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Accountability * Integrity * Reliability
United States General Accounting Office
Washington, DC 20548
December 8, 2003
The Honorable Dave Camp
Chairman, Subcommittee on Infrastructure and
Border Security
Select Committee on Homeland Security
House of Representatives
The Honorable Mac Thornberry
Chairman, Subcommittee on Cybersecurity,
Science, and Research and Development
Select Committee on Homeland Security
House of Representatives
Subject: Posthearing Questions from the September 17, 2003, Hearing on
Implications of Power Blackouts for the Nation's Cybersecurity and
Critical Infrastructure Protection: The Electric Grid, Critical
Interdependencies, Vulnerabilities, and Readiness
As requested in your letter of November 5, 2003, this letter provides our responses for
the record to the questions you posed to GAO. At the subject hearing, we discussed
the challenges that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) faces in integrating
its information gathering and sharing functions, particularly as they relate to fulfilling
the department's responsibilities for critical infrastructure protection (CIP).
GAO released a report on information sharing in August of this year. It found
that no level of government perceived the [information sharing] process as
effective, particularly when sharing information with federal agencies. How
does [this]finding relate to what happened during the August 2003 blackout?
In our August 2003 report on information sharing, we identified initiatives that had
been undertaken to improve the sharing of information to prevent terrorist attacks
and surveyed federal, state, and city government officials to obtain their perceptions
on how the current information-sharing process was working.' Our survey showed
that none of the three levels of government perceived the current information-sharing
process to be effective when it involved the sharing of information with federal
agencies. Specifically, respondents reported that information on threats, methods,
1U.S. General Accounting Office, Homeland Security: Efforts to Improve Information Sharing Need to Be
Strengthened, GAO-03-760 (Washington, D.C.: Aug. 27, 2003).
GAO-04-300R](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.gao/gaobaamju0001&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)