Our vital infrastructures must be protected from many threats. Following on from the White Paper on defence and national security, the National Defence Secretariat-General (SGDN) is playing a major role, both in approving 21 national security directives and in supporting the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection. By controlling all facets of strategic information useful to economic players, economic intelligence contributes to defence of the nation’s vital interests. Arrangements for supporting companies include oversight of financial operations, avoidance of strategic dependence, defence of legitimate economic security interests and the development of an ability to anticipate and act on tomorrow’s opportunities and threats.
Economic Intelligence Serving Private Operators of Vital Infrastructures
The world is today facing a terrible financial crisis. Businesses have been weakened, our economies are flirting with recession, and we are witnessing general mobilisation by states in order to refuel investments and maintain credit possibilities. The majority of the major private operators of vital importance as well as their subcontractors can become the targets, at any time, of takeover bids or of acquisitions of interest if they do not find any internal financing solutions. In addition, our country’s economic activities are facing such growing threats as terrorism, computer hacking, or looting of strategic information. To protect our vital infrastructures, the SGDN(1) has contributed to the implementation of security plans fitting into economic security dynamics. Moreover the State, as direct follow-up to the recommendations contained in the White Paper on defence and national security, is initiating some basic projects that are eminently collective and European.
In this context, should one also speak of economic intelligence? The answer is yes, more than ever before. The economic and financial crisis as well as the emergence of sovereign funds and the existence of speculative funds create such new threats as losses of know-how, transfers of technologies, or else violations of infrastructures, to which the concepts of economic security supervised by the Ministry of the Interior, and of economic defence, supervised by the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, constitute only partial responses.
SGDN’s Action in Connection with Sectors of Activities of Vital Importance
The White Paper on defence and national security defines resilience as ‘the desire and the ability of a country, of society and of the authorities to stand up to the consequences of major aggression or of a major disaster, and then to quickly re-establish their ability to operate normally’. To strengthen the nation’s resilience, the White Paper urges an energetic continuation of the security policy applying to activities of vital importance initiated in 2006, but also calls for freeing up the initiatives launched by the European Union on behalf of establishment of common principles for organising the protection of vital infrastructures and concerning the sharing of best practices.
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