History, Security

Three Guns or Four? How to Read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters

Leave a comment

I’ve been asked as a historian what I think of historian Heather Cox Richardson. In particular, since I am a historian who has posted nearly every day to a blog for about 20 years, I was asked about her blog popularity. I was asked what do I think of her posting every day to her blog for seven years, rising to millions of followers.

Well, not much, honestly. I had never heard of her before I was asked. And when I was asked, I looked and found that she was publishing things that seemed factually wrong. I also don’t honestly know how many followers I have. I don’t track and advertise, or take paid subscriptions, so we’re fundamentally different on the platform as well as the points.

Take December 28, for example. Since 2019, she has republished her account of the night before the Wounded Knee Massacre. She revises it each year. It’s kind of like how I was doing the exact same thing for Thanksgiving Day starting back in 2005.

I’ve written about Thanksgiving history here many times (2005, 2006, 2008, 2010) and this year it feels like time to write again.

When I did a diff across her annual posts, I found the name “Big Foot” was dropped in 2023. And “a dozen years ago, I wrote a book” became “fifteen years ago” in 2024. I get that. But then I found a sentence rising up again and again, through all seven editions without edit:

In came three mountain guns.

Huh? Why does she say three? I’m not saying this to be pedantic. It’s rather important in the detail of military strategy from that time to know the exact type, number and position of guns. Such details are literally how people learn to win the next battle, or even a war.

The Army counted four. So why three?

Major Samuel Whitside testified to the court of inquiry in January 1891 that his column reached Wounded Knee Creek with “two Hotchkiss guns, under Lieut. Hawthorne,” and that Colonel Forsyth arrived at about 8:45 that night with “one section of Hotchkiss guns, under Captain Capron.”

Two guns were on the hill at dusk. Two more came in after dark. That makes… NOT three.

With all due respect, Richardson works full-time on history and she wrote the book on Wounded Knee. A specialist in the Army’s files calls her book “phenomenally researched.” And yet her newsletter, Letters from an American, which reports more than three million subscribers, doesn’t seem to hold the line.

I suppose we could call this one mistake a small thing. I suppose we could even say repeating it annually, increasing the chances of it becoming repeated by others, is a small thing. But my own training begs me to ask how big of a pattern can I find from the small thing. I think the gun is a bigger symptom than most people would notice, and it’s certainly something that LLM vendors get raked over the coals about.

So, being an old disinformation analyst by formal training, what could I do but pull all of her 2,300 letters, from September 2019 through November 14, 2026? I’m not interested in her current politics or even her arguments. Although, let me also point out that facts affect the arguments, as I explained already in another post about her.

A historian reproducing mythology as a settled fact marks a synthesis drawn from a disinformation canon, rather than the scientifically corrected record.

This time I pulled every passage about events before 2000 and extracted the dates, counts, names and offices that disagreed with a reliable, primary source. Then I double-checked it all. Every example in this post I verified by a linked source. Primary sources have the correct answer, so it’s mostly just a simple math test about the drift in her texts, a simple plus or minus.

Interestingly, there are 524 letters about an event in history with a date. Of those, 96 have at least one factual error. Of those, there are 68 distinct errors that I found 109 times. She tends to repeat her errors when she posts re-runs. That’s just a start, because quantitative analysis seemed to be the right path into qualitative.

Slop is a word we use for automation machines. It’s a derogatory term about the high cost, high output and low integrity. Each of her letters isn’t brief, usually over a thousand words and a page of source notes. It seems to be on the end of high cost and high output, so I’m asking here if there is there evidence of integrity issues? Or perhaps more to the point, is there a lack of an editor doing the pre-publication pass that a book deal would impose upon her?

