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Freedom and Information

Assessing Publicly Available Data Regarding U.S. Transportation Infrastructure Security

by Eric Landree, Christopher Paul, Beth Grill, Aruna Balakrishnan, Bradley Wilson, Martin C. Libicki

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How much data regarding U.S. anti- and counterterrorism systems, countermeasures, and defenses is publicly available and how easily could it be found by individuals seeking to harm U.S. domestic interests? The authors developed a framework to guide assessments of the availability of such information for planning attacks on the U.S. air, rail, and sea transportation infrastructure, and applied the framework in an information-gathering exercise that used several attack scenarios. Overall, the framework was useful for assessing what kind of information would be easy or hard for potential attackers to find. For each of the attack scenarios, a team of “attackers” was unable to locate some of the information that a terrorist planner would need to gauge the likely success of a potential attack. The authors recommend that procedures for securing sensitive information be evaluated regularly and that information that can be obtained from easily accessible, off-site public information sources be included in vulnerability assessments.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter One

    Introduction

  • Chapter Two

    Defining Terrorists’ Information Requirements: The ModIPB Framework

  • Chapter Three

    Summary of Red-Team Findings and Validation

  • Chapter Four

    Conclusions and Recommendations

  • Appendix A

    What the Red Team Found

  • Appendix B

    Crosswalk of ModIPB and al Qaeda Manual

The research described in this report was conducted under the auspices of the Homeland Security Program within RAND Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment (ISE).

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