has caused more problems than it's sold. liquid really can be crime was always skeptical about brags it 10 percent of his exports used to go to ireland, but now costs for his retail customers. there have doubled an export to the continents. they've also dried up right now where we might ship, you know, 10000 or 20000 beers out of time into europe. the paperwork, the fixed costs are really making our beers uncompetitive. but even if breaks it regret is starting to trend higher. neither the government nor the main opposition made party is going anywhere near the political risk of a 2nd referendum. when greg's it is an issue has dropped down the list of voters concerns. more people think bricks has been, but the economy more people are saying breaks it was a bad idea. but the salience of bricks it has dropped markedly since those sort of days of 2019 when it was all anyone could think or talk or argue about. so even more people are rethinking their referendum vote, but miss set to keep it status as europe outlier. well into the future. harry

faucet, al jazeera, leicestershire united, ah. is al jazeera these util stories. special counsels been appointed to investigate jo biden's handling of sensitive government documents. a 2nd sets of papers were found at the us presidents, delaware home biden says he didn't know that he had the documents. people know i take classified documents or classified material seriously. i also said were cooperating fully and completely the justice department's review as part of that process. my lawyers reviewed other places, word documents and my i'm of, from my time as vice president were stored and they finished the review last night . they discovered a small number of documents of classified markings of storage areas in file

cabinets in my home, in my, in my, my personal library, how speak a kevin mccarthy has called for an investigation. they knew this has happened to president biden before the election, but they kept the secret from the american public. he goes on 60 minutes criticized as president, trump even knowing what he has done and he wasn't president at the time. now we find another location that it's at, but he refused to answer his press. secretary won't answer the questions we, you watched them leak photos are sitting out files, the president, trump, where's the photos? a president biden's documents. where are those photos that he knowingly knew? this happened going into a lecture going into interviews. this is what makes america not trust their government. ukraine says it's forces are holding on to the east and city of sala dies. fighting intensifies this despite the russian mastery group. wagner claiming its gain control of the area. well protested, being held in perry's capital,

demanding the removal of the current leader dana bluesy. protest. first started off to the ousting an arrest to present peddler castillo, and early december, thousands of people have rallied in somalis capital against the armed who found. so bob, it's one of the largest such gatherings in recent years. okay, there is a headlines. nice continues here. now, does era out inside story? ah, i computed less grounds thousands of mains across the united states. l i fly into the country. we're delayed to disrupting international travel. so how did this

happen, and how vulnerable our mutual id systems elsewhere. this is inside store. ah hello and welcome to the program, am fully by t bowl failure of a system that gives safety warnings to pilots. force the grounding of all departing planes in the u. s. for 90 minutes. on wednesday, thousands of flights were disrupted domestic and international with delays to pains heading for the us from elsewhere. so how could this happen and what lessons can be learned or put that to our guests in just a moment? first al jazeera, heidi is your casto rewards from washington. it was a sight not seen since $911.00, thousands of plains grounded at all u. s. airports due to a nationwide stoppage called by the federal aviation administration. no,

nothing like this. so both love and obviously you know, everything to stop and because of the system i think that she just punch control alt, delete the f a a says a computer failure was to blame. specifically the notice to air mission system or not m suffered a temporary outage. without it, like crews could not access the latest safety alerts about fly conditions and runways. we still consider this to be a vital safety system because this is the one that moves messages that our pilots need on anything from a taxi way or a runway being out to an issue with the navigation beacon to may be an upcoming military or space operation. as in a certain sector, the outage did not impact quite already in the air. the ground stopped lasted about an hour, 4 and a half until yesterday said the computer problem was fixed. the cause of the outage remains unclear. there is no direct indication of any kind of external loaner various activity,

