ABRAMS CITES INDUSTRY-GOVERNMENT Y2K COOPERATION

This is a transcript of a digital video conference held by USIA on December 17th. Janet Abrams, as executive director of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, is John Koskinen's deputy. She spoke at length to a group in Italy, and took a few questions.

An interesting aspect of this is that little of what Ms. Abrams says here has been said officially in the United States. (Or am I just out of touch?)

Comments?

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 29, 1998

Answers

I should have mentioned that when I tried to open this link with MSIE 3.0, it started a download, ran it for a few seconds, then reported that it couldn't find the file. Netscape 3.0 opened the URL directly, no download, no problem. I've never run across this before.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 29, 1998.

Abrams said the assessment process represents a rare occurrence 
where
industry and government people are working together to develop
appropriate contingency plans and emergency response procedures.



She said that after the assessments and contingency plans are
developed over the next few months, an effort "unprecedented in scope"
will begin to look at the whole United States to find out what
companies or organizations are at highest risk.



"We are really asking industry to do something that I don't know if
the government has ever asked them to do, which is to work with us to
identify people within their industries who have very important skills
that could be brought to bear at other organizations who are in
trouble, or at other states, or potentially in other countries,"
Abrams said.



"So we are going to be calling upon these industry leaders to 
help
provide part of their skilled work force to be available to help
others in need," she added.

Well, it's not really a programmer draft, is it? It's just a unique response to a unique problem.

-- rocky (rknolls@hotmail.com), December 29, 1998.

Thank you, Sir. I'm speaking to the Rotarians next week, and many copies of this are going with me. My knees are knocking a little less now.

-- Lisa (lisab@shallcx.com), December 29, 1998.

Astounding that it didn't get any play in the US press. This needs to get distributed to the press right away. This means that if you are a programmer in Iowa in a local industry, you could find yourself in Washington working on HCFA. I also found the following interesting:

"We have concern about air transport around the world. We need to assure that air traffic control systems -- including our own in the United States -- will be ready. And as an aside, let me say that we have confidence that the Federal Aviation Administration will be ready on time and our deadline within our federal government is March 31, 1999, for full compliance."

I guess Janet doesn't know about the ATC regional mainframes being replaced. They aren't even physically onsite yet and the last time the FAA updated mainframes (360's -> 3083's in the early 1980's) it took 3 years!

-- RD. ->H (drherr@erols.com), December 29, 1998.

That transcript is fascinating. Good sleuthing, Tom.

-- Lewis (aslanshow@yahoo.com), December 29, 1998.

"So we are going to be calling upon these industry leaders to help provide part of their skilled work force to be available to help others in need"

A surprising revelation that is difficult to reconcile all the 'no problem, we'll be ready in time' statements we've been getting from government and industry.

Unfortunately this 1) assumes that someone is going to have skilled workers to spare, and 2) ignores Brooks' Law "assigning more programmers to a late software project makes it later" which has been amply discussed on this forum.

-- Ned (entaylor@cloudnet.com), December 29, 1998.

Other excerpts of interest...

We have moved pretty much out of that awareness raising phase for most sectors -- to let you know. We're now in a process of assessments. ...

... So that assessment process will go on all through 1999. The third part of activity that these working groups of our council are charged with is contingency planning and emergency response. And that means within their sector, whether it be transportation, air, rail, highways, sea, travel, or electric power, oil and gas, food supply, et cetera, it's their responsibility to work across their sector to take that assessment information that's been gathered and develop appropriate contingency plans and develop a mechanism for responding to emergencies which may develop. ...

... We will be compiling the assessments into major reports to come out each quarter. Our first report will be out by year end. ... It will summarize essentially what is known about the state of the United States as in Y2K preparedness. And then also, we'll include comments about how the international community is doing on Y2K. ...

... But we are also from a national level going to be building with all the key agencies of the federal government who generally have responsibility for responding to serious situations, like our Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Defense, and others.

We're working to develop an over-arching capacity to manage what could be a series -- a large series of mild to moderate disruptions in our country. ...

... Our real concern beyond the states is the readiness of cities and counties. And we have a major push underway to raise the awareness of those local officials. ...

... The National Association of Counties has just completed a survey - - one of these assessments that they've done -- in cooperation with our working on state and local government. And they found and published just last week that roughly 50 percent of county governments in our country -- and we have some 4,000 counties in the United States -- 50 percent do not have a comprehensive Y2K readiness plan. ...

... In addition to getting them to become Y2K compliant with their own systems, we need to get them prepared for the unique experience that we may all encounter in 12 months because this will not be business as usual in the emergency response world.

We may have a situation of lots of small disruptions across the country -- a small utility, a power plant out, a water purification plant out in another community.

These are situations that in usual times you might be able to call on the state or the federal government to help solve, but we are stressing to our local officials that they're going to have to take care of these problems on our own. ...

... And let me add to our priority for 1999 the prevention of public over-reaction -- public over-reaction to the Y2K problem.

We are working very hard across the Clinton administration and with our partners in industry and in state and local government to assure that adequate information about all the hard work that has gone into preparing our critical systems for the Year 2000 is made available to the public.

We will be doing a series of events to showcase the readiness efforts of our different sectors. You will be hearing different officials of the administration speaking out to the public in partnership with officials from our key industries, our infrastructure providers, to assure the public that all that can be done is being done on Y2K, that there will be almost certainly a number of disruptions. ...

... But again, I'll stress, we are telling the American people that there may be disruptions in their communities. But the organization is in place -- number one to prevent to the full extent possible -- any major disruption, and to respond to problems that may occur. ...

... One initiative I didn't mention was that John Koskinen is inviting very senior leaders of each of our key industry sectors to join a panel. We're calling it the Senior Advisors Group to the President's Council on Y2K. ...

... As I mentioned in my opening remarks, one of our priorities for the coming year is the prevention of public overreaction to the Y2K problem. And we believe this is real because it is rational, as you mentioned, for individuals to have a Y2K contingency plan, to have a certain amount of cash with them, to make sure they have a certain amount of food with them, et cetera.

