WikiLeaks and the risks to critical foreign dependencies

Abstract

AbstractDuring its “Cablegate” campaign, the WikiLeaks website released a U.S. Department of State list of world-wide assets vital to the United States created under the Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative (CFDI). This paper evaluates the entries in the CFDI list relative to various definitions of critical infrastructure pertaining to homeland security, and past patterns of terrorism attacks on categories within the CFDI as recorded by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) over the past 40 years. It is found that what the United States identifies as critical international infrastructure differs significantly from what is defined as the national critical infrastructure. Moreover, the geospatial distribution of foreign infrastructure identified as critical by the United States differs substantially from the past patterns of terrorist attacks on similar entities. Finally, examining the GTD for the years subsequent to the WikiLeaks release reveals that there is little evidence to substantiate that WikiLeaks provided a “to-do” list for terrorists intending to attack critical infrastructure assets as was claimed by some U.S. government officials