Richardson Claim History
“In came three mountain guns” (every December 28, 2019 to 2025) Four Hotchkiss guns: two with Whitside, two with Forsyth (Whitside testimony, 1891)
“That night, America declared war on Japan” (2019, 2021, 2023, 2024) Roosevelt addressed Congress at 12:30 p.m. on December 8 and signed the declaration at 4 p.m. (National Archives)
Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment “by a vote of 50 to 49” (2022, 2024, 2026) The House voted 49 to 47 after a 48 to 48 tie; the Senate voted 25 to 4 (National Park Service)
“Parliament in 1772 removed all but one of the new taxes” (2023, 2024, 2026) Parliament rescinded four of the five Townshend duties in April 1770 (Massachusetts Historical Society)
John Lewis “in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders” (2019, 2020, 2021, 2025) Lewis became a Freedom Rider in 1961 (National Park Service)
“former U.S. senator Alexander Stephens of Georgia” (2026); “Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens” (2022 twice) Stephens sat in the U.S. House from 1843 to 1859 and never in the U.S. Senate (House Historian)

The Wounded Knee letter gives a clue how the mistakes might happen. Each December someone edits the tribal names and the author’s note, and then publishes the same text again. That is a pass for readability, making the text enjoyable. Quality isn’t being defined in terms of the accuracy, which is how the number of guns continues to be wrong.

When I looked at the Pearl Harbor letter, it said “That night” four times between 2019 and 2024. It wasn’t that night. In 2025 it corrected to “The next day, the United States declared war on Japan.” That’s great. Except for two things. The page carries no correction note and the four earlier editions are wrong. My thing about Pearl Harbor has always been the listening station being ignored. It’s a bit messy to understand and explain. But this night/day thing is a simple one.

The 2025 edit fixed the date and kept the order of events. The sentence now reads:

The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America, and on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America.

Every edition has the United States declare war first and Japan second. Ugh. Why?

Japan declared first. And this one can’t be called a small error.

Japan’s cabinet released the imperial rescript declaring war at 1100 hours on December 8, Tokyo time. Tokyo was fourteen hours ahead of Washington, so the rescript came out at 9 p.m. on December 7 in Washington, about seven hours after the attack began. Roosevelt signed the American declaration at 4 p.m. on December 8, nineteen hours after Japan’s. In terms of defense theory she’s making one of the worst mistakes possible, reversing the declarations. Who declared war first matters A LOT for basically every reason we study war at all.

Richardson does mark corrections. Her letter of May 21, 2024 concludes on this line: “Edited on the morning of May 22 to correct the date to May 21. Sorry about that.” The headline date was fixed and flagged within hours. The same letter says Joseph McCarthy spoke in Wheeling “On February 12, 1950.” The Wheeling Intelligencer of February 10 reported that he spoke “last night.” Her own letter eleven days later gives February 9. Talk about a merry-go-round. At the end of it all, the incorrect February 12 date is still on the page.

One edit in fact made a true sentence false. In 2022 she wrote of the Little Bighorn: “The only army survivor of the battle from Custer’s immediate command was a horse, Comanche.” For the 150th anniversary in 2026 the sentence reads: “The only army survivor of the battle was a horse, Comanche.” Whoops. She deleted four words that erased the fact that hundreds of men under Reno and Benteen survived the battle. Again, a small detail, but it kind of is the entire point of studying Custer that he was such an incompetent bombastic disaster (foreshadowing politics today), different from others like Reno and Benteen.

Richardson Claim History
Republicans “added five new states” by July 1890 (September 2025); “six new states,” with Wyoming and Idaho both admitted “On July 3, 1890” (February 2026) Six states. Idaho was admitted July 3, 1890 and Wyoming July 10, 1890 (Statutes at Large)
A Joint Committee on Reconstruction “of thirteen lawmakers” (November 2025); “of fifteen members” (October 2026) Nine House members and six senators (House Historian)
Roosevelt’s Osawatomie speech “later that year” in 1910 (November 2023); “in 1912” (March 2024) August 31, 1910 (Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library)

The October 2026 letter that corrected the committee to fifteen also says both chambers agreed to the Fourteenth Amendment “on June 18, 1866.” Congress passed it on June 13. I guess an 8 can look like 3 sometimes. My eyes aren’t great anymore. But a system with integrity controls is meant to compensate for exactly that kind of error. These letters float conflicting dates, where each is published with the same confidence, internally contradictory.

