[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 74 (Tuesday, June 3, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5268-S5270]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                             ON ALL SHORES

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on my recent trip to Israel, I 
read an illustrative article in the Financial Times of London. It seems 
financial experts in England have come to a conclusion many financial 
institutions in the United States have failed, thus far, to reach. 
Namely, that it is too late to solve the year 2000 computer problem 
completely, and that it is hopeless to rely on a ``silver bullet'' to 
solve the problem. Instead, officials in the United Kingdom have 
concluded that the world economy faces a very time-consuming, labor-
intensive project--the scope of which is unparalleled in modern 
history.
  Upon my return to the United States, I found that Newsweek had just 
published an important article that will increase awareness, I hope, to 
the point of action. Thus, I remind my colleagues of my bill (S. 22) to 
set up a commission responsible for ensuring that all executive 
agencies are compliant by 2000. I hope my colleagues recognize--as the 
British have begun to do--what we now face and what we must do to 
ensure the proper functioning not only of our Government, but of the 
economy.

[[Page S5269]]

  I ask that the Newsweek cover story, ``The Day the World Shuts Down'' 
and the Financial Times of London's story, ``Millenium Bomb Ticks 
Away'' be printed in the Record.
  The material follows:

                      The Day the World Shuts Down

       Drink deep from your champagne glasses as the ball drops in 
     Times Square to usher in the year 2000. Whether you imbibe or 
     not, the hangover may begin immediately. The power may go 
     out. Or the credit card you pull out to pay for dinner may no 
     longer be valid. If you try an ATM to get cash, that may not 
     work, either. Or the elevator that took you up to the party 
     ballroom may be stuck on the ground floor. Or the parking 
     garage you drove into earlier in the evening may charge you 
     more than your yearly salary. Or your car might not start. Or 
     the traffic lights might be on the blink. Or, when you get 
     home, the phones may not work. The mail may show up, but your 
     magazine subscriptions will have stopped, your government 
     check may not arrive, your insurance policies may have 
     expired.
       Or you may be out of a job. When you show up for work after 
     the holiday, the factory or office building might be locked 
     up, with a handwritten sign taped to the wall: out of 
     business due to computer error.
       Could it really happen? Could the most anticipated New 
     Year's Eve party in our lifetimes really usher in a digital 
     nightmare when our wired-up-the-wazoo civilization grinds to 
     a halt? Incredibly, according to computer experts, corporate 
     information officers, congressional leaders and basically 
     anyone who's given the matter a fair hearing, the answer is 
     yes, yes, 2,000 times yes! Yes--unless we successfully 
     complete the most ambitious and costly technology project in 
     history, one where the payoff comes not in amassing riches or 
     extending Web access, but securing raw survival.
       What's the problem? It's called, variously, the Year 2000 
     Problem, Y2K or the Millennium Bug. It represents the 
     ultimate indignity: the world laid low by two lousy digits. 
     The trouble is rooted in a seemingly trivial space-saving 
     programming trick--dropping the first two numbers of the 
     date, abbreviating, say, the year 1951 to ``51.'' This 
     digital relic from the days when every byte of computer 
     storage was precious was supposed to have been long gone by 
     now, but the practice became standard. While any idiot 
     familiar with the situation could figure out that the world's 
     computers were on a collision course with the millennium, no 
     one wanted to be the one to bring it up to management. And, 
     really, which executive would welcome a message from nerddom 
     that a few million bucks would be required to fix some 
     obscure problem that wouldn't show up for several years?
       So only now, as the centurial countdown begins, are we 
     learning that the digit-dropping trick has changed from 
