Boy, who needs a drink, eh? Critical infrastructure, cyber vulnerabilities, AI, lack of guidance, forget it. Before you reach for something strong to drown your sorrows, let’s kick back for a second with something calming. Coming your way right here, right now, and courtesy of GoTech is a toolkit that our municipal officials and critical infrastructure operators can use to help begin to mitigate risks from connected community architecture deployments.

Much like how a combination of ostensibly unrelated ingredients can result in a delicious salad, U.S. critical infrastructure coalesces disparate parts to form the public services and functions that we have come to rely on.

Many in the United States are just beginning to fully understand the role services from space-based assets play in their everyday lives. These services do not simply impact individuals but businesses, militaries, critical infrastructure, and more. As more satellites are placed in orbit, and the cost per kilogram for space launches falls, experts and novices alike are increasingly engaging in calls to designate space as critical infrastructure.

Having a general conversation about risk is about as useful as having one about AI, IoT, or any other technology. These are terms that can mean nothing and everything at the same time. A statement like, “We need to do something about IoT” is vague to the point of not being useful. “What are the risks to our organization,” sounds similarly insightful and commanding but means little.

Any conversation about the concept of convergence should start in the logical place: chocolate and peanut butter. Convergence is when two (or more) things layered together create a capability that is greater than the individual components.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was born in a different time. One year, two months, and twenty-four days after the attack on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and United Flight 93, DHS was born. The Homeland Security Act was signed on November 25, 2002, and carried with it fresh and open wounds from the horrifying attack just over a year past.

Homeland security has not traditionally been thought of as a mission area supporting space activities. Homeland security organizations, however, have been long time consumers of space data and services. Today, the space domain has opened for commercial activity and geopolitical competition alike.

Security and privacy are two sides of the same coin – it’s hard to have one without the other. Yet there can be a tension between them. Strong legal and technological protections, including encryption, are necessary to effectively protect private data and communications. Yet terrorists, smugglers of dangerous weapons and drugs, human traffickers, and perpetrators of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) sometimes use end-to-end encrypted messaging (E2EE) to prevent their crimes from being discovered by law enforcement. Proposed U.S. laws such as the EARN IT Act seek to end E2EE messaging so that law enforcement need not fear criminals "going dark."

Quoted in the article.

“While America continues to grow its commercial space opportunities, our adversaries will also seek to disrupt the advantages the space economy will bring,” the document states. “The Department must therefore support America’s expanding space ecosystem by recognizing its importance to the security of the homeland and through a DHS Space Policy that defines and updates DHS’s role in this important domain.”