The November 2023 letter gives the 1912 result as “409 electoral votes to Roosvelt’s 107 and Taft’s 15.” When I checked the National Archives I found 435, 88 and 8. Very strange.

The February 2024 letter gives Lincoln “212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 12.” When I checked, McClellan won 21.

Can you see why I ran a mathematical analysis? It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s the kind of thing my history professors hammered into me. Davi, at least get the dates right if you want to do analysis of events. It’s the kind of importance I carried straight into digital forensics investigations, where a timestamp error is death to any attempts at catching a perpetrator.

Secretariat’s “trainer” in her annual Kentucky Derby letter is Charlie Hatton, who wrote about racing for the Daily Racing Form. Nope. And the line she gives him, “The trees swayed,” is one the Racing Form says he wrote about a different horse, Raise a Native, in 1963. Her letter has the wrong job for Hatton, the wrong horse, and a conversation with Red Smith that the Racing Form’s account doesn’t have.

Jim Thorpe’s 1912 pentathlon is listed as “sprint hurdles, long jump, high jump, shot put, and middle distance run.” Yet the events were actually long jump, 200 metres, discus, 1,500 metres and javelin.

Her very moving tribute to Dolly Parton has the singer on radio and television “in Nashville by the time she was 10” and then, in the next sentence, moving to Nashville in 1964. That’s such a quick flip, did she read her own letter? I didn’t know this history, and when I checked, found that the childhood broadcasts were in Knoxville.

A horse, an Olympian and a country singer aren’t the class of error as three versus four guns. These errors maybe are a matter of fast writing that goes out unchecked, and her memory is subject to correction like any of us. But bear with me here, as a historian who has written daily on a blog for 20 years, not to mention that it has been online since 1995. If you ask me what I think about her letters, I think I’m finding a lot of errors. When I am asked to look at just one letter, I find an error. And then I look at a few more, and I start to think something is off.

The rate has held steady, by my quick calculations. Hey, maybe I’m wrong here! But between 10 and 18 letters a year have carried an error in every year since 2021. Across seven years I found only three corrections. Eleven errors were republished three or more times.

Perhaps she needs a quarterly rescan, a cleanup of the past daily posts?

Richardson is very, very popular as a writer. The Daily Show just did an “interview” that amounted to the host gushing about her love for the letters, and Richardson even fluffing the host. The only history in it at all was a single minute comparing today to the 1890s, which the host took without a single question. Shame on you Daily Show.

People are looking for the actual facts of what this country is.

You’re not going to call her out on that? Ok, then, I guess I have to be the one. This is what the host said.

I don’t think we have blue waves like this without scholars like you walking us through these moments.

Maybe the whole point is a feel-good narrative and regurgitation and re-runs of what works, to amplify and gain audience as Jon Stewart seemed to do with her. This is what she told him.

I help to show people where the ground is.

Any pilot relying on her would be shown the wrong number for where the ground is for at least 1 of every 5 flights. You want to fly on those numbers?

She is a clear and persuasive writer, and most of her history is on target. But it’s not all, and maybe reach is the reason her errors matter even more, beyond the question of whether she would accept a factual error in one of every five papers a history student turns in. If her low-quality facts get high reach, is it better than someone with high-quality facts getting low-reach? That’s a question for the ages. McDonalds or a local chef, you make the call. Three million people receive the letter as if it is the work of a historian. And the way I was trained, an historian’s authority comes from them doing the checking and re-checking, not you doing all the clicking.

Food, History, Poetry, Security

Keep Saying “Honey Trap”. Man is But a Fly.