     clever to catastrophic. Because virtually all the mainframe 
     computers that keep the world humming are riddled with 
     software that refuses to recognize that when 1999 runs out, 
     the year 2000 follows. When that date arrives, the computers 
     are going to get very confused. (PCs aren't as affected; 
     sidebar.) So that seemingly innocuous trick now affects 
     everything from ATMs to weapons systems. Virtually every 
     government, state and municipality, as well as every 
     large, midsize and small business in the world, is going 
     to have to deal with this--in fact, if they haven't 
     started already it's just about too late. Fixing the 
     problem requires painstaking work. The bill for all this? 
     Gartner Group estimates it could go as high as $600 
     billion. That amount could easily fund a year's worth of 
     all U.S. educational costs, preschool through grad school. 
     It's Bill Gates times 30!
       That tab doesn't include the litigation that will 
     inevitably follow the system failures. ``You can make some 
     very reasonable extrapolations about litigation that take you 
     over $1 trillion, and those are very conservative 
     estimates,'' says Dean Morehous, a San Francisco lawyer. 
     (Conservative or not, this is more than three times the 
     yearly cost of all civil litigation in the United States.)
       Come on, you say. Two measly digits? Can't we just unleash 
     some sort of robo-program on all that computer code and clean 
     it up? Well, no. Forget about a silver bullet. It seems that 
     in most mainframe programs, the date appears more often than 
     ``M*A*S*H'' reruns on television--about once every 50 lines 
     of code. Typically, it's hard to find those particular lines, 
     because the original programs, often written in the ancient 
     COBOL computer language, are quirky and undocumented. After 
     all that analysis, you have to figure out how to rewrite the 
     lines to correctly process the date. Only then comes the most 
     time-consuming step: testing the rewritten program.
       It's a torturous process, but an absolutely necessary one. 
     Because if we don''t swat the millennium Bug, we'll have 
     troubles everywhere.
       Electricity. When the Hawaiian Electric utility in Honolulu 
     ran tests on its system to see if it would be affected by the 
     Y2K Bug, ``basically, it just stopped working,'' says systems 
     analyst Wendell Ito. If the problem had gone unaddressed, not 
     only would some customers have potentially lost power, but 
     others could have got their juice at a higher frequency, in 
     which case, ``the clocks would go faster, and some things 
     could blow up,'' explains Ito. (Hawaiian Electric revamped 
     the software and now claims to be ready for the year 2000.) 
     Another concern is nuclear power; the Nuclear Regulatory 
     Commission says that the Bug might affect ``security control, 
     radiation monitoring . . . and accumulated burn-up 
     programs [which involve calculations to estimate the 
     hazard posed by radioactive fuel].''
       Communications. ``If no one dealt with the year 2000 Bug, 
     the [phone] network would not operate properly,'' says Eric 
     Sumner Jr., a Lucent chief technology officer. He's not 
     talking about dial tones, but things like billing (watch out 
     for 100-year charges). Certain commercial operations that run 
     phone systems by computer could also go silent if the 
     software isn't fixed.
       Medicine. Besides the expected mess in billing systems, 
     insurance claims and patient records, hospitals and doctors 
     have to worry about embedded chips--microprocessors inside 
     all sorts of devices that sometimes have date-sensitive 
     controls. The year 2000 won't make pacemakers stop dead, but 
     it could affect the data readouts it reports to physicians.
       Weapons. Newsweek has obtained an internal Pentagon study 
     listing the Y2K impact on weapons and battlefield 
     technologies. In their current state, ``a year 2000 problem 
     exists'' in several key military technologies and they will 
     require upgrading or adjustments. One intelligence system 
     reverts to the year 1900, another reboots to 1969. The report 
     confidently states that as far as nuclear devices like 
