There's still no effective solution to protect the White House from drones that encroach into nearby airspace, says Secret Service, FBI and CIA expert and author Ronald Kessler.
In an interview with "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth on Friday, Kessler, author of
"The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents," conceded, "We have to just cross our fingers."
"There really has not been a solution developed," he says, noting the Secret Service is working with Sandia National Laboratory and others to try to find one.
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The obstacles to that solution are significant, he said, noting that radar mistakes drones for birds – accounting for the ease with which a piloted
drone crash-landed near the White House.
"There probably would not be time to actually shoot it down or disrupt its mechanisms," Kessler said. "They are working on it."
"When you think of the idea that the White House fence is so close to the White House and it's at least for now been very easy to scale a fence, that's a much more serious problem," he added.
But Kessler argues there are other security problems facing the White House, including the Secret Service's cutting corners and "ignoring the most basic security precautions."
Kessler pointed to the case of Omar Gonzalez, who was able to
intrude at the White House last September.
"The White House door wasn't even locked, and then the Secret Service lied about it and said that he had been apprehended at the door and that he was unarmed," he said.
"It turned out he had penetrated the whole White House and that he was armed with a knife. It tells you a lot about the arrogance of the Secret Service, the culture of covering up, and that has led to all these problems."
The high-profile
prostitution scandal involving the Secret Service "is not that common and is not the real problem," he asserted.
More problematic, he says, is that "on a regular basis, agents will be pressured by the White House or campaign staffs and the Secret Service management will kowtow to them to let people into events without . . . a metal detection screening."
"If anyone did that in the airline industry, they [would be] . . . possibly prosecuted, and yet this is accepted behavior. It's simply unbelievable," he said.
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