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Y2K Update By Declan McCullagh January 1, 1999 On December 14, Declan McCullagh spoke to an audience of Polish reporters about Y2K. The telecast was arranged by the US Information Agency in Washington, DC and the American embassy in Warsaw. Following are excerpts from his presentation, as transcribed by USIA. I cover what Washington and state and local governments -- some foreign governments -- are doing with technology.... The year 2000 bug I dismissed. I'm a former computer programmer, but I dismissed it as nonsense, or something that would be easily fixed, for quite a while. But early this year, I started to report on the problem, and I became a little more concerned. This is, in fact, an important issue. There are a couple of phases of awareness that we've encountered here in the U.S., and the first is just awareness -- trying to get federal agencies, and corporations as well, interested in the problem and aware that it exists. Then there's the remediation phase, the actual fixing of computer problems. That's what most companies and the federal and state and local governments are in right now. The third phase that we're about to enter is contingency planning and crisis management. "The Ottawa Citizen," a Canadian newspaper, reported on Saturday that the Canadian government is...creating plans to declare martial law in Canada for fear of looting and rioting or social unrest if the power goes out or other vital infrastructure services go down. It seems to me that as long as the power stays up, that is, the electricity stays running, then it won't be that terrible a problem here. And it seems as though, yes, in fact, a lot of those companies are...spending a lot of time, energy, resources, and management commitment in fixing their Y2K problems in the electric power industry. Last week...an anti-nuclear advocacy group submitted an emergency petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the entity within the federal government that oversees nuclear power plants. This group asked that all nuclear power plants be shut down on December 1, 1999, arguing that unless they can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they're okay, just even a 1 percent chance of something happening is just unacceptable to the American public. The NRC has not ruled on this. There's a reasonable chance, I think, that they'll do something along those lines. In the U.S. at least, the financial industry is said to be the best prepared. Small businesses and partnerships are said to be the least prepared -- maybe they don't have the resources to fix the problem, maybe they just haven't spent the time investigating it. They may not have full-time information services or information technology people on staff. The U.S. is being, perhaps, slightly arrogant in saying that we're the best prepared of any country in the world -- or at least we will be by the time the deadline rolls around. It seems as though Southeast Asian countries, Africa, South America, are woefully behind -- with Europe, especially Western Europe, and Canada trailing the U.S. or coming in a very close second. Here in the U.S. -- here in Washington -- (we) tend to think of Y2K as a potentially serious problem. There will be disruptions. We're not sure how substantial they are.... A British newspaper -- I think it was "The Guardian" -- yesterday reported that the British government's Y2K task force has recommended that citizens store two weeks of food, water, money, and so on. The American Red Cross has suggested last week that Americans should stockpile the same thing -- basically food, water, money, even get electric generators for fear that the power could go out. And the mayor of St. Paul said two weeks ago that he's so afraid -- this is a mid-sized American city -- he is so afraid that the power is going to go out in the middle of the winter, that he's asking churches and synagogues to prepare themselves to receive a flood of Y2K refugees, and I think that's absolutely extreme. He's got a year to fix this, and he should get his people in line. So, that's what we're starting to see as we enter 1999. We're going to see more panicked overtones to Y2K and probably more focus on the politics, more focus on the culture and implications -- the social reaction to the year 2000 problem and less on the actual technological glitches themselves.... Because we don't know what's going to happen with the infrastructure, we don't know if the power is going to stay up. I think it will. But even if there's a small chance of it failing, it makes sense to prepare -- the way you might prepare for a flood or an earthquake or a bad snow storm. In other words, just follow the American Red Cross' advice -- or the Red Cross' advice -- and do make some preparations. It costs very little to prepare but, in case there are power outages, it's worth it.... I think that Americans are spoiled maybe a little in that we want things right away. We're not used to dealing with lines or hardships or shortages. And, even if the United States has no Y2K problems at all -- zero problems -- if the rest of the world, especially developing nations, is not as prepared, that will cause disruptions when we can't get cheap exports from China or India and, perhaps, shipping and transportation is disrupted. At the U.N. in New York City last Friday, about 150 nations sent delegates -- the U.S. paid their way -- to the conference to talk about Y2K, and that was one of the main questions they had during the portions I listened to. Transportation -- embedded systems are in not just power plants, not just oil and gas plants, but also ships themselves. What happens if shipping is disrupted? Well, what does that mean to our standard of living? Bank runs personally scare me. I've never lived through this time, and I'm not quite sure what to expect. The U.S. Federal Reserve, our central bank, has anticipated this, is preparing for this by printing up -- they announced in August -- $50,000 million more bank notes. This is not expanding the money supply. This is just printing up more actual physical currency in case there is a run on the banks. The Canadians, the Australians, and I believe the New Zealand government have taken similar measures. I believe in Australia, the government has stopped destroying used or old or dirty bank notes. But in those cases -- and I suspect more countries will do the same thing -- the governments are preparing for a run on banks, and this can happen for a number of reasons. You might have it (a bank run) just because people are afraid that the bank's computers will have problems, and they can't get their money out. Another reason would be that people just want to take their money out because they're afraid they may not be able to later. It's a fractional reserve system. If more than 5 percent of people take all their money out, there could be trouble. But this is what the Fed is anticipating. And they've taken, I think, at least reasonable steps to address it. But if everyone wants to take their money out, there's very little the government can do, save declaring a bank holiday like Roosevelt did the first day he was in office.... The scientific community