     Trident missiles are concerned, ``there are no major 
     obstacles which will prevent them from being totally Year 
     2000 compliant by Jan. 1999.''
       Money. Banks and other financial institutions generally 
     will go bonkers if they don't fix the year 2000 problem. The 
     Senate Banking Committee is even worried that vertiginous 
     computers might automatically erase the last 99 years worth 
     of bank records. Some Y2K consultants are advising consumers 
     to make sure they don't enter the 1999 holiday without 
     obtaining hard-copy evidence of their assets. According to 
     Jack Webb of HONOR Technologies, Inc., ATMs won't work 
     without fixes.
       Food. In Britain computers at the Marks & Spencer company 
     have already mistakenly ordered the destruction of tons of 
     corned beef, believing they were more than 100 years old.
       Air-Traffic Control. ``We're still in the assessment stage, 
     determining how big the problem is,'' says Dennis DeGaetano 
     of the Federal Aviation Administration. One possible danger 
     is computer lockup: while planes well keep moving at 12:01 
     a.m. on Jan. 1, 2000, the screens monitoring them, if not 
     upgraded, might lock. Or the computers might know where the 
     planes were, but mix them up with flights recorded at the 
     same time on a previous day. (``You can bet we're going to 
     fix it,'' says DeGaetano.)
       Factories. Ford Motor Co. reports that if the Bug isn't 
     fixed, its buildings could literally shut down--the factories 
     have security systems linked to the year. ``Obviously, if you 
     don't fix it, your business will stop in the year 2000,'' 
     says Ford's David Principato. Even if a manufacturing company 
     aggressively solves its own problem, though, it might be 
     flummoxed by a supplier who delivers widgets in the wrong 
     century.
       Just About Everything Else. Larry Martin, CEO of Data 
     Dimensions, warns that if not adjusted, ``on Jan. 1, 2000, a 
     lot of elevators could be dropping to the bottom of 
     buildings,'' heading to the basement for inspections they 
     believe are overdue. Similarly, automobiles have as many as 
     100 chips; if they are calendar-challenged, experts say, 
     forget about driving. Computerized sprinkler systems could 
     initiate icy midwinter drenchings.
       Like leaves rustling before a tornado, there have already 
     been harbingers of a bureaucratic meltdown. At a state 
     prison, a computer glitch misread the release date of 
     prisoners and freed them prematurely. In Kansas, a 104-year-
     old woman was given a notice to enter kindergarten. Visa has 
     had to recall some credit cards with expiration dates three 
     years hence--the machines reading them thought they had 
     expired in the McKinley administration.
       The $600 billion question is whether we'll fix the Bug in 
     time. The good news is that the computer industry is finally 
     responding to the challenge. For months now, squardrons of 
     digital Jeremiahs have been addressing tech conferences with 
     tales of impending apocalypse. The most sought-after is Peter 
     de Jager, a bearded Canadian who scares the pants off 
     audiences on a near-daily basis. ``If we shout from the 
     rooftops, they accuse us of hype,'' he complains. ``But if we 
     whisper in an alley, no one will listen.'' Last week in 
     Boston de Jager demonstrated the rooftop approach: ``If 
     you're not changing code by November of this year,'' he 
     warned, ``you will not get this thing done on time--it's that 
     simple. We still don't get it.''
       But we're starting to. Most major corporations now have 
     year 2000 task forces, with full-time workers funded by 
     multimillion-dollar budgets, to fix a problem that their 
     bosses finally understand. They're aided by an army of 
     consultants and specialized companies. Some, like Data 
     Dimensions, offer full Y2K service, providing tools, 
     programmers and guidance. Others, like Peitus, sell special 
     software to help find offending code and, sometimes, even 
     convert it. (The final, most arduous stage, testing, still 
     defies automation.) These firms are the new darlings of Wall 
     Street. But buyer beware--consultants are coming out of the 
     woodwork to exploit the desperation of late-coming companies.