Leave a comment

A woman wrote “honey-trap” about a man and a woman in 1859, and in her sentence a man falls for a woman like a fly, ahem, flies into honey. Can you blame the fly? Of course.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest known use of the phrase to Elizabeth Sheppard, the English novelist who wrote Charles Auchester. It is on page 126 of the second volume of Almost a Heroine, where a man talks about a woman:

I am no fantastic fool, intoxicated by her like a fly fallen into a honey-trap. I will tell you, I know her so well as this. She is perfectly unworldly, but she is also vain of being so; and only so far is she vain at all; her fascinations and her passionate sweetness she is alike unconscious of.

Her meaning is simple. A man says he sees a woman clearly. Falling for her would be the honey-trap, and the man who falls is the fly and the fool.

John le Carré used the phrase 115 years later in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where an intelligence service sets the honey as a trap and a woman is the bait, almost exactly as Sheppard had phrased it. He later wrote in an introduction to the novel that he invented honey-trap along with lamplighter, scalphunter and babysitter. Time magazine printed a glossary of his words and called him “their inventor”, and the dictionaries agree with him. Merriam-Webster dates the first known use to 1974, and Dictionary.com gives 1970 to 1975 and names le Carré. The OED is the only one that prints Sheppard’s line. It lists her under insect traps and starts the seduction meaning in 1974, so it still credits him.

All of these dictionaries cover English only. Writers in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Chinese used honey for a lure more than a thousand years before Sheppard or le Carré. Spies use tactics that already work, because inventing one is expensive and likely to fail. To call spy novels the source of this tactic is like saying a journalist invented the news.

Origin Meaning
5th century BC, Chinese The state of Yue sends the beauty Xi Shi to the king of Wu. Chinese calls this 美人計, the beautiful person stratagem, the thirty-first of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.
Hebrew, Proverbs 5:3-4 The lips of the strange woman drip honey (נֹפֶת), and in the end she is bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword.
1st century BC, Greek Strabo, Geography 12.3.18: the Heptacometae leave bowls of toxic honey in the road. Pompey’s soldiers eat it and three maniples are killed.
1st century BC, Latin Lucretius: doctors put honey on the rim of the cup so that children drink the wormwood.
8th century, Chinese 口蜜腹劍, honey in the mouth and a sword in the belly. The phrase describes Li Linfu, a male chancellor of the Tang court (Zizhi Tongjian, volume 215).
1624, French Francis de Sales: a spoonful of honey catches more flies than a hundred barrels of vinegar (de la Rivière, Vie, page 584).
1666, Italian and English Torriano: honey gets more flies than vinegar (Italian Proverbs, page 149).
1859, English Sheppard: a man who falls for a woman is a fly in a honey-trap.
1974, English Le Carré: a honey trap is a spy operation.

The Chinese examples matter here more than an English dictionary because of the news. Fast Company reports that U.S. intelligence identified the woman in the Jensen Huang story as a Chinese spy. You can see above exactly for how long Chinese has named the stratagem after the beauty and uses honey for a deceitful man.

The Fast Company column is by Laëtitia Vitaud, and most of it is standard stuff. She argues that 1970s spy novel usage turns a powerful man into the helpless victim of a scheming woman. I mean we’re talking about 1970s spy novels, right? Have you read my post called James Bond Movies Are “Fascist Pig” Glorification?

Then she traces that idea all the way (fast reverse) to Genesis, where Adam blames Eve. Her report is technically accurate that it is English dictionaries who credit le Carré with making the phrase popular. The dictionaries start the phrase with the spy novelist and then credit him for it. Self-proving hypothesis. But her question is more about whether a 63-year-old chief executive officer in total command is as helpless as a bear near honey. Helpless? The inflation of a man into a bear seems more about trying to sound powerful, than about being made helpless by honey it totally consumes and literally wrecks.