But we know that if 150 million Americans go to the gas station on December 31, 1999, there is literally not enough gas in the pipelines here in this country to fill up all those cars, to fill up those tanks.

And then you know what happens, if people have to wait in long lines, then a measure of hysteria could ensue.

Let me say a few things, number one, our council is focused on. At yesterday's meeting -- our monthly meeting of our council -- with the senior officials from around the federal government was, in great part, dedicated to this discussion.

Secondly, let me say that the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington has publicly announced -- and they did this several weeks ago -- that they are printing $50,000 million to $75,000 million extra dollars to prepare. Because they understand people will want to have some more cash with them.

Let me say, as I mentioned earlier, we do have a strategy for putting information out in a responsible way on a consistent basis to the American people. We will be doing these quarterly reports. We will be doing selected events -- for example, to demonstrate that the Social Security system is compliant.

And as of this past week, that whole process is compliant. And that's critical to older Americans who live on their benefits checks. So we will be reaching out to particular communities through press events to communicate that information.

But let me comment also on a growing movement in our country -- I'm not sure if you've seen it yet in Italy -- and that is a movement of citizens coming together to do planning, to do local planning. They're calling it civic preparedness in their own communities.

And we see this as a very healthy movement, and we're very supportive of it. We're not, as you might imagine, very excited about giving lots of attention to those people who say they need to buy a gun and move to the hills and take their dried food with them and their generator and they'll live on their own and they'll be protected through the Year 2000. We're not too excited about that group.

But there are some very responsible Americans coming forward and saying that our communities have got to come together and -- number one -- put positive pressure on their local leaders to do the work they have to do to fix their system and develop their contingency plans over the coming months.

And number two, they want to make sure as a community that if there are a few days of difficult transition into the Year 2000 that, for example, you might store some extra food in a local school building. Or make sure that there is a building that has a generator where people could go to as a shelter.

So we are supportive of these efforts that are grass roots, that are growing from the grass roots. ...

... And every single one of them spoke about a need to have a consistent, calming but honest message to use in talking to their citizens.

And so I know this is a common problem held around the world, I think that the national coordinators -- the Y2K national coordinators who recently met at the United Nations will be discussing this as a group. And this will be an important item on their agenda as a group to work together to develop positive messages, honest messages, but calming messages that they and their political leaders can articulate.

A final point -- this is a long answer to your question. We really are dependent on the press, on the media to cover this story in a responsible way because it's very tempting to cover the dramatic aspects of the story. ...

... So we really need to look to those people who are journalists in the media, are commentators, to report this story in a balanced way so as not to generate unnecessary concern among the public. ...

Tom, This is pure gold!! Thank you. (Instead of a programmers draft it might be on a corporate sponsored volunteer basis)

Just e-mailing it to a few investigative reporters. And planning to revisit www.Y2K.gov and www.consumer.gov to re-view their Y2K information.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 29, 1998.

Tom,

Good find! A veritable treasure trove of information, as they might say. I'm thinking about sending this to my local newspaper.

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), December 29, 1998.

Actually I'm not the finder here. It arrived in a mailing list post from someone else, who said, "read between the lines." Once you do that, of course, it's clearly a very interesting document.

A few weeks ago I would have been concerned that this URL would not survive very long. But now I think a quiet policy is in place to run things like this up the pole in some out-of-the-way place and watch how the wind blows. Nobody wants to kick off a panic -- it would be to no one's advantage. (Even so -- I'm printing it out....)

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 29, 1998.

Tom,

RE: ABRAMS CITES INDUSTRY-GOVERNMENT Y2K COOPERATION

How did you get to this URL? When I backtrack on it, I hit some blank spots and I can't find a search engine on the United States Information Agency http://www.usia.gov/ site.

http://www.usia.gov/current/news/latest/98122301.glt.html?/products/ washfile

Great info but I'd feel better if there was an obvious path to it.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 29, 1998.

Good thinking. I tried backing into that URL too. Lots of blanks, but eventually http://www.usia.gov/ -- the home page -- turns up. I don't think anyone can spoof a .gov domain -- but who knows?

How to get to the Abrams transcript from the home page? I dunno. I'll ask the person who drew my attention to it, and let you know.

The second post on this thread reports my odd problem with MSIE3.0 and this URL. Could it be that much of this website is secured? Yet in other cases when I have inadvertently tried to access a secure site, I got a very pointed message that the site was not accessible. Not "can't find the specified file."

(P.S. -- is "spoof" the right word?)

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 29, 1998.

Interesting fact: the URL http://www.usia.gov/current/news/latest/98122301.glt.html?/products/washfile opens the same page as http://www.usia.gov/current/news/latest/98122301.glt.html?/products/

Any webmeisters care to talk about that?

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 29, 1998.

Keep trying Tom.

I'm trying to find "something" through http://www.info.gov/cgi-bin/ search_gov and testing the intracacies (sp) of their esoteric advanced search techniques.

Worst case, I have Janet Abrams e-mail address.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 29, 1998.

BTW, I could not "get" to the document from the United States Information Agency http://www.usia.gov/ web-site. We may have a false or "planted" document here.

Ideas anyone?

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 29, 1998.

Interesting Y2K & International policies speach by John Koskinen on the USIA web-site http://www.usia.gov. Its easily findable off of the Year 2000 Conversion hotlink and mentions they ARE doing videoconferencing. Janet Abrams talk is probably real. -- Diane

USIA Chairs International Diplomacy Working Group in President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion

(Statement of John Koskinen, Assistant to the President and Chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, including mention of USIA's leadership role. August 1998)

http://www.usia.gov/usiahome/y2k.htm#role

... In support of our international efforts, we are using the USIA's ability to do video conferencing in at least 40 countries around the world. We did a video conference a couple of weeks ago with Russian participants in the American Embassy. I was here and they were there. We had Pravda and a whole series of other press representatives as well as some government representatives. We spent about an hour talking about what we are doing. ... We expect, under the auspices of the USIA, to do additional teleconferences with countries around the world. ...

