[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 51 (Wednesday, April 14, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E657-E658]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      AN APPROPRIATE CLARIFICATION

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                          HON. NORMAN D. DICKS

                             of washington

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, April 14, 1999

  Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, in December, a group of Microsoft's 
competitors and their consultants convened a briefing for congressional 
staff here on Capitol Hill. I was alarmed to learn recently that they 
used the occasion to allege that Microsoft's software posed a national 
security risk, and I want to take this opportunity to set the record 
straight. At this time when the Justice Department is pursuing 
Microsoft in federal court over alleged anti-trust violations, there 
has been a lot of misinformation promulgated by the company's 
competitors, and I believe it is appropriate to provide a 
clarification.
  In this instance, reference was made to an incident on the Navy's 
Aegis cruiser, U.S.S. Yorktown, in which the vessel's computers 
crashed, leaving the ship dead in the water. The allegation was made 
during this congressional briefing that the computers' operating 
system, Microsoft Windows NT, was the cause of the outage.
  This allegation was false, and the Navy had conceded publicly at 
least one month before this briefing that human error, not Windows NT, 
caused the failure.
  Mr. Speaker, while I am concerned that this incident happened at all, 
I commend the Navy for quickly pinpointing the problem, accepting 
responsibility, and taking action to prevent a recurrence. What 
concerns me more at this point are the specious, deceptive and 
irresponsible accusations which Microsoft's competitors are clearly 
willing to make to congressional staff and the public.
  Lately, Mr. Speaker, Members of Congress have seen media reports 
about accusations against Microsoft and proposals to break up the 
company or force it to relinquish its intellectual property. Much of 
this attention has been generated or fueled by this same group of the 
company's competitors. At this point I would like to urge my colleagues 
and their staffs to be careful, to listen to such discussions with a 
skeptical ear, and to seek out both sides when such allegations are 
made.
  And for the Record, Mr. Speaker, I would like to insert a copy of an 
article from the trade publication, Government Computer News, published 
November 9, 1998--more than a month before the congressional staff 
briefing was held. The story details the Navy's investigation and the 
full story behind the human error that caused the U.S.S. Yorktown's 
computer problem.

              Navy: Calibration Flaw Crashed Yorktown LAN

                   (By Gregory Slabodkin, GCN Staff)

       Pascagoula, Miss.--Human error, not Microsoft Windows NT, 
     was the cause of a LAN failure aboard the Aegis cruiser USS 
     Yorktown that left the Smart Ship dead in the water for 
     nearly three hours last fall during maneuvers near Cape 
     Charles, Va., Navy officials said.
       The Yorktown last September suffered an engineering LAN 
     casualty when a petty officer calibrating a fuel valve 
     entered a zero into a shipboard database, officials said. The 
     resulting database overload caused the ship's LAN, including 
     27 dual 200-MHz Pentium Pro miniature remote terminal units, 
     to crash, they said.

[[Page E658]]

       The petty officer, who has since left the Navy, fed the bad 
     data into the Remote Data Base Manager, a Standard Monitoring 
     Control System application. SMCS, developed by Canadian 
     Aviation Electronics Inc. of Toronto, allows sailors to 
     monitor the ship's engineering and propulsion plant for 
     potential casualties.
       The system provides troubleshooting data and normally 
     indicates whether a valve is open or closed without requiring 
     calibration. But something went wrong.
       ``There was a problem in that this one valve was closed, 
     but SMCS wasn't indicating it as such,'' said Cmdr. Eric 
     Sweigard, the Yorktown's commanding officer. ``So this petty 
     officer stared playing with the data.
       ``This was the only time it occurred, and since then there 
     have been some changes made to prevent it from happening 
     again,'' he said.
       SMCS managers are now aware of the problem of entering zero 
     into database fields and are trained to bypass a bad data 
     field and change the value if such a problem were to occurs 
     again, Sweigard said.
       ``Now that we know what can happen, we've realized how to 
     bring the system back quickly,'' Petty Officer 1st Class 
     Phillip Cramer said. ``All we have to do is change the zero 
     to any number, and everything comes right back up.''
       The Yorktown was not towed into port as a result of this 
     incident, Sweigard said. The ship restored the LAN in about 
     two hours as it made its way to the Naval base at Norfolk, 
     VA., under its own power, he said.
       ``It's not something that we desire, but ships do go dead 
     in the water,'' Sweigard said. ``People sometimes make 
     mistakes and systems break. The trick is we have trained our 
     crew to react to those situations.''
       The Office of the Navy's Chief Information Officer is 
     conducting a detailed inquiry of the Yorktown incident, Navy 
     officials said. A report from the Navy CIO is expected later 
     this month, officials said.


                           Point of no return

       Regardless of who or what was at fault for the Yorktown LAN 
     failure, the stakes for the Navy are high. The service plans 
     to install Smart Ship technology on all its cruisers.
       The Navy selected NT 4.0 as the standard operating system 
     aboard the Yorktown for its reliability, functionality, low 
     cost and ease of integration, said Lt. Danny Bethel, 
     Yorktown's electronics material officer. NT runs the 
     Yorktown's integrated bridge, engineering, condition 
     assessment and damage control systems.
       The Yorktown uses dual 200-MIIz Pentium Pro systems from 
     Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., to run NT over a fiber-
     optic, asynchronous transfer mode LAN. Shipboard users can 
     access computers from 15 locations so that the Yorktown can 
     be driven from virtually anywhere on the ship.
       The Navy has reduced the Yorktown's crew from about 350 
     sailors to 307 personnel by adopting new policies and 
     procedures, as well as through the use of commercial 
     products, Sweigard said.
       The Navy's Western Hemisphere Group will begin installing 
     Smart Ship technologies aboard the USS Ticonderoga and USS 
     Thomas S. Gates early next year, said Lt. Danny Hernandez, 
     public affairs officer for the group in Mayport, Fla.
       Smart Ship was the brainchild of Adm. Jeremy Boorda, the 
     late chief of Naval operations who wanted to save money by 
     reducing personnel aboard Navy ships while maintaining 
     safety.

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