Her main error for me is the one sentence: “The term comes from spy fiction.” No. That’s wrong. The earliest known phrasing of woman being the honey trap for men is Sheppard’s.

But the bigger fault is that her sentence leaves out a woman. A column about sexism repeats the error printed in dictionaries and credits a spy fiction that came 115 years after a woman printed it first.

It also costs Vitaud her best evidence for her own case about the phrase. She wants the press to stop saying “honey trap”. Sheppard’s version in fact shows a better fix.

We can celebrate Sheppard. Say honey trap as she did.

In 1859 the man who falls is a “fantastic fool”, and he is responsible for where he lands. In 1974 he becomes the target of an operation, and the man who made that change claimed the invention. Vitaud’s question about the bear has had an answer since 1859. Man is but a fly, a fool who flies into a trap.

Security

Berlin Leak Middleman: Munich Firm Boasts of Selling Access to Stolen Files

Leave a comment

A Munich penetration testing firm is running Berlin’s stolen files through open-weight AI models on its own hardware. Sascha Herzog of NSIDE ATTACK LOGIC told iX that his team uses models such as Qwen, operated purely locally, to pre-sort the Rhysida dump for its customers. One search run across the archive takes twelve to fifteen hours.

That is what I described on September 8 in RAIV in Berlin Says the Senate Has Time for Breach Triage. Ten RAIV (GPU rigs) of used video cards would have cost 35,000 euros, and finished in two weeks, while keeping the data in Berlin. The Senate’s Chief Digital Officer had told the Innenausschuss that “AI tools” would rank the files by risk. A private firm in the far away state of Bavaria has now shown that local open-weight models carry the work.

Herzog also reports he has hit some limits, which are well known. His model marked a document as classified because it contained the word “geheim” (secret). I mean, it does have the word secret. Context is hard. He says his customers in some cases assign staff for a week to read the filtered files by hand, which sounds light to this historian. Can you imagine if Germany had used that attitude to read their own archives? Just think of what would have happened to Siemens. Anyway, the AI model sorts and people do an actual finding, which is the division of labor a Berlin RAIV was built for. It’s not unlike how archaeologists and war crimes investigators work. They fly a plane over, using modern tools like radar, land and then dig by hand.

His download took two and a half weeks over Tor, while Rhysida rearranged the file structure three times. He reports only 5.25 terabytes and 1.431 million files. The archive published in September ran to 1.44 million. About nine thousand files are unaccounted for. Herzog says either his download missed them or Rhysida changed the archive after publishing, and he can’t say which. He says his firm has yet to analyze any of the 7-Zip archives inside the dump.

Herzog also makes the rather bizarre and unsafe comment that he personally feels that Berlin should have paid a ransom. What? What? Why? His argument is that the harm comes from publication. Rhysida took the data between August 7 and 12 and held it for three weeks before the deadline passed, but Rhysida sells to whoever pays. Whoever. Payment buys nothing but a promise from a criminal with zero enforcement. A paid Rhysida still has the files and still has a buyer, and can still leak. This is not news to anyone, hopefully.

Herzog then describes his work as a product. Customers name email domains, project names and keywords. His analyzer sells them the hits. The matching files are packaged and sent to the customer with a preliminary report and an HTML index that links to each file. Those files include the emails exchanged with two Senate administrations. They carry the names, addresses and words of Senate staff and of every other party on the thread. That seems rather broad, no? This guy is a leak administrator over all of it?

The legal basis receives one sentence in the interview:

we of course always observe the necessary legal framework.

How? Explain! But the interviewer moves on, leaving the most crucial detail unexplained. Herzog is handing leaked files to his customers on what basis? I turned down requests for hosting a free mirror of the dump just for journalists in September for exactly this reason. A copy of stolen files means holding a copy of third parties’ data, right?

Herzog says he saw data on critical infrastructure operators outside his customer base and calls them enormously affected. He says he is in contact with federal agencies and declines to say more. Again the interview moves on, and leaves open whether anyone has told those operators. Do they know he’s telling people other than them, if they don’t know themselves?