...At this stage, though, one of the fascinating parts of this problem [Y2K] is that it is impossible to predict what the world is going to look like at the end of next year because it is actually almost impossible to know where everybody is on the problem today.

All we know is which organizations are focused on this problem and working on it. The biggest problems are still being worked on. We are still completing the remediation. Most solutions are still in the testing phase, so if you ask a major bank or a major insurance company or a major industrial company if their work is finished yet, the answer they will give you is no.

Most of them have plans in which they will complete solutions between December and March. That is why I said we will have much harder data in early 1999 about where people actually are internally and externally. Until then, I think it is impossible to make an accurate estimate as to what the impact is going to be.

All you can say is that there are great risks that if we don't continue to spend the necessary time and resources on this problem, there is a potential for the impact to be fairly substantial. The difference between my perspective and some more alarmist predictions that there will certainly be major disruptions is that I don't think you can assume the worst yet. I think it is possible there will be major disruptions, but we have got a lot of work to do before we will know that will be the case.

This is why we have placed such importance on contingency plans. We have instructed every federal agency that they have to have two kinds of contingency plans that they are now working on. ... The first level responds to possible failure of their own systems. ... The second level of contingency plans addresses the failure of outside systems. ...

... I have told the agencies and industry groups that we have a lot of experience in dealing with localized failures caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. We know what to do when you can't get into an area, where you can't use a telephone, where the power is out. We know how to respond to that kind of situation.

The real question is what happens if you have multiple problems in several areas at the same time. If you have power blackouts in one area, transportation failures in another, problems with the emergency response circuits and operations in yet another. We need to deal with that.

... my hope is as we move through the end of this year into the first quarter of next year, we will have more and more hard information about where the risks are and are not. Right now, the possibilities are infinite because of how much needs to be done and the uncertainty about whether they will finish in time.

By the end of the year, with a little luck, I will be able to move through those 35 sectors and say where we are in really good shape. Where we aren't in good shape, we must decide where we think the greatest chances for risks are and design contingency plans accordingly. I am working, in that regard, with the National Security Council and with the Defense Department as well as others, the Emergency Management Agency, to begin to pull together the overall framework in which we will look at the deployment of national government resources. ...

... power is the most critical part of the infrastructure. If you don't have power, you can have all the other systems ready to run and still nothing works. We are particularly looking at the interface between the United States and Canada because we depend on, and interchange a lot of power and information back and forth. We must make sure that we've done everything we can to ensure that our power grids are up and running, that our oil and gas industries function. I think that ought to be a high priority in every country. ...

-- John Koskinen

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 29, 1998.

Diane, good sleuthing, here and your TV tracking on other threads, and always on your reporting. Thanks! Hear little echoes of martial law & "reallocation" in Koskinen's remarks. Will we be bored the next 18 months? Nope ;-O

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx

-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), December 29, 1998.

Both the Abrams transcript and the Koskinen statement seem much more outspoken than what we've been given so far via the media. It seems odd that no one's paying attention -- these are public communications by those in charge of a critical program.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 29, 1998.

The Abrams transcript is referenced twice on Gary North's site, under Government. See http://www.garynorth.com/y2k/detail_.cfm/3417 and http://www.garynorth.com/y2k/detail_.cfm/3420

As usual North's commentary demonstrates that he sees only what his Ragnarok-tinted glasses allow.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 30, 1998.

Just a quick note .. I got home late this evening and all links referenced in this thread .. as well as the ones on GN's site linking to the preceding documentation .. are now dead. Don't know if this is a temporary or permanent change .. but as of 06:23 GMT on Dec 30, 1998, the link files are there -- no "404" (File Not Found error) .. just empty files. Life of the links: < 24 hours. Hmmmm.

Time will tell....

-- Dan (DanTCC@Yahoo.com), December 30, 1998.

GOD! I hate revisionist hiustorians!! The links are ALL just blank screens!! Glad I printed off the Abrams one when y'all found it!

Anybody got the Koskinen one on disk???

cr

-- Chuck a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), December 30, 1998.

OK guys it's probably my fault. Last night I sent the following e-mail to

MAGGIE WESTMORELAND, DEPUTY DIRECTOR Room 567 Direct tel: 202-205-9940 mwestmor@usia.gov

Ms. Westmoreland--

The following URL appears to be part of the www.usia.gov web site:

http://www.usia.gov/current/news/latest/98122301.glt.html?/products/washfile

It is headed:

23 December 1998 TRANSCRIPT: ABRAMS CITES INDUSTRY-GOVERNMENT Y2K COOPERATION

and purports to be a transcript of a video conference dated 17 December 1998 in which the principal guest is identified as JANET ABRAMS,EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON YEAR 2000 CONVERSION.

Can you verify that this document is genuine?

I ask this for the following reasons:

1) Backing successively through the URL elicits only blank screens until the USIA home page, www.usia.gov/ is reached. 2) I was unable to find any link to this URL on the pages accessible from the USIA home page.

3) Microsoft IE 3.0 responds to a call for this URL by beginning a file download, then in a few seconds reporting that it is unable to find the file specified; whereas Netscape 3.0 responds normally, opening the web page as a conventional HTML file. I understand that access to some web pages may be restricted, but normally this is clearly stated whenever unauthorized access is attempted.

I would appreciate any clarification you can provide.

Thnaking you in advance,

Respectfully,

Thomas E. Carey

I sent that message at 23:39 Dec 29, or 04:39 GMT Dec. 30. At 06:23 GMT Dec 30 Dan found the links blank.

This gives new meaning to the phrase "United States Information Agency." But we know at least that our public servants are alert.

I have both the Abrams transcript and the Koskinen statement printed out, but I didn't save them to disk. I don't have a scanner so have no way of reposting them here. This has been a learning experience. Perhaps not only for me.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 30, 1998.

Live & learn. The Koskinen statement is still available at http://www.usia.gov/usiahome/y2k.htm#role

At least just now: 10:39 EST Dec 30 = 15:39 GMT

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 30, 1998.

