Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina thinks Hillary Clinton’s email troubles represent a larger issue of technophobia in Washington.
The former Hewlett-Packard CEO, who is no stranger to technology herself, told Boston Herald Radio that most federal employees and agencies fall woefully short in their familiarity with technology.
“I must say – and I’ve been highly critical of Hillary Clinton’s lack of technical knowledge – there are a lot of politicians who are pretty technophobic,” Fiorina said Monday on the program.
“[Hillary Clinton] is not unique in this,” she added.
Fiorina, who is second in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings, explained that such fear and apathy toward advanced technology is due in large part to a lack of exposure to it on Capitol Hill.
“Many politicians, with all due respect to them, have their staffs carry around their technology and they’ve had staff assistants for so long they don’t understand their technology,” she said.
The only female in the GOP field described Washington, D.C., in general, as “really, quite technophobic.” That, she said, is a shame “because we are the most technologically sophisticated nation in the world.”
“Technology is not only a weapon being used against us, but it is a tool that can be used to hold people accountable,” Fiorina said. “It is a tool that can be used to provoke greater transparency which leads to greater accountability. It’s also a tool that can be used to engage citizens in the process of their government once again.”
Asked later in the interview what she would do to strengthen cybersecurity and technological awareness, Fiorina listed three steps she would take as president.
“Number one, we need to have collaboration between the private sector and the public sector on the detection and repellence of these attacks,” she said. “Secondly, we need to have basic competence in IT management in the government. … Part of that, I believe, is to stand up a centralized cybersecurity command in the federal government that would be accountable for protecting our sensitive databases and systems in federal government and that would report, I believe, to the White House, Department of Defense, or Department of Homeland Security.
“And of course we should retaliate,” she added, third and finally. “There has to be consequence when the Chinese or the Russians attack us in cyberspace.”
Fiorina has risen rapidly in the weeks following the second Republican primary debate. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll shows her at 16 percent support among GOP voters in New Hampshire, just 5 percentage points behind front-runner Donald Trump and 6 points higher than where she stood in early September.