The interview is a bust. It ultimately skips the findings that matter most to Berlin, perhaps because, I don’t know, the expert sits in Bavaria? Does that explain anything?

The 21 administrative passwords that only vendors can change go unmentioned.

So do the Payone credentials and the water supply vulnerability analyses, and the intrusion detection budget the CDU-SPD coalition cut.

The article states that Berlin found the intrusion while investigating a domain controller fault on August 13. The interviewer never asks why a fault found what monitoring missed. Herzog’s advice to affected companies is boring and bog-standard: ask the authorities, warn staff about phishing, check what the leak says about your IT, tell the others on the thread.

Rotating every credential that touched the Senate, THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP, goes unmentioned.

The Senate told the Innenausschuss it needed AI tools. A firm in Munich has them running on local hardware and sells the leak without a clearly stated legal basis. The duty to tell the people in those files? Where does that sit, Berlin?

Security

FAA Outage: Why Duffy is Spelled With Two Ms

Leave a comment

A copper line upgrade at a remote FAA site shut down every departure in the United States. Yeah. Telco engineers, you know what I’m talking about.

A contractor was switching the old line to new fiber on Friday afternoon. The router then flooded the rest of the air traffic network with more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. That is about 250 a second, a trickle for any modern network. The FAA’s acting CTO said two sources were hammering the network and it settled down once both were switched off. That artificially created storm, as a self-Denial-of-Service, meant controllers lost reliable radio and radar.

This has been a known way to lose a whole network since way back in October 1980, when one faulty ARPANET node flooded every other node with bad routing updates and took it down for several hours.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy gave the above account on Saturday. The explanation came right from the top. On Friday night he had been singing a different tune. He told the White House briefing that it was the failure of old hardware and “our new IP switches did not go down.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood beside him and said the FAA was putting in new equipment and “it was overwhelming the older system.” Mullin was right, in the sense that a Friday afternoon upgrade went sideways. Yeah. Server engineers, you know what I’m talking about.

The FAA, unable to handle their own upgrade storm, held every departure from 3:54 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. Eastern. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford counted 12,000 flights lost on Friday and expected 4,000 to 5,000 more cancellations on Saturday. The old network was fine carrying about 30,000 flights that day before a botched upgrade plan took it down.

On Friday a reporter asked Duffy directly whether FAA caused the outage with an upgrade. He answered by describing the old analog system. Cute. Asked what was different about the system that day, he said “we’re still working on the details of what went wrong today.” He named a cause and then claimed he didn’t know the cause in the same briefing. Because Duffy is actually spelled with two Ms. How do we know? He asked Congress for $50 billion to do more upgrades faster, and the next day said doing the upgrade is what caused the outage. Talk about a sense of fail-faster privilege.

The reporting was flying by this time, even though the planes could not. CBS sources described a botched network update within hours, and Bloomberg reported the FBI was examining whether a software update did it. CBS said the failure was Cisco routers built between 2001 and 2006 that fed out-of-sync data into the wider system.

Running Cisco gear that was built between 2001 and 2006, in other words staring down two decades of reliability, means having redundancy plans for redundancy plans for redundancy when anything is changed. Bedford said the FAA is replacing 2,000 of these Cisco routers with Juniper ones, so Friday’s swap is one of two thousand, supposedly following a playbook. Yeah. Disaster recovery engineers, you know what I’m talking about.

Secretary Duffy replied to a reporter asking why the FAA didn’t have an emergency backup plan:

I didn’t anticipate we’d have an outage like this.

Saturday’s accounting brought more clarity. An upgrade job caused the outage. Duffy revealed himself to be unfit for the role as he started calling the switchover straightforward work at a small location that should have had a small impact. Yeah, my man, I think everyone knows by now that it was not a small impact at a small location. It was a national security level disaster caused by a cascading fail-unsafe, on your watch. Service returned once engineers isolated the work that should have been isolated from before anyone put hands on the network. I can’t emphasize enough the self-incrimination of someone in charge who looks at the Hindenburg in flames and only offers the explanation that it was supposed to be a straightforward landing at a small location.