This IS really odd. The transcript of the video conference by Janet Abrams is only a white screen, and, this isn't the first time I've noticed this.

Koskinen gave a speech to some Asian government representitives a couple of months ago, and that link quickly became a white screen too. It was a juicy transcript, because he described all the sectors of the economy that would be hit by one-year lookahead problems in January 1999.

That Asian transcript by Koskinen WAS at this link:

http://www.usia.gov/current/news/latest/98102701.elt.html?/products/wa shfile

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), December 30, 1998.

Tom,

Im rapidly coming to the conclusion that your video conference transcript link was coming from the dark side of the USIA web-site. (United States Information Agency http://www.usia.gov/).

Some hidden Ali Baba, inside Alladins cave is helping leak the video conference from Italy information, probably with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Y2K government types. Just so the complete transcript doesnt disappear into Washingtons black hole, Ill slap the full-text below this message.

For those whod like some play time theres a portion of the site where you can search for USIA Declassified Historical Information at: http://www.usia.gov/plweb-cgi/fastweb?searchform+view3

Or with keywords at: http://www.usia.gov/plweb-cgi/fastweb?searchform+ view3#keywords

Tom, I know you and I, are both working at seeing if we can get access to the other video conference transcripts, through the USIA, Janet Abram and John Koskinens Presidents Council on Year 2000 Conversion Group at http://www.y2k.gov/java/index.htm. They should be accessable under the freedom of information act policies.

Ciao, Diane

23 December 1998

TRANSCRIPT: ABRAMS CITES INDUSTRY-GOVERNMENT Y2K COOPERATION

(Industry to help other groups become Y2K ready) (7200)

Washington -- A U.S. official says senior people in government are working closely with private industry to develop contingency plans to deal with the Year 2000 (Y2K) computer problem and find ways to respond to emergencies that may occur.

Janet Abrams, executive director of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, told a USIA digital video conference December 17 that the council's 25 working groups -- made up of senior federal officials -- are in the process of assessing the Y2K readiness of key industrial sectors such as air, rail, electric power, oil and gas, and food supply.

Many believe that when the clocks roll over to the year 2000 there will be profound problems with the nation's high-technology infrastructure, with many systems failing due to errors in such things as software or embedded circuits.

Abrams said the assessment process represents a rare occurrence where industry and government people are working together to develop appropriate contingency plans and emergency response procedures.

She said that after the assessments and contingency plans are developed over the next few months, an effort "unprecedented in scope" will begin to look at the whole United States to find out what companies or organizations are at highest risk.

"We are really asking industry to do something that I don't know if the government has ever asked them to do, which is to work with us to identify people within their industries who have very important skills that could be brought to bear at other organizations who are in trouble, or at other states, or potentially in other countries," Abrams said.

"So we are going to be calling upon these industry leaders to help provide part of their skilled work force to be available to help others in need," she added.

Abrams also said chief executive officers of major corporations representing the key industry sectors will be part of a panel that will organize mitigation teams to help critical organizations, companies and service providers become Y2K ready.

She said the industry Y2K effort is made possible largely by bipartisan legislation passed last October that provides liability protection to those who share information on how to fix a Y2K problem or describe experiences they have had working on Y2K problems.

She said another major concern is the Y2K readiness of cities and local governments. "We have a major push underway to raise the awareness of local officials," she said.

(Following is the transcript of Abrams remarks)

(begin transcript)

UNITED STATES INFORMATION AGENCY

YEAR 2000 (Y2K) COMPUTER PROBLEM

DIGITAL VIDEO CONFERENCE

DECEMBER 17, 1998

PRINCIPAL GUEST: JANET ABRAMS,EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON YEAR 2000 CONVERSION

MS. ABRAMS: We're here in Washington on a gray, rainy day. And let me explain first of all, my position. I am the Executive Director of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion. I serve as the deputy to John Koskinen, who is the chair of the council. And he is an assistant to the President.

President Clinton -- for your background, President Clinton established the Council on Year 2000 Conversion in February of this year, 1998. The council is made up of approximately 40 senior federal government officials. It's an inter-agency government panel. And we meet monthly. Yesterday we just had our eighth meeting -- our December meeting. The council began meeting in April.

We are divided into some 25 working groups. And each of the working groups focuses on a particular area of concern -- electric power, oil and gas, state and local government -- outreach to those entities, Native American governments, et cetera -- transportation, food supply, I could go on and on.

These working groups have each formed relationships with the key umbrella organizations in the private sector, or in state and local government, if that is what's relevant, to be their partners.

And what the working groups are doing, just to give you a sense of our process, is they have been going through what is a series of activities. First, the awareness raising. Making sure that folks in organizations in that sector are aware of the full range of challenges that the Y2K presents and that they're acting on those challenges.

We have moved pretty much out of that awareness raising phase for most sectors -- to let you know. We're now in a process of assessments.

Good morning. I'm seeing a friend here, across the room.

We're now in a process of conducting assessments with -- each working group is doing that with their umbrella organization partners. And they're assessing readiness within their sectors. And most of them are doing this by preparing surveys and gathering data, putting that data into information which they then -- the umbrella organization, as opposed to the government, release to the public.

So that assessment process will go on all through 1999. The third part of activity that these working groups of our council are charged with is contingency planning and emergency response. And that means within their sector, whether it be transportation, air, rail, highways, sea, travel, or electric power, oil and gas, food supply, et cetera, it's their responsibility to work across their sector to take that assessment information that's been gathered and develop appropriate contingency plans and develop a mechanism for responding to emergencies which may develop.

I don't want to take up too much time with opening remarks because I know people have questions. But I wanted to tell you a few things about where we're headed -- what the priorities are for John Koskinen, the chair of our council, over the coming 379 days -- but who's counting?

We are going to -- as I mentioned -- focus on gathering these assessments, having each of the working groups do that. We will be compiling the assessments into major reports to come out each quarter. Our first report will be out by year end.

It will summarize essentially what is known about the state of the United States as in Y2K preparedness. And then also, we'll include comments about how the international community is doing on Y2K. So assessments are very important to us a priority.