but we're not yet prepared to rule that out. president joe biden has ordered an investigation. the white house says there is no indication of a cyber attack. the epa is working aggressively to get to the bottom of the root causes for the system outage, so that it does not happen again. meanwhile, thousands of delayed are canceled flights, have colored flight status for the airports read. this is the domino effect of the ground. stop and it's impacting travelers already battered by a chaotic holiday travel season. try to wilford smith hopes his flight from washington to fort lauderdale. florida will take off on time. his wife is waiting there, he said, and he hasn't seen her in a long time. oh, my 1st thought was freaking out. like, i haven't seen her in 5 months and now it may be a day or 2 more. that an apparent technical which can hold the u. s. air travel industry impacting millions has drawn renewed scrutiny to the systems

vulnerabilities. a full investigation has been protest. heidi jo, castro, al jazeera washington, not just 2 weeks ago, a different critical control system broke down in florida, causing delays. while failure of such technologies rare, it's not the 1st session incident in recent years. a year ago this month, the f a, a briefly grounded flight in the west from us and hawaii. north korea had fired a miss sign around the same time in 2018 a system fault in europe say a traffic control system led to more than 15000 flights being delayed in 2014 computers at the los angeles airport crashed 20 you to spy plane through overhead the system run out of memory as it struggled to process the planes flight path and all for that year an air traffic control computer glitch led to flight delays and cancellations across the u. k. ah, well let's bring in our guests for today's show in new jersey, kyle bailey,

a former federal aviation administration safety team representative and also a pilot in washington, d. c. jody west be chief executive at global cyber risk. and in london, alex mac harris and aviation analysts a very warm welcome to all 3 of you. thank you so much for joining us on inside story kyle, in new jersey. let me start with you a hold. as we heard all fights across the u. s. is extremely rare and has only happened a few times, including a during the $911.00 attacks. now the u. s. administration, the binding ministration says it has no evidence that this was a cyber attack. so what could have caused this system outage in your view? it's looking right now that it's a corrupt data database file that pretty much caused this glitch in a cause. you know, the paralysis of the airspace system. the exact cause of it right now is not known

. you know, there, there are some reports out there that it was caused by a single employee, but i think there is going to be a full investigation. the, the systems are just very antiquated. it's here and it states like typical government bureaucracy systems not just yesterday, but across the board. everything pretty much is not up to speed like private sector . if this was a company like space x, you wouldn't see something like this because you know, all their systems are on the cutting edge. but typically how bureaucracy works. do you want to replace systems? it's a long drawn out process. there's bidding, there's contracts, and it's not just a matter of swapping out servers if you want to upgrade, upgrade a big complex system with all those data points coming into it. i mean, it could be a much, it could be years even after they have a contractor or you know, upgraded or replace it. alright. jody, let me come to you from your experience, jody. is there any indication that this could have been foul play?

could this have been intentional? well, we don't know yet, as my colleague just said, it is and determined at this point exactly what happened. however, we do know that the data base, apparently they're saying was corrupted and that was the primary database as well as the backups. and that is how malware works. that's how ransomware works. it gets in a system and at 1st now it looks for backups and we'll corrupt that data and then go to the real data and corrupt and encrypt it. and so i think ransomware definitely is on the table, but forensic investigations of this nature do not have and quickly in many cases. so i think it's too early to tell. in any event, it was a cyber incident because it certainly involved incident response and back up recovery. and so those measures certainly made it

a cyber incident. and we found out that the backup recovery had some issues as well as just their ability to determine what happened and remain operational. if this was a breach, jody, do you think us officials would have made to it? i think, yeah, i think they would, you know that nobody has a silver bullet system. and if, if there was a ransomware that got in the system, i think they'd need to know that and, and it could impact other systems. i don't think someone was trying to hide it. ok, alex, that me come to you. the problem it said came from the pilot alerting system. the no tom system telethon tell us and explain to our view is what this pilot warning system does. how critical it is, how, how it operates, and what do you think happened here? well, fully, this is why we have such a big, almost immediate impact with, with what happened in the u. s. because it, instead of something happening in the airline operations room that would affect one

