WikiLeaks has just released documents that could pose a serious threat not only to US interests around the world, but also to the lives of ordinary citizens in countries as far afield as Congo, China, France, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Yemen, and Canada.
WikiLeaks has blabbed the type of information that terrorists potentially exploit - a list of critical infrastructures and key resources that have been singled out by the US government for protection because attacks on them might potentially not only undermine the US economy and national security, but also pose a threat to the lives of ordinary citizens.
The cable is an action request labeled
NOFORN, NOT FOR INTERNET DISTRIBUTION
.
It is the follow-up on a request by the Department of Homeland Security which is tasked under the National Infrastructure Protection Plan with keeping an inventory of critical infrastructure and key resources abroad
which, if destroyed, disrupted or exploited, would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the United States.
This includes infrastructure and resources from 18 key sectors:
agriculture and food; defense industrial base; energy; healthcare and public health; national monuments and icons; banking and finance; drinking water and water treatment systems; chemical; commercial facilities; dams; emergency services; commercial nuclear reactors, materials, and waste; information technology; communications; postal and shipping; transportation and systems; government facilities; and critical manufacturing.
These critical national infrastructures and key assets in countries abroad are significant to US interests because they fall into one of 3 types:
1) direct physical linkages (e.g., pipelines, undersea telecommunications cables and assets located in close enough proximity to the U.S. border their destruction could cause cross-border consequences, such as damage to dams and chemical facilities);
2) sole or predominantly foreign/host-country sourced goods and services (e.g., minerals or chemicals critical to U.S. industry, a critical finished product manufactured in one or a small number of countries, or a telecom hug whose destruction might seriously disrupt global communications); and
3) critical supply chain nodes (e.g., the Strait of Hormuz and Panama Canal, as well as any ports or shipping lanes on the host-country critical to the functioning of the global supply chain).
The leaked cable itself is a request for an annual updating of the US list of these critical infrastructures and key resources. It is a routine annual update and is dated 2/18/2009.
On the bottom of the request itself is the existing list of such assets produced by the Bush Administration broken down by region and country.
The purpose of having this list is in part to ensure that the United States can coordinate with its allies to protect common interests. The purpose of the list is also for the United States to be able to disseminate best practices on the protection of critical infrastructure and key resources to governments throughout the world.
The list includes wide-ranging specific critical infrastructures and key assets such as strategic cable lines running between countries in Asia and the United States, pharmaceutical factories that produce vaccines, the Panama Canal, mines, ports, the wold's largest integrated chemical complex, a Foot and Mouth Vaccine finishing site, etc.
The fact that the US keeps such a list is certainly not exceptional and should come as no surprise. Like many of the WikiLeaks documents: this one reveals that the US is doing its job, as we would hope and expect. Other countries are certainly doing the same thing. So, this sort of information is likely not particularly useful to other governments.
However, one can hypothesize two audiences that might have some use for this material.
Since the bulk of these critical infrastructures and key resources are privately held, assumedly their corporate competitors might potentially find certain information useful.
The Times London says - this morning - that some security experts view this release as "a gift to terrorist organisations", and certainly it might reduce the cost of identifying targets. We need only remember 9/11 to realize how attacks on civilian infrastructure can have cascading effects and take human lives.