For Garbarino, big tech outage is all systems go

Daily Point

Garbarino leading Crowdstrike inquiry

The massive tech outage that is still rippling through the nation has turned the spotlight to one of Long Island’s own, Rep. Andrew Garbarino. As chair of the congressional subcommittee on cybersecurity and infrastructure protection, Rep. Andrew Garbarino is taking a central role in the federal response to the Crowdstrike outage that wreaked havoc on airlines, hospitals and other industries — some of which still haven’t fully recovered.

While much of Congress is ready for the summer recess — and preparing to spend much of the fall in full campaign mode, Garbarino’s CD2 is considered a safe Republican seat. That gives him the rare opportunity to focus on the governing — rather than the politics.

Garbarino told The Point he hopes to receive a closed-door briefing next week from Crowdstrike officials about what happened — but does not expect a subcommittee hearing to occur until September. By the fall, he noted, there will  hav e been time to begin to understand what went wrong, and what can be done differently.

Garbarino said his committee already has spoken to representatives of Crowdstrike, in the wake of a letter he and Homeland Security committee chair Mark Green sent to Crowdstrike chief executive George Kurz on Monday.

The letter emphasized the need for a hearing by Garbarino’s subcommittee, calling the outage "a broader warning about the national security risks associated with network dependency."

But Garbarino told The Point that the goal of a hearing isn’t to "have them look bad."

"It’s to figure out how this happened, how do we prevent it from happening again, what’s being done, what can other people do and what are the lessons learned here," Garbarino said. "This should not be a gotcha moment."

Garbarino said that he connected with Crowdstrike to arrange for briefings and testimony thanks in part to previous contacts between his committee and the company.  One Crowdstrike official used to work for the committee, he said, and company representatives previously have testified in front of the subcommittee as experts.

Garbarino said he’s particularly concerned with "continuation of economy" issues, the idea of evaluating what the federal government should do if a cyber attack takes down critical infrastructure in multiple industries and how resources should be prioritized. But he’s also focused on how to make sure there’s not a repeat of an outage like the one caused by Crowdstrike.

"We cannot afford to have this happen again," Garbarino said.

— Randi F. Marshall randi.marshall@newsday.com

Pencil Point

A case of nerves

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Reference Point

When LBJ told the nation why he would he not run again

President Joe Biden will explain in a televised address to the nation tonight why he abandoned his quest for a second term, a moment that has only one reference point in modern history.

"I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President," Lyndon B. Johnson said on March 31, 1968, in an Oval Office speech that shocked the nation.

Biden released a short statement Sunday on social media announcing he was dropping out of the race, so tonight is unlikely to have the drama of that moment. But comparisons are enlightening.

While both White House incumbents were grappling with divisions in their parties and fears of defeat in the upcoming November election, the reasons for their decisions were very different. Johnson was being confronted with protests in the streets and challenges in the Democratic presidential primaries over his handling of the Vietnam War. He just barely edged out antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary the month before. And Robert F. Kennedy of New York, the brother of the man he succeeded, had just entered the race.

But as with Biden, Congress was putting pressure on Johnson as well. Newsday wanted the Senate to vote on a measure that would have repealed what was known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that Johnson said justified his bombings in North Vietnam and the possible sending of 100,000 more troops to Southeast Asia. "Why not, therefore, a vote of confidence? Nothing could do more to clear up doubts about whether the American people, do in fact, support the commander-in-chief," the editorial board wrote on March 9, 1968, three weeks before Johnson’s exit speech.

The measure failed and wasn’t repealed until 1971 to stop Richard Nixon from continuing the war.

During Johnson’s moment of crisis and perhaps because there were no social media or cable channels, there wasn’t any breathless chatter that Johnson was considering or pundits arguing about why he should drop out of the race. The Vietnam issue, the Democrats felt, should be decided at the party’s upcoming nominating convention. That’s why Newsday said the New York delegation should lead by making clear whether they would support Johnson, McCarthy, Kennedy and Sen. George McGovern.

"Is Johnson’s course right or wrong? Is the Vietnam war viable or not?" the Newsday editorial board asked New York delegates to decide five days before Johnson made his announcement.

In contrast, Biden's intra-party problems with his administration were not about an incredibly unpopular policy but concerns that the public would not think he could physically do the job for another four years.

In that sense, since it might be easier to show some separation for the incumbent administration by Vice President Kamala Harris than it was for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who like her also had not been in the primary scrum but won the Democratic nomination in Chicago. Yes, that kinda town that the Democrats are returning to next month. Humprey could never shake off the antiwar anger at the administration he served in, and his insistence that the party’s platform include a plank supporting the war.

There’s one more difference in the times between those of Johnson and Biden. Johnson promised the nation, "I intend to turn this office with all its power intact to the next man who sits in this chair."

— Rita Ciolli Rita.Ciolli@newsday.com

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