airline, or perhaps something that would affect one manufacturer. this was centralized with the f a where the no times are distributed. and no terms in simple english are essentially key information directives that are distributed to all aviation stakeholders. and in every day of the asian life. the main and primary purpose would be, for example, flight crew entering the cockpit prior to departure, and reviewing and checking the no times before departure to make sure if there are any, anything unusual ahead. we're at the destination apple, perhaps the active runway, that they usually flying to is closed and they're using an alternative runway. perhaps there is construction on the taxiway or even cranes near by the approach path that specifically the apple once flight crew, another aviation stakeholders to be aware of. so they are key communication, essential notices that really insure the safe continuation of air travel by keeping everyone up to speed. and so with the failure of the no time system and this being

the, the specific outage that the f a suffered. we saw immediately how a decision had to be taken whereby they couldn't allow any additional aircraft to be added into the system. well, because already at that time we had hundreds and hundreds of aircraft air born in the u. s. and thousands elsewhere getting ready to depart there yet. kyle: the u. n. a civil aviation organization i. kyle, i understand has been leading an effort to overhaul the system to make it easier for airlines and pilots to better filter information. is this new system that they're looking at? is it not in place in the us? well, to my understanding, not yet. now this old system is still completely in place so that you know, they will need some sort of, you know, additional funding or, or approvals for, or any kind of new system that is implemented then it will take time because, you know, the old system will have to be taken down and the new system will obviously have to be better than installed and bidding process and all that. so yeah,

talk to us about the factors behind this for jelly t of the system in the u. s. you started talking about them a little earlier and they had been regional issues previously. kyle. but how widespread were they? and what do you think has exacerbated the problem? well, you know, we're, we're talking about pretty much old servers, servers and equipment that when they're working and do a pretty good job. i mean the know tam system is fairly simple for your audience who isn't really familiar with them. it would be similar to getting a weather for a textbook if you're doing a google search or you got a weather website and you're reading text of a weather forecast. it would be similar to that, but you're actually obtaining the critical no 10 information, such as you know, how it's referred to if there's a runaway closure. it would say, runway to 7 left close dad, you know, london heathrow, airport or things of that nature. so it's

a very simple system in that it's basically pilots reading text and that text could be obtained on a laptop or on software in the carpet. yeah, but it's just the, the key here is with old software. it works well when it's working. it does the job very good, but we don't know. is this going to happen again tomorrow? is it going to happen a month from now? is it going to happen 10 years from now? we just don't know. so that's the issue. okay, job is very proactive and replacing systems that are very critical, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. but it's everything else pretty much moves at, at, at, at a snail's pace to, to typical of government. jodi kind of phase an old system, but a simple one. is there no backup to stop the cascading failures? there could be 2 problems here. he's right, these old systems often require old operating platforms to run on. and sometimes

those are out of support by the vendors, and that can create security issues. i'm not saying this one was that, but old systems, these old legacy applications, always present security problems and a many time to see age old problem of it works. now we like the system, we won't replace it, it will be too expensive, it will take too long. but we see the price of that. the other thing is that this, this clearly involved a backup restore issue. and many companies and government entities to they are replicating their data real time. so as up it's operating, it's transferring the exact same data to another location. so if something happens on that site, they could bring up the other site. well, if you don't have backups that i, i have a hash integrity check so that you know that nothing's been changed in that backup . then if something happens to the system goes down,

you need to restore like this corrupted database. you may not know if your restoring is accurate, so that can be another problem that they run into. so what needs to happen? joining the media to, to prevent future mishaps. well, the 1st thing is obviously to make sure that all the equipment is up to date, that all the software supported by vendor support that all the patches have been applied. but also then they need to understand what happened if there was any insider problem here or, or something that was a weak control to fix, to build up those controls and to try to determine the cause of the problem. so it's hard to know exactly what they need to do to prevent it from happening when we don't know yet what caused it. all right, alex, this is the 2nd major incident in less than a month for the usa, vh. an industry. are these issues specific to the us or other countries and industries outweigh in the world, also vulnerable? everywhere, and everyone is vulnerable to this?