Second, as a priority is developing an over-arching contingency planning and emergency response mechanism, we are asking each of our working groups to take on this responsibility.

But we are also from a national level going to be building with all the key agencies of the federal government who generally have responsibility for responding to serious situations, like our Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Defense, and others.

We're working to develop an over-arching capacity to manage what could be a series -- a large series of mild to moderate disruptions in our country.

Another priority we have is continuing to promote the sharing of technical information on Y2K. This has been a terrific priority of Mr. Koskinen over the past year. Because when we first came into this, John and I, it was clear when we talked to members of industry across our country that people weren't talking about Y2K.

Their lawyers were all telling them, don't say a word about Y2K because it may -- you may make yourself even more liable to the lawsuits that everybody is afraid of.

This past year, John Koskinen was able -- with the support from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress -- to get passed a narrow piece of legislation to protect from liability those who share in good faith information about Year 2000 fixes, how to fix particular problems, their experience on working on Y2K, and also their own readiness as an organization.

That legislation was signed into law by President Clinton on October 19th of this year. But a priority for us looking over 1999 is to make sure that individual companies and industry organizations and other national groups and international groups understand how important it is to release this information and share it freely, ideally as the form of databases on Web sites because it is so important for companies in this country or organizations around the world who are getting a late start for that information to be available to them.

A couple of other priorities over the coming year are certainly our concern about the readiness of state and local government in our country.

We work very closely with all 50 states. We've had a summit here in Washington with Y2K experts from the states. We had 45 of the 50 states here in July. We will be repeating that in the coming months here in Washington.

We work in close collaboration with the National Governor's Association and other associations of state officials.

We feel that a good number of the states are in great shape and working in a very focused way in Y2K. We have a number, unfortunately, who are not as far along as we would like.

Our real concern beyond the states is the readiness of cities and counties. And we have a major push underway to raise the awareness of those local officials.

The National Association of Counties has just completed a survey -- one of these assessments that they've done -- in cooperation with our working on state and local government. And they found and published just last week that roughly 50 percent of county governments in our country -- and we have some 4,000 counties in the United States -- 50 percent do not have a comprehensive Y2K readiness plan.

And this is of real concern to us. We are actually happy that the news came out because the more information out there, the more alert people are going to become. And actual citizens may pick up the phone and call their county official or their mayor and say, gee, what have you done on Y2K?

So we're working there. The vice president of the United States, Al Gore, recently -- two weeks ago, spoke to the National League of Cities, the large association of mayors across the country and spoke to them about the importance of Y2K.

Also, we are working through our Federal Emergency Management Agency to reach down to state emergency management officials and local emergency management officials to get them prepared.

In addition to getting them to become Y2K compliant with their own systems, we need to get them prepared for the unique experience that we may all encounter in 12 months because this will not be business as usual in the emergency response world.

We may have a situation of lots of small disruptions across the country -- a small utility, a power plant out, a water purification plant out in another community.

These are situations that in usual times you might be able to call on the state or the federal government to help solve, but we are stressing to our local officials that they're going to have to take care of these problems on our own.

So our priority there that I was mentioning was local government officials. I would also add to our list of major concerns, that is the readiness overall of the international community.

Some of you may know what we just held at the United Nations in New York last week a meeting -- the first ever meeting of all national Y2K coordinators of members nations of the United Nations.

We had over 120 countries represented. The nation of Italy was represented well there. We met for a full day on Friday. The event was hosted by Ambassador Ahmad Kamal (phonetic) of Pakistan who chairs the United Nations working group on information systems -- on informatix, as they call it.

And John Koskinen of the United States with several other national Y2K coordinators from all key regions -- including Europe -- around the world served as the organizing committee for the event.

We anticipate and we're working very hard to assure that there will be concrete follow-up to that meeting in which Italy and all your neighbors will participate.

We hope to build a small secretariat to support the ongoing activities of the body of global national Y2K coordinators.

We are very concerned about, certainly telecommunications around the world, feeling fairly -- we feel fairly confident about the readiness of the financial sector around the world because of the strong efforts of the joint Year 2000 Council and the Global 2000 Coordinating Group.

That first group being that association of central bankers from around the world. The second group being a group that's been created by the private sector financial institutions.

We have concern about air transport around the world. We need to assure that air traffic control systems -- including our own in the United States -- will be ready.

And as an aside, let me say that we have confidence that the Federal Aviation Administration will be ready on time and our deadline within our federal government is March 31, 1999, for full compliance.

So we're concerned about air travel around the world -- very concerned about shipping. About the operation of shipping and ports around the world, about the transport of oil and other critical resources around the world.

So that is -- certainly, international preparedness is a priority. And let me add to our priority for 1999 the prevention of public over- reaction -- public over-reaction to the Y2K problem.

We are working very hard across the Clinton administration and with our partners in industry and in state and local government to assure that adequate information about all the hard work that has gone into preparing our critical systems for the Year 2000 is made available to the public.

We will be doing a series of events to showcase the readiness efforts of our different sectors. You will be hearing different officials of the administration speaking out to the public in partnership with officials from our key industries, our infrastructure providers, to assure the public that all that can be done is being done on Y2K, that there will be almost certainly a number of disruptions.

We do not envision major massive disruptions, but we want to be honest with the public. Mr. Koskinen's philosophy is the public should know all that he knows. And that's why we are publishing these quarterly reports that -- our first, One Year Out report, as I mentioned, will be issued to the pubic in a week or two by year end.

And we will continue to report quarterly through a document and then regularly, week to week, through meetings with journalists and events that we create to show the public what is happening.

But again, I'll stress, we are telling the American people that there may be disruptions in their communities. But the organization is in place -- number one to prevent to the full extent possible -- any major disruption, and to respond to problems that may occur.

We are going to launch by year end a toll free hot line for our citizens that they can call for answers to questions they may have about Y2K, such as -- will I get trapped in an elevator? Should I fly on an airplane? Is it safe? What do I do about my bank account? Will I be able to use my credit card, my ATM card? -- those sort of questions.

