National Security Expert Trashes Excuses For Flight Shutdown: 'There Are Lots Of Questions'

详细摘要

Richard Clarke appeared stunned by the lack of answers from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

Veteran national security expert Richard Clarke on Saturday decried Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s lack of answers during a White House press conference Friday after a four-hour nationwide flight shutdown.

A former counterterrorism and national security official who served the administrations of former Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama, Clarke told CNN host Michael Smerconish on Saturday, “I think we need a much more complete explanation.”

The Federal Aviation Administration halted all activity in U.S. airspace for more than four hours on Friday. Duffy attributed the issue to old FAA routers, while Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the press there was “zero evidence” of a cyberattack — which stunned Clarke.

“First of all, you should never rule out cyber until you’ve done a forensic analysis, a root cause analysis, and they haven’t had time to do that,” he said. “So saying we don’t know what it is, but it wasn’t cyber, or we think it was this, but it wasn’t cyber — it’s too early to say that.”

Clarke continued Saturday, “The American people need an explanation and saying simply that it got overloaded for no particular reason on a Friday afternoon when there was nothing special happening ... maybe that’s true. But we need trust in the system.”

Duffy announced earlier this week that the FAA was expanding its artificial intelligence-based platform SMART (or Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories), which “centralizes diverse data streams,” in a stated attempt to improve efficiency “nationwide.”

He said during the press conference that “there’s no possible way” SMART contributed to the shutdown, but only after Mullin said that Duffy and various unnamed officials were patching the FAA system with “new technology” that “was overwhelming the older system.”

Friday’s incident came mere days after a global Microsoft outage that disrupted email access and other systems worldwide.

“You’re supposed to have — with the…

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