Is there someone else we can put in charge here? Someone who not only can anticipate but knows that prevention of outages, regardless of anticipation, is the actual job.

Duffy’s defense, almost unbelievably, is that doing nothing adds more risk that his fire, ready, aim approach. Ok, so Friday tested that claim and Duffy is exactly upside down and backwards. Doing something is what created the largest failure. The old copper line was carrying traffic until the switchover began. A rush into a changeover brought down the country. Without having any isolation, without having a clear idea of what could happen, doing nothing seems pretty damn smart. The line was due to be discontinued, so there was a need for work. The quality of a changeover, a safety procedure following decades of migration planning, was the FAA’s to manage. An upgrade managed this way is far, far more dangerous than the network it replaces.

The whole country had to be shut down! How much worse could the migration be managed?

Every part of the Duffy changeover plan failed.

The hour chosen was a peak moment of traffic, Friday afternoon with 3,500 aircraft in the air. Controllers told a Washington Examiner reporter that work like this is done midweek in the middle of the night (one of my favorite times to fly, especially into Dallas where you can skateboard all alone all night inside the airport). A reporter asked Duffy why the department did it at such a dangerously busy time, and he said small remote sites get switched over during the day while big facilities like Newark get done at night, and that the timing will be reevaluated. For what? Friday afternoon was the policy working as designed. It couldn’t be more obvious that the policy was approved on a dummy’s watch.

The impact was the whole country. Bedford said 17 of the 22 en route centers went unstable, and after 45 minutes of failing to find the cause the FAA grounded everything. He also said maintenance on this network is logged on paper, so officials had to dig through paper records to find out who was working where. Duffy said he was under the impression a small wire at a small site would have a small impact. Apparently his team assumed a network fault would stay local and not cascade everywhere. The recovery timeline was more than four hours, which itself negates the “small” framing. A day later the FAA is still choosing between contractor error and faulty equipment, which itself negates the “small” framing. The correctness of the installation and its configuration is still an open question requiring more research, even after it went live.

Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, told CNN Saturday morning that he expected a higher standard. New equipment is tested under high load in a sandbox before it goes live. Under Duffy, apparently America rams new equipment straight into the national airspace on a Friday afternoon without a clue.

Duffy pointed his finger at a contractor. He said L3Harris carried out the upgrade and it owns that legacy network. He told reporters he’s the victim of this story because “I’m stuck with L3Harris.” That seems suspect, because the FAA has had this contractor’s number for two decades. The technicians’ union warned after a 2007 Memphis outage that the network’s design made failures like it likely to happen again. In 2009 Harris installed a replacement router with a bad route configuration during planned maintenance, and the inspector general counted 129 air traffic facilities disrupted. Harris, now L3Harris, has held the contract since 2002. The FAA knew its performance, and even knew its priors in this exact context. After a Dallas outage in September 2025 the FAA said an L3Harris oversight failed to make sure the backup systems worked. In other words, when a manager already has faulted a contractor in writing, and then supervises that contractor’s next switchover, the finger pointing changes. The copper-to-fiber work is an FAA program on an FAA schedule. Who knows this? Duffy knows this. Why? Because in 2025 he was the guy who blamed Newark outages on a mishandled move of that airspace to Philadelphia. He called it the fault of… wait for it… the previous administration. Now his own FAA attributes those Newark outages in part to a move made before adequately testing the telecommunications lines. Friday was the same failure Duffy had criticized for failing before, now under his management.

You see the problem with him claiming he was surprised? It was supposed to be small. And the problem with him claiming it was the contractor? It was supposed to be someone else’s fault. And the problem with him claiming it was old equipment? It was supposed to be a win for upgrades.