has not taken the lead on (the Y2K challenge). It's been primarily corporations and the federal government in the form of John Koskinen, who chairs the President's Year 2000 Council.... The scientists and engineers who have followed this (Y2K) are fairly alarmed. But by and large, they're not as alarmed as I think the private sector. It seems that a lot of computer scientists who you might expect to raise the alarm, are more theoreticians. They deal more in theory than actually building complex systems. At least, it was that way when I was in college and taking computer science classes. And so this means that they may understand the mathematics of it...but this does not mean that they understand how large systems like, say, our Internal Revenue Service or our welfare system, the computers supporting these programs are going to interact, and how they can be corrupted by bad data, or the different ways that they can fail.... I think awareness is growing, but corporations are going to take the lead. And they're upping -- they're continuously upping their costs of how much -- how much they're going to have to spend to debug their systems, both in the private and public sector. The IRS said, last year, that they're going to have to spend $250 million, and now they're saying they're going to have to spend about $1,250 million. This is a five-fold increase in the last year, or just over a year.... Bell Atlantic, one of the Baby Bells that services the East Coast, has again upped its fix estimates from $250 million to $350 million. So it's larger than most corporations thought, and they're still trying to figure this out.... There are widespread predictions of an avalanche of lawsuits. The Gartner Group, a reasonably respected Y2K and technology consulting group, has said that there could be $1 trillion -- that's trillion with a 't' -- worth of lawsuits. I don't believe that at all. I think that companies that have worked together for decades, generations, are going to try to fix their problems without suing each other, because suing is just a long, painful process, and it's probably not the most efficient way to keep your business going. But even I admit -- and I'm a skeptic on the $1 trillion figure - - even I admit that there are going to be lawsuits. This is a key concern of businesses, and so you have every special interest group in town -- the hospital manufacturers, the hardware manufacturers, the software manufacturers -- saying to Congress, "No, immunize me. Pass a law so that I can sue everyone but I cannot be sued." And we saw the first step in that process in a law Congress passed this session that limits the liability for statements made.... I'm also a little concerned about the economic effects of corporations spending an aggregate of hundreds of billions of dollars on this. What's it going to do to the economy? We had Governor Ed Kelly of the Federal Reserve saying that it is going to cause an economic slowdown, but I think it is going to cause a little bit more than just a bump in the road. One other thing I wanted to raise is nuclear weapons. Atomic weapons are affected by the problem, we've learned, and our military and the Russian military both say, well, if there are Y2K glitches, they are just going to not fire at all, as opposed to fire when they should not -- which is, I suppose, reassuring. This is something that is going to be debated more and more in the next year. BASIC, the British-American Security Information Council, has started to make waves about this, and say that nuclear weapons should be taken off-line, just in case something happens, which is, I think, probably a sensible point. NATO is lending help to the Russians on this, to try to make sure that the Russian nuclear weapons are also fixed in time. I think that the private sector is largely self-policing when it comes to Y2K, because corporations of any size have a substantial market incentive to stay afloat and not go out of business. One thing I've seen is that some insurance companies have started to look at Y2K and say that maybe they're going to ground some airplane flights on New Year's Eve, December 31st, 1999, for fear of increased liability and accidents and all that. It seems as though the U.S. government is more aware of it, I think it's definitely true in that it's becoming front page -- it's receiving regular front-page story coverage in major newspapers and news magazines. The difference is maybe that the U.S. is actually going to be much more affected, and maybe we're much more dependent on technology and if one of our critical infrastructures -- telecommunications, water, banking, etc. -- goes down for even a couple hours, I think the reactions of most Americans are going to be pretty severe. We're not used to outages around here.... The (technical) problem is that some of the (computer) code might have been written 20, 30 years ago, and it might have been maintained in a very haphazard manner since then. The original source code, the relatively human-readable instructions, may no longer be available. And if the program is coded in assembly language, as older ones are on microcomputers, minicomputers and mainframes -- they're coded in assembly for speed -- then it becomes very difficult, well-nigh impossible to find the original program and then essentially you're going to have to reverse-engineer it. So if the source code is lost, it makes the remediation efforts much, much more difficult. It slows it down by a factor of probably 10. There's no way to automate this (remediation), because every programmer, when writing date-sensitive code, has an idiosyncratic programming style. And so it's not like you can buy a software package and say, "Find all the dates with two digits on them and convert them to four." And because you don't know if a variable means A, B or C, one of those might represent financial information, another a name or street address, and the third might be, in fact, the date. And without looking at the way the computer program works and without a human going in there and understanding it, it's very difficult to find which of the A, B or C represents a date. The good news is that there are custom programs available that can try to highlight what is probably a date, but it's not a "silver bullet." By no means are these (programs) going to replace a human. If we had a decade, we, I think, everyone in the world, could fix the problem in time, with no disruptions. But we don't have that long.... And so the question becomes then, well, what kind of disruptions are we going to have? In the U.S. at least, I've been writing a lot about the electric power systems, because I think this is the most important problem to solve. The problem is -- we have three power grids in this country; West Coast, East Coast, and Texas, which has a grid all of its own. It also includes southern portions of Canada and very northern portions of Mexico. If there's an outage in one section of the grid, the rest of the grid can be pulled down with it. This is probably going to be more regionalized, but the problem is that we're interconnected.
(end excerpts)
(This originally appeared on the USIA web site).
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