[[Page S5270]]

     Someone might promise a phalanx of brilliant programmers to 
     fix the Bug, but ``for all you know, it could be 10 people 
     in a garage doing it by hand,'' says Ted Swoyer, a Peritus 
     exec. Still, the creation of a Y2K-fixing infrastructure 
     is encouraging.
       It's not uncommon to find gung-ho efforts like the one at 
     Merrill Lynch: an 80-person Y2K division working in shifts, 
     24 hours a day, seven days a week. It'll cost the company 
     $200 million, a sum that could hire Michael Eisner and fire 
     Mike Ovitz. ``Our return on investment is zero,'' says senior 
     VP Howard Sorgen. ``This will just enable us to stay in 
     business.''
       So maybe we're not in for a full-scale disaster. Let us 
     assume--oh God let it be true--that those in charge of life-
     sustaining applications and services will keep their promises 
     to fix what needs fixing. The costs and liabilities of not 
     doing so are too huge not to. (On the other hand, when did 
     you last see a huge software project that met its deadline 
     and worked perfectly? Just asking.) Still, there will almost 
     certainly be severe dislocations because of the mind-boggling 
     enormity of the problem.
       Even the most diligent companies don't have total 
     confidence they can fix everything. Consider BankBoston, the 
     15th largest commercial bank in the United States. Early in 
     1995, the company realized that ``it was a problem that could 
     bring an institution to its knees,'' says David Iacino, who 
     heads the bank's Team 2000. To stop a meltdown, BankBoston 
     has to probe 60 million lines of code. the harder BankBoston 
     works at solving the problem--it now has 40 people working 
     full time on it--the more complicated it seems. ``Every day, 
     when we see something new we haven't thought about, we get 
     additional angst,'' said Iacino.
       Of the 200 BankBoston applications that need revamping, 
     only a handful have been completed so far. BankBoston is now 
     separating the essential work from the noncritical, and if 
     the Bug causes less dire problems, like the heavy vault doors 
     swinging open on New Year's Eve, it'll just cope: ``Vaults 
     are physical things,'' says Iacino. ``If push comes to shove, 
     we can put a guard in front.''
       Now, if BankBoston, which started early and has been 
     driving hard, is already thinking triage, what is going to 
     happen to institutions that are still negotiating in the face 
     of a nonnegotiable deadline? The Gartner Group is estimating 
     that half of all businesses are going to fall short. 
     ``There's still a large number of folks out there who haven't 
     started,'' says Matt Hotle, Gartner's research director.
       As businesses finally come to terms with the inevitable, 
     it's going to be panic time. In about a year, expect most of 
     the commercial world to be totally obsessed with the Bug. 
     ``Pretty soon we have to just flat stop doing other work,'' 
     says Leo Verheul of California's Department of Motor 
     Vehicles.
       But no amount of money or resources will postpone the year 
     2000. It will arrive on time, even if all too many computers 
     fail to recognize its presence.
       ``It's staggering to start doing mind games on what 
     percentage of companies will go out of business,'' says 
     Gartner's Hotle. ``What is the impact to the economy of 1 
     percent going out of business?'' Or maybe more: Y2K expert 
     Capers Jones predicts that more than 5 percent of all 
     businesses will go bust. This would throw hundreds of 
     thousands of people into the unemployment lines--applying for 
     checks that may or may not come, depending on whether the 
     government has successfully solved its Y2K problem.
       What is the U.S. government doing? Not enough. ``It's 
     ironic that this administration that prides itself on being 
     so high tech is not really facing up to the potential 
     disaster that is down the road a little bit,'' says Sen. Fred 
     Thompson. If Y2K indeed becomes a calamity, it may well be 
     the vice president who suffers--imagine Al Gore's spending 
     the entire election campaign explaining why he didn't foresee 
     the crisis. (Gore declined to speak to Newsweek on Y2K 
     problem).
       Here's the recipe for a federal breakdown: not enough time 
     and not enough money. While the Office of Management and 
     Budget claims the problem can be fixed for $2.3 billion, most 
     experts think it will take $30 billion. Rep. Stephen Horn 
     held hearings last year to see if the federal agencies were 
     taking steps ``to prevent a possible computer disaster,'' and 
     was flabbergasted at the lack of preparedness. His committee 
     assigned each department a letter grade. A few, notably 
     Social Security, were given A's. (The SSA has been working on 
     the problem for eight years and now has it 65 percent licked; 
     at that rate it will almost make the deadline.) Those with no 
     plan in place--NASA, the Veterans Administration--got D's. 
     Special dishonor was given to places where inaction could be 
     critical, yet complacency still ruled, like the departments 
     of Labor, Energy and Transportation.
       State governments are also up against the 2000 wall. 
     California, for instance, finished its inventory last 
     December and found that more than half of its 2,600 computer 
     systems required fixes. Of those, 450 systems are considered 
     ``mission critical,'' says the state's chief information 
     officer John Thomas Flynn. These include computers that 
     control toll bridges, traffic lights, lottery payments, 
     prisoner releases, welfare checks, tax collection and the 
     handling of toxic chemicals.
       As bad as it seems in the United States, the rest of the 
     world is lagging far behind in fixing the problem. Britain 
     has recently awakened to the crisis--a survey late last year 
     showed that 90 percent of board directors knew of it--but the 
     head of Britain's Taskforce 2000, Robin Guenier, worries that 
     only a fraction really understand what's required. ``I'm not 
     saying we're doomed, but if we are not doing better in six 
     months, I really will be worried,'' he says. He expects the 
     cost to top $50 billion. On the Continent, things are much 
     worse; most of the information-processing energy is devoted 
     to the Euro-currency, and observers fear that when countries 
     like Germany and France finally tackle 2000, it might be too 
     late.
       Russia seems complacent. Recently Mikhail Gorbachev met 
     with Representative Horn in Washington, expressing concern 
     about how far behind Russia is in dealing with the Bug; 
     Gorbachev raised its possible impact on the country's nuclear 
     safeguards.
       The list can go on, and on and on. ``It's like an 
     iceberg,'' says Leon Kappelman, an academic and Y2K 
     consultant. ``I would certainly be uncomfortable if Wall 
     Street were to close for a few days, but I can live with 
     that. But what if the water system starts sending water out 
     before it's safe? Or a chemical plant goes nuts? Anybody who 
     tells you `Oh, it's OK' without knowing that it's been tested 
     is in denial.''
       It's tough out there on the front lines of Y2K. And in less 
     than a thousand days, it might be tough everywhere. ``There 
     are two kinds of people,'' says Nigel Martin-Jones of Data 
     Dimensions. ``Those who aren't working on it and aren't 
     worried, and those who are working on it and are terrified.''
       Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
                                                                    ____