and what this has done is this has now renewed and refreshed the need for that conversation to keep going over the issues that the ation sector has globally. we have, you know, modern day risks of soluble, we have modern day risks to do with the fun that we're running as your guest explained, old i t system which is so common across aviation. and remember that the very concept of air travel connects a to b. so wall a may have the latest investments and innovation in, in the tech budgets. it's not always going to be the case for b. and that's why, you know, we need a harmonized approach to ensuring that the industry is ready for not just the movement of digitalization that is ongoing. and that is likely to, you know, have it mishaps here and there as these upgrades take place. but also on this risk of cyber. from 2019 to 2020. we saw in europe a 530 percent increase in cyber attacks in 2020 alone. 61 percent of all the

cyber attacks in europe. we're to specifically to airlines. so you begin to, to realize quickly have information sharing is key. how taking a harmonized approach is key. and that's why you know, i k o, the centralized un body of ideation. they have an important role to play, to ensuring that in this specific area of security, no country is left behind. to what extent is information sharing happening alex, it's happening better in some parts of the world than it. ready others, for example, if we look at the continent of africa with still we have so much work to do in terms of sharing and liberalizing aviation across the continent there. and it runs all the way along to the theme of security and information sharing, you know, slowly and i think this is the good news. constance like africa are beginning to realize the benefits of becoming more liberalized and adopting something that is a project that's been in the what for so long such as the single african market. ultimately a single african skies. that pilot with around 20 plus african member states,

including gonna ethiopia morocco that's going into place this year. and not only will that help look at the economic development, an opportunity for opening up aviation. but it really runs down to said that information sharing area, ensuring that if there are aspects of the system, there are not as up to date as others in certain countries or in certain regions. and how can we work on ensuring that they also receive that upgrade and that lift, because as i say, it's over a well being fine on one side with a but ultimately vi croft is traveling to be. all right, a kyle alex talked about liberalization. there, there is also the question of, of privatization which you alluded to earlier. and in the wake of this incident, there are some in the us, we're arguing that failures like this system meltdown that we saw on wednesday is why government should be removed from some aspects of air travel that could be better handled by, by, by the private sector what are your thoughts about this?

i mean that organ and it could go either way. i mean, the government has some here in the u. s. has some great relationships. you know, with companies like l 3, l 3, harris and north from in and companies of that nature. i think the private sector does a very good job working in concert with the government as it would be, you know, say we have flight service stations here in the u. s. used to be run by the s t a. there are now run by the private sector. so that relationship works very well in my opinion, and i don't, i don't think the government should be eliminated completely because they really do as far as the essay is concerned from a safety perspective, they really do a very good job of what they do. ok alex you, i'm sorry. finish your thought. i might finish your font trees. you know in this instance, although you know,

inconvenienced millions of air travelers with delays and misc miss connections and cancellations. the system worked as stop a catastrophe from happening. everything basically shut down. they shut the entire system down in matter minutes and the system really worked out perfectly. although people were inconvenienced for the sake of safety. alright, jody, i'll come to you just one second. but alex, i wanted to get your thoughts on this question of privatization. would privatizing some aspects of air travel like air traffic control, for example, in the us would, would that help in fixing some of the problems industry has encountered that? i think it is perhaps too broad over of a blanket approach to take that to some how the private sector has all of the answers. i think what would be better is if we, if we had more consistent commitment to these upgrades and, and if we, you know, the good thing is, is that with the current administration in the u. s, we have seen infrastructure investments that stemmed right down and across aviation

. and so you know, this is the truck that, that is necessary. the funny part is that we often talk about when a child who is disrupted you to outs, geez. and due to glitches many times, these glitches are occurring because of the upgrades that are taking place for 2023 for the next 12 months, euro control who assist with the site, the skies of europe are ready warning that there will be delays to travel this summer, merely because they are doing system upgrades in key european hubs and where a traffic is centralized, such as liz, vernon and reams in france. so, you know, it's a bumpy road of course, but i don't think to go back to a question of the private sector has all of the answers, but perhaps more integration in various different areas could bring a could help modernize the sector. alright, jody computer systems are hierarchical, of course, looking at the broader infrastructure system. how robust are these key systems around the world to deal with the issues that they're faced with today?