So that sums up our priorities moving forward. Of course, I didn't speak much about what we're doing to assure that our federal government systems are prepared, but that is certainly a priority of our President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion.

Again, I'll state our deadline in the federal government is March 31, 1999. We are confident that for most critical systems, the vast majority, we will meet that deadline. Right now, according to the most recent reports submitted by all the agencies to the Office of Management and Budget, we have completed approximately 90 percent of all renovation on critical systems. And we are at about 60 percent full compliance for all our systems.

Let me end there and I would be delighted to answer any questions you may have.

QUESTION: Begging pardon for my English. I don't -- to speak in Italian. And -- we're talking about the Y2K problem. And as we've seen this is a transnational problem, issue. There are countries that aren't as prepared as others. And I am sure that we aren't as prepared as you are.

However, there are developing countries that could represent a very serious problem, even more serious that ours and us. So first of all, how can we help them? In their interest, as well as our interest?

And is it possible as some people say it is that there are systems that won't be ready for the Year 2000? And if they come into contact with a system that has been converted for the Year 2000 then this might lead to some technical failures in the problem -- in the systems that have already been converted? Is that true? Can that happen?

And what kind of damage can this possibly engender? Thank you very much for your attention.

MS. ABRAMS: Sure, let me answer your second question first, if I may. Yes, it is true because we are so inter-connected that if one system is fully compliant and tested as compliant and it relates to another system that is not compliant, problems can occur.

I need to qualify that I'm not a technical expert, and so it's difficult for me to explain exactly how that happens. But we are very concerned. All the companies that are working on this problem explain their focus is certainly on the internal systems of a company first and foremost.

But then each company must rigorously test all of their interfaces with their partners in the business world. You need to test all these interfaces because -- for example, our Social Security system which writes -- which issues benefits payments to millions of American citizens, it could be ready, but it only can deliver a service if another agency, our Treasury Department, the Financial Management Service is also compliant.

And then it must -- that FMS, must then relate to all the banks that accept either the checks or the electronic distributions of funds. And so each link in that chain is very critical.

Back to your first question about developing countries -- it's a very important question. And it was discussed at our meeting at the United Nations. A few things -- number one, the World Bank has a program called Information for Development -- INFODEV -- I-N-F-O-D-E-V.

And they had created an initiative on Y2K and are accepting contributions from countries. The United Kingdom has made a significant contribution and the United States has made a significant contribution.

And INFODEV is working in developing countries providing grants to national coordinating offices to begin their work or push their work forward in their countries. And that has been very successful to date. But the money they have is limited and other countries are encouraged to contribute.

We at the United Nations over lunch met in regional groups. All the national coordinators from each region got together. And it was decided within these regional lunches that the wealthier countries in those regions would reach out to all the other countries in their region and lend a helping hand, and that means -- let me just state also that Y2K, we find, is not just a problem of money.

We've received very few calls in the United States for people concerned they don't have the money to solve this problem.

The problem is one of understanding what the problem is for your particular organization, assessing it fully, and having the people on staff -- or being able to bring them in -- who are technically capable of doing work that needs to be done.

And most critically, it's a problem of information. As I mentioned before, many of the countries who are late in starting their work on Y2K, or who have proceeded slowly will benefit greatly from the sharing of information by countries like the United States and Italy on how we have solved problems so these countries with fewer resources than ours will not have to reinvent the wheel.

QUESTION: Good afternoon.

MS. ABRAMS: Hello.

QUESTION: I would like to address a question. According to the Gardner Group (phonetic) a Year 2000 project on the average lost 18 months just to fix problems in -- critical systems.

MS. ABRAMS: Yes.

QUESTION: I heard before that in the States, you are satisfied that the assessment phase has been completed. So that means that '99 -- 1990 should be devoted to the implementation -- to the renovation, to the validation, to the implementation. It is a very short period.

So do you agree that it is necessary to plan 18 months to complete a project?

MS. ABRAMS: Again, let me stress, unfortunately I'm not a technical expert. So I would defer to the Gardner Group because they are expert in this whole area and have become leaders in working in this area, that 18 months sounds right.

But also the 18 months varies. That time period varies based on how large an organization you have and how complex your problems are. But if I can clarify for the U.S. government federal systems -- our critical systems -- we have completed over 90 percent of our renovation work. So we are way beyond the assessments.

And we actually -- according to the most recent Office of Management and Budget Report -- have completed over 60 percent of all the projects. So 60 percent of our critical systems are completely done and tested. Thank you.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) an economical way to help -- or maybe -- I know you told them of the problem -- the economical problem and maybe it will be one -- and do you have any plan to help or without that -- but taxation or whatever it is to help the companies -- or even software houses that are now -- or that are now going to reach the --

MS. ABRAMS: Could you restate that question? Do we have plans to help software companies?

QUESTION: Software companies or private companies in what concern the economical effort they have to face to reach the Y2K compliance? In a certain time? You know, just --

MS. ABRAMS: A couple things. One is there are loans available to small businesses in our country through our Small Business Administration for companies that are rushing to get ready for Y2K to help in purchasing the equipment or the services needed to prepare their systems.

As for helping high-tech companies -- the software companies do their work, we actually don't have plans for that and have assumed that the marketplace would do the trick there.

I don't know if I've answered your question, though. I'm sorry, if you want to restate it.

QUESTION: I just want to know if there is some plan -- in helping the companies to reach that point? For example, the software houses?

MS. ABRAMS: No, we've actually assumed that in this country -- and we haven't heard that there's a real need in this area -- we've assumed that the free marketplace would work that out.

QUESTION: Just another question.

MS. ABRAMS: Yes.

QUESTION: In which way you plan to -- the urgency -- you can have the 1st of January or whatever from USA from the world -- from problems you face only at the beginning of the Year 2000? You have to learn something like a test for us, for helping in problems like that? Or something like -- special need -- special things for that?

You know at the moment in which you will already will have a problem, that's from the 1st of January, the Year 2000, do you have any plan to set up a task force? Or something to help with that problem at that moment?