                       Millennium Bomb Ticks Away

                             (By Alan Cane)

       Staff at a Scottish bank, curious to know what effect the 
     millennium date change would have on their systems, turned 
     the clock on their mainframe computer forward to a minute 
     before the turn of the century--and watched.
       At first, the system continued to process financial records 
     as before. Then, as time ticked on, the bankers realised that 
     the figures made no sense. It took some time for older staff 
     to realise what was happening. The machine had assumed it was 
     working in 1900 and was calculating in pounds, shillings and 
     pence, the denominations replaced by the present decimal 
     system in 1971.
       (Do not try that this at home. Your personal computer might 
     crash or destroy information held in programs which rely on 
     dates.)
       The ``millennium bomb'' is the consequence of the computer 
     specialist's habit of storing the year in a date as two, 
     rather than four, digits--97 rather than 1997. It was a way 
     of saving space when computer memory was expensive. Few 
     programmers expected systems written many years before the 
     millennium to be in use after it.
       The result? ``Never in human history have we shot ourselves 
     in the feet so badly,'' says Mr. Brad Collier, a director of 
     Millennium UK, a consultancy which specialises in the 
     problem.
       Nobody who has investigated the problem has any doubt that 
     it is serious and complex and will touch the lives of 
     virtually everyone. In the UK, the normally unemotional 
     National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, has 
     warned that unless government systems are modified in time, 
     salaries might not be paid, invoices might not be issued, 
     collection of taxes could be put at risk, defence systems 
     could malfunction and inaccurate hospital records could be 
     created.
       While the government is taking urgent steps to ensure that 
     its systems will work after 2000, the NAO detected some 
     indications that its programme was slipping behind schedule. 
     Computers and software fresh out of the box today are as 
     likely to fail a 2000 compliance test as older systems, so 
     ingrained is the habit--which persists--of writing the year 
     as two digits.
       Then there is the problem of ``embedded processors''. These 
     are silicon chips which control everything from traffic 
     lights and medical equipment to power stations and 
     electronically guided weapons. They may or may not be 
     affected by the date change--the lack of information is a 
     serious hindrance.
       If hospital radiation equipment were affected, for example, 
     it might deliver inaccurate doses or close down completely. 
     Sir Robert Horton, the chairman of Railtrack, the company 
     responsible for the UK's railway infrastructure, told a 
     seminar this year that embedded systems could affect lifts, 
     access controls, switchboards and facsimile machines.
       Mr. Robin Guenier, head of TaskForce 2000, the unit set up 
     by the government to raise awareness of the problem, says it 
     is already too late to solve the problem in its entirety. But 
     he counsels against despair or panic.
       Yet it is important to realise that while fixing the 
     millennium bomb is not technically difficult, it is tedious, 
     time-consuming and detailed.
       As a first step, it is sensible to protect your job by 
     asking your employers what steps they have taken to deal with 
     the problem. The next step is to protect your savings and 
     investments by asking these same question of your financial 
     services companies--banks, pension funds, brokers and so on. 
     Only if they show no signs of understanding what you mean 
     should you take extreme steps, such as withdrawing your 
     funds.




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