIN-CS), the technical platform supporting the CIKR ISE, into a unified information sharing environment for the Sector; and
•     The collaboration tool within the CIKR ISE on HSIN-CS was used over the past year to host over 25 educational events for approximately 17,000 critical infrastructure stakeholders. Valuable information was provided to participants on topics such as CIKR resilience and threat detection.