Month: June 2026

It was a pleasure to present initial findings from our project in Crete at the NATO Maritime Interdiction Operational Training Centre – NMIOTC annual conference. The NMIOTC conference is a wonderful space to connect and learn with an audience of policymakers and practitioners from around the world.

In our presentation we highlighted some of the key drivers and barriers to information sharing, including concerns raised during project data collection around threshold definition alignment for reporting/action between industry and government, alongside the challenge of over classification of information. We also introduced an initial framework for dissecting the characteristics of multi-actor information sharing that we hope can help establish a diagnostic and change toolkit.

We were grateful for the opportunity to get expert feedback and we will use these insights to further refine our project outputs.

Last week I had the immense pleasure to visit Tallinn on data collection duties for the project.

Alongside our visit to Helsinki late last year, we wanted to better understand how countries with considerable reason to think about their critical undersea infrastructure are approaching risk analysis and crisis management.

While these countries are obviously different to the UK, the lessons we can learn from how cross government and government to industry information sharing works, cannot be underestimated.

I am hugely indebted to those who spoke to me across Estonia’s government and industry and the spirit of openness and honesty that characterised our conversations. I learned a lot about the wider geopolitical context shaping CUI security, national response characteristics and the factors that are shaping information sharing day to day.

There is a lot to digest and I hope as a project team we can do justice to the insights gained in our planned project reports. Stay tuned!