The Government Accountability Office audited the program two months ago, just to give some idea of how this outage fits into Duffy’s risk management gaffe. Its September 2026 report records the FAA’s finding on the Newark failure. It also mentions that the FAA pulled the copper replacement deadline forward by 21 months, to December 2028. As of May it had replaced 2,560 of 5,170 copper lines. On Saturday Duffy said 69 percent are done, which works out to about a thousand switchovers in six months and about 1,600 still to go. Bedford called Friday’s router work routine maintenance outside the $12.5 billion modernization, yet GAO lists the copper replacement as a line in that very program. Each one of those 1,600, if Duffy doesn’t step up to the job required, has the risk we just witnessed on Friday.

To make a finer point, there’s other evidence Duffy is in a rush to fail faster. In August 2025 the FAA Administrator issued a blanket waiver that exempted the whole program from the agency’s acquisition rules, including its technology and security reviews. The waiver’s stated reason was that those reviews add months or years. GAO found 11,389 separate project schedules that the FAA had yet to join into one master schedule. FAA officials told the auditors that integrating them would be of little use. GAO said the installations were being scheduled with little attention to disruption of air traffic operations, and it warned of “more system outages, ground stops, flight delays, and safety incidents.” The Transportation Department partially concurred and claimed an integrated schedule already existed. GAO disagreed.

Speed was the stated goal. More national disasters, faster, as the predictable outcome. Just because someone put a Duffy in charge.

Duffy told Friday’s briefing the FAA is moving faster than it ever has. As if we needed to be told that after a botched upgrade shut down national airspace. His 2025 announcement of the program promised “we will not let government bureaucracy get in the way of results.” Yeah, he’s turning off all the safety. Man in a rush to stomp on the accelerator for air travel says he has no time to think about consequences. The department’s September release described spending $12.5 billion at “breakneck speed” calling all 13 workstreams on track. More like derailed by speed as the only measure. The FAA hired Peraton in December 2025 to be their single integrator, with the end of 2028 as the deadline.

Duffy Statement Reality
The old hardware went down. A contractor’s copper-to-fiber switchover at a remote site flooded it.
The new IP switches stayed up. The upgrade work was the trigger.
The fix points to a legacy network problem. The fix was isolating the upgrade work at the remote site.
Doing nothing adds more risk. The old line worked until the switchover began.
Congress owes the program $50 billion. Congress gave $12.5 billion in 2025. GAO is still waiting for a reliable cost estimate.

The old network has been declared obsolete. A November 2023 safety review commissioned by the FAA said so and warned that an unexpected failure could cut an entire regional center off from the network. After Friday’s nation-wide outage I think we can all agree a regional one would be lesser. The report should have raised the standard of care for every change that is meant to upgrade anything. A fragile, obsolete system is a known state in technology circles. It gets a digital twin, a sandbox, a parallel with a fail safe, a tested change in a quiet hour, with a rollback plan. The Duffy version of the FAA waived its reviews to hit a deadline Duffy set by one man’s calendar, done by the time Trump leaves office, like a rushed SpaceX rocket exploding on the pad.

On Friday Duffy had said he is happy to take the blame when the fault lies with the FAA. On Saturday he blamed the contractor. In 2025 he blamed the previous administration. Now that Bedford has promised a root cause analysis, it will be written by the agency that ran the program. Will it name who approved a Friday afternoon switchover? Will he point fingers and rush the next 1,600 if it doesn’t?

The bottom line is congress should cut-off Duffy from the upgrades and certainly not give him any more money, unless he demonstrates the minimum level of competency for the job. You don’t get to run with scissors and shutdown the entire nation on the basis you’re trying to prevent a small regional outage.

Duffy’s proof that the old network keeps failing is the local outages at Newark and New York, and then his Friday switchover took down the whole country instead. What a complete Duffy, spelled with Ms.

a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995