MS. ABRAMS: You mean to help other countries? Is that your question?

QUESTION: No, no, inside the U.S.

MS. ABRAMS: Inside the U.S., well, let me --

QUESTION: Someone that can have a problem at that moment.

MS. ABRAMS: Yes, that's a great question. As I mentioned, over the course of the next few months, we will begin pulling in the assessments from the working groups and developing contingency plans within sectors and then our hope really -- and this is unprecedented in scope -- is to develop -- is to look at the whole United States and get -- and have a sense of what our highest risk areas are and work with industry to do that.

And then also work with industry and state and local officials to develop these task forces you're talking about to respond if failures occur.

One initiative I didn't mention was that John Koskinen is inviting very senior leaders of each of our key industry sectors to join a panel. We're calling it the Senior Advisors Group to the President's Council on Y2K.

And we will have chief executive officers of major corporations representing each of the key industries on a panel. They will meet every six to eight weeks. And one of their responsibilities with our council will be to consider how best to pull together teams that can go out and do mitigation work if we find out there's an absolutely critical resource or entity, a company, a service provider that has to be ready, and we find out they're not ready. Maybe in advance of 2000, they'll go out.

It would be a combination of industry people and government people. Or certainly after January 1st -- or beginning on January 1st, we are really asking industry to do something that I don't know if the government has ever asked them to do, which is to work with us to identify people within their industries who have very important skills that could be brought to bear at other organizations who are in trouble, or at other states, or potentially even in other countries.

So we are going to be calling upon these industry leaders to help provide part of their skilled work force to be available to help others in need.

QUESTION: To gather all the global knowledge of the companies themselves to help other companies to face the problems? In each company, you will find out if there is a very high expert to help other companies to reach that compliance? Or to go to that level?

MS. ABRAMS: Yes, this is -- yes, and you're expanding what I'm talking about to the international scene. It's a very good idea.

Out of this United Nations meeting, it was decided that a group -- that any of the national coordinators who are highly motivated are welcome to join a steering committee, if you will, for follow-on activity.

And so far in that group, we have the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, Chile, and Canada. And this group is open to any other nation who wants to join.

But one of the critical issues they'll need to face is exactly what you're raising, is should they pull together a group that would be able to help countries as major problems arise.

QUESTION: My English is not very good --

MS. ABRAMS: My Italian is worse than your English.

QUESTION: I have two questions for you. My first question is this: in the United States -- and if I understood you correctly -- the state of advancement of the conversion or compliance for the Year 2000 is quite good, is quite strong -- so do you think in the final stage of the conversion that there will be any problems with regard to the availability of people, of human resources, of technical experts -- people, in other words, who will be able to help others who won't be dealing with this problem until the very last minute?

And my second question is this: we have to -- acknowledge the fact that at the end of a millennium there's always a problem. We had it after the end of the first century -- or millennium rather in Europe, and we'll have another problem in this millennium.

Now, the first time it was a psychological problem, it wasn't a concrete issue. However, do you think that even for the Year 2000, we won't only have a psychological problem?

And let me tell you what I mean. The measures taken by governments are solution oriented. In other words, they're trying to solve the supply of public services, energy, telecommunications, transportation, financial services, et cetera.

Now, I think that all the players -- and I hope -- anyway, that all the players will by Y2K compliant at the end of 1999. And probably we won't have any major disruptions.

But what could happen is that -- not on the supply side but on the demand side for services, in other words in the civil sector amongst the people, perhaps we could have this psychological fear -- this fear over the Y2K problem. And this could perhaps lead to some unpredictable outcomes, i.e., panic and other situations in which every head of a family has his own contingency plan.

He'll go shopping at the supermarket. And he'll do something about his stock -- now, he'll go to the bank, et cetera. So what is being done for the people?

I realize how important information is. It has to be disseminated, obviously, as you said. But what are you doing in order to dose the information, to provide it gradually?

They need to know. But I think in some cases it's better not to know. So that's my question, what are you doing in that regard?

MS. ABRAMS: Thank you. Thank you. Let me answer your first question about availability of skilled workers. Can you hear? I'm going to answer your first questions about the availability of skilled work force.

We early on in April established a working group of our council here in the United States to focus on the Y2K work force because we were very concerned. We had the same question you raised: would we run out of people?

As the awareness level goes up, you know, does the availability of skilled to handle the problem decrease?

And what we found up to this point is that has not been a problem for the federal government. It has not been the problem that we anticipated. And we have not heard about it yet from our private sector, or from our states and localities.

The problem we addressed in a number of ways. I'm not sure how you're working on it in Italy. But we increased salaries for key federal government employees.

We were lenient about -- let me say we bent some rules to bring back retired federal employees who had great knowledge of the old computer systems that we're working to make sure they're Y2K compliant.

And so we built in some incentives to keep on the people that we knew were critical. And we've heard a variety of things from the major consulting firms that do Y2K work. We've heard from some -- and it was written up in The Wall Street Journal that they don't want to take on more Y2K work because there's great legal liability, they claim. And also because it's not exciting to them. That's what some have claimed.

But in truth, we have not heard from all the hundreds of companies that we interact that there is a work force shortage.

Now, again, after our United Nations meeting and after you hear a number of more world leaders speaking about Y2K to raise awareness in areas of the world where awareness has been very low, we may encounter some shortages. And we'll have to deal with that when we have that information.

Let me comment on your second question which is certainly much broader and very serious.

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, one of our priorities for the coming year is the prevention of public overreaction to the Y2K problem. And we believe this is real because it is rational, as you mentioned, for individuals to have a Y2K contingency plan, to have a certain amount of cash with them, to make sure they have a certain amount of food with them, et cetera.

But we know that if 150 million Americans go to the gas station on December 31, 1999, there is literally not enough gas in the pipelines here in this country to fill up all those cars, to fill up those tanks.

And then you know what happens, if people have to wait in long lines, then a measure of hysteria could ensue.