well, they were in an interconnected global network and this incident highlights that very clearly. and highlights the impact that can have this kind of incident can have where it's a domino effect. one, the company, one government agency may have an absolutely robust, everything's perfect where there's a control security controls. everything's up to date. and yet if that system goes down or another system impacts it, then, then the systems can crash or the systems can have problems. so the interconnected nature is something that we have to understand we as part of how we live today and how we operate. and so just saying that one vulnerability in one company is they're not up to speed or they need a better app or the government needs a better app. we're also interconnected that, that risk flows to everybody else. so it really is a, at everyone's depend on everyone else in this type of system where everyone is

relying on an information system that puts out information for air control. you can be sure that whatever the answer is to the problem that people will take note. but in my experience, private sector systems have often just as many weaknesses or worse than government systems because there's not as good oversight from those systems. so i think we have to figure out what happened here. but we have to understand the interconnected nature of how we operate today. these kinds of things can happen. ok, kind let me get your thoughts on, on how we fix the problem. what's the answer short and long term to, to solving these own abilities. you know, i think there will be investigations as a result of this incident, whether it be with, you know, congressional investigation or whether it will be conducting the, you know,

from the office of the f, a administrator. and from that, i think, you know, that this might be a wake up call for perhaps congress to increase funding for various projects that perhaps they might have overlooked in the past. and from the standpoint just from their side alone, just looking at the projects that are in the pipeline. and maybe as we again evaluating what are the top priorities and what should be addressed immediately and what maybe they could put on the back burner for a time. the ok, so car. sorry, alex, let me give you the last word. cause say this is the wake up call and you know, they should be increased funding to the f a. what do you feel? should be the priorities right now to solve this issue and make sure it doesn't happen again in the near future. but of course, it's inevitable. we're going to see more of these issues, whether or not they're related to the older i t and o to tech, or of course, that ongoing risk of cyber and the cyber attacks that hit the industry daily. what

i hope that the global aviation sector, which is so well harmonized takes from this is the importance of ensuring that every, all of the systems are up to date and keeping their infrastructure as, as modern as possible. but also ensuring, as i said earlier, that no countries left behind, you know, the un special agency i k o they want to see in ideation across the world, more personnel who are well versed in both aviation. i'm cybersecurity, but that's going to require investments. so these are conversations that have to be taking place across governments as we move into different areas of risks in 2015 and we saw in sweet and part of their air traffic control abilities was shut down for 5 days. initially, it was blamed on a solar flare. later it turned out to be a malicious cyber attack. so we know that not always is everything as it seems from the early on period in the early on days. but i hope that that conversation has started now to address both these areas to be asian,

and i'm sure we'll learn more in the next few days when, when this investigation happens, as to what exactly happened with this incident. thank you. all 3 of you for a very interesting conversation, kyle bailey, jodie westby and alex much harris. and thank you as well for watching. you can always watch this program again any time by visiting our website at al jazeera dot com for further discussion. go to our facebook page at facebook dot com, forward slash ha inside story. and of course you can join the conversation on twitter handle is that a j in sized from me fully back to you going the whole team here in doha. thanks for watching bye for now. ah and

there are people in the world walk all forms of verification to just go away. so we need people fighting against that. we are trying to see if it's a fake video, maybe in syria, but in a different time. they risk a great deal to find out the truth in very complex situations that include major global players. we'd be targeted by cyber attacks from russia. they're all they just do this kind of work welling truth in a post truth world on al jazeera via is at a tipping point. scientists are telling us that we have just 12 years as the world's leaders fail to agree upon a solution. people are taking matters into that we're talking about the property now. we're trying to get people to understand that it kills people and that it kills people. now it's already getting people thrive the

people's voice on al jazeera. but it has been done before. we can be done even better, as long as a human being is doing it. you can do it, no matter how you possibly it looks. it's you to put in the effort to put in the lock and you will have to be patient with me. i am the captain, a science than me. i still continued kenya and am, was, or the assistant which we are the only ice okey team in east and central africa b as b. i francois progressing pretty well. we had managed to play in some international games. then when koby came, the ice rink was closed and it's the only ice rink in the country. ah, i moline site, enjo.