Critical Information Infrastructure

This page considers telecommunications networks and services in Australia and New Zealand as critical information infrastructure.

It covers -

• introduction
• conceptualisation and strategies - making sense of 'critical infrastructure', risks and responses
• mapping and inventories - what does the infrastructure look like and where is it located
• legislation - NII and other infrastructure protection legislation
• physical security - hardening, access restriction and risk analysis for protecting cables, dishes, boxes and buildings
• structures - policymaking, coordination and monitoring bodies
• studies - government, academic and other studies

     studies

Salient official studies include -

• E-government - Protecting New Zealand's Infrastructure report (2000)

Academic work of value includes -

• The Revenge of Distance: Vulnerability Analysis of Critical Information Infrastructure (PDF) by Sean Gorman, Laurie Schintler, Raj Kulkarni & Roger Stough

A perspective is provided by works such as Peter Laurie's Beneath The City Streets (London: Allen Lane 1983), David Krugler's This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006), Guy Oakes' The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1994), Andrew Grossman's Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (London: Routledge 2001), Laura McEnaney's Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000) and Peter Hennessy's The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (London: Allen Lane 2002), illustrating how the US and UK governments sought to protect communication links, data processing and senior personnel.

Unfortunately there is no comparable study for Australia or New Zealand, although the principles are presumably the same.

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