Homeland Secretary Assures FAA Crisis Is ‘Not Another 9/11,’ Won’t Rule Out AI Mishap or Cyber Attack

UPDATE: The nationwide ground stop concluded Friday evening, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributing the incident to old technology. Passengers are still dealing with the effects of thousands of cancelled and delayed flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a rare ground stop on all flights nationwide on Friday, leading some to question the reason for such a drastic measure. According to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, some of those concerns may be overblown.

“We were wanting to assure all the American people, this isn’t a safety to the American people or another 9/11,” he said. “I think that’s what a lot of people are trying to make the comparison to, and that is not the case.”

Mullin addressed a crowd of reporters gathered outside the White House on Friday afternoon to speak to the FAA’s actions, which will delay flights for citizens across the country for an indefinite amount of time. Though the secretary assured that “there is no reason for the public to be afraid or scared for your loved ones,” he couldn’t explain what exactly caused the “telecommunication outage.”

“Do we know what has caused it yet? No, we’re going to go through it. But I’m not going to make assumptions,” Mullin said. “As I’ve said multiple times, it’s very difficult to make assumptions. We want to always deal with facts, and we’re going to deal with facts, and as we get them, we’ll roll them out to you guys.”

The secretary then departed the press briefing.

Mullin reiterated multiple times during his appearance that the telecommunication outage is not a version of terror comparable to 9/11, saying “that’s a road I won’t go down.” When a reporter tried to ask if the ground stop might be related to AI, Mullin was quick to amend their wording.

“We call it SI around here, remember?” he said, evoking Trump’s preferred term of “super intelligence.”

“You just can’t rule out anything at this point. We’re going through that process, and we’re going to find out what happened. And when we do, we’ll take the appropriate actions to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

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