Let me say a few things, number one, our council is focused on. At yesterday's meeting -- our monthly meeting of our council -- with the senior officials from around the federal government was, in great part, dedicated to this discussion.

Secondly, let me say that the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington has publicly announced -- and they did this several weeks ago -- that they are printing $50,000 million to $75,000 million extra dollars to prepare. Because they understand people will want to have some more cash with them.

Let me say, as I mentioned earlier, we do have a strategy for putting information out in a responsible way on a consistent basis to the American people. We will be doing these quarterly reports. We will be doing selected events -- for example, to demonstrate that the Social Security system is compliant.

And as of this past week, that whole process is compliant. And that's critical to older Americans who live on their benefits checks. So we will be reaching out to particular communities through press events to communicate that information.

But let me comment also on a growing movement in our country -- I'm not sure if you've seen it yet in Italy -- and that is a movement of citizens coming together to do planning, to do local planning. They're calling it civic preparedness in their own communities.

And we see this as a very healthy movement, and we're very supportive of it. We're not, as you might imagine, very excited about giving lots of attention to those people who say they need to buy a gun and move to the hills and take their dried food with them and their generator and they'll live on their own and they'll be protected through the Year 2000. We're not too excited about that group.

But there are some very responsible Americans coming forward and saying that our communities have got to come together and -- number one -- put positive pressure on their local leaders to do the work they have to do to fix their system and develop their contingency plans over the coming months.

And number two, they want to make sure as a community that if there are a few days of difficult transition into the Year 2000 that, for example, you might store some extra food in a local school building. Or make sure that there is a building that has a generator where people could go to as a shelter.

So we are supportive of these efforts that are grass roots, that are growing from the grass roots.

Let me speak, though, about the international community because this is certainly a problem we all share.

Yesterday I was in Ottawa, Canada, meeting with the federal, provincial, and local officials all dedicated to Y2K for the nation of Canada.

And there were representatives of 10 provinces there and each gave a report on their preparedness. And every single one of them spoke about a need to have a consistent, calming but honest message to use in talking to their citizens.

And so I know this is a common problem held around the world, I think that the national coordinators -- the Y2K national coordinators who recently met at the United Nations will be discussing this as a group. And this will be an important item on their agenda as a group to work together to develop positive messages, honest messages, but calming messages that they and their political leaders can articulate.

A final point -- this is a long answer to your question. We really are dependent on the press, on the media to cover this story in a responsible way because it's very tempting to cover the dramatic aspects of the story.

And speaking of drama, we know there's a major Hollywood movie -- at least one of them -- that will come out in 1999 to focus on, you know, a potential disaster that might occur on January 1, 2000. And I'm sure you'll be seeing the movie there in Italy, or producing your own movies on Y2K in Italy.

So we really need to look to those people who are journalists in the media, are commentators, to report this story in a balanced way so as not to generate unnecessary concern among the public. Thank you.

QUESTION: Hi.

MS. ABRAMS: Hi.

QUESTION: What I really perceive of the conference is that we have addresses on the Internet, so everybody can go -- if I understood correctly -- and see suggestions so they can know where to go?

MS. ABRAMS: Yes.

QUESTION: And look for problems and so on?

MS. ABRAMS: Yes.

QUESTION: And another aspect I think which is quite good is giving practical examples. I've noticed from your speech and from your communication that we've received that they're giving many examples. They're talking about the elevators?

MS. ABRAMS: Yes.

QUESTION: I never thought about elevators in my case anyway.

MS. ABRAMS: Oh, you better watch out.

(Laughter.)

QUESTION: And planes, airplanes, and probably on the 1st of March.

MS. ABRAMS: Right.

QUESTION: I don't know it's good traveling. But if you want, I can say the objective of the conference has been really reached. Now I am coming to my question.

MS. ABRAMS: Yes.

QUESTION: Which is Year 2000-related, but is after Year 2000. Are we seeing a huge investment -- a lot of people are talking about hiring a lot of people, young people and making them a little bit of --

MS. ABRAMS: Right.

QUESTION: -- on programming computers. And now they're all working -- software companies, consulting companies are hiring people. Now, the Year 2000 is over, the Year 2001 --

MS. ABRAMS: What happens?

QUESTION: What are they going -- these people in the world?

MS. ABRAMS: Right, what happens to these people? That's a very good question and one that we need to pay attention to.

But again, you know, we have this Y2K work force issues working group on our council. It is chaired by the deputy secretary of labor for the U.S.

And what we have found in talking to major employers -- the companies that are providers of Y2K remediation services and project management services is they do not believe that they will have to be letting all these people go.

And they actually believe they are going to be able to incorporate these new folks -- the new employees -- into other types of work as you move beyond dealing with the Y2K problem.

Another thing that we found interestingly is that many of the major corporations -- and certainly with our federal agencies, we're using people who are internal. They're employees of our for many years and they've been asked to do Y2K but --

(END OF TAPE ONE)

MS. ABRAMS: -- delighted to hear it, if you have experience in Italy that really kind of rejects what our understanding that this is not going to be a major problem.

I want to reiterate our -- you may have already heard about our Web site. You mentioned Web sites. But I hope everybody will look at www.Y2K.gov. It's a little advertisement.

And if you're interested in information to use with consumers, you might check -- you can get to it through our site -- but you can also go to www.consumer.gov -- c-o-n-s-u-m-e-r -- and we have a special area for Y2K information.

And it is linked to many different corporations across this country and international corporations. So a lot of the information we did not develop. We just link to their sites. Other questions?

QUESTION: (Technical difficulties) -- so during all press conferences I asked all businesses -- industries, et cetera if they had the problem -- I put the same question in London two years ago during the press conference at the Inter London Future Exchange and other -- the stock markets -- and the answer was -- was really -- and someone even dared to say that -- it might have been a huge advertising campaign being carried out by big computer producers to convince people not to make their computer compliant with Y2K but rather to change their whole computer system.

Now, I'm getting to my question. I have two questions, rather. Do you foresee any problem from a military point of view? For example, if last night had been in -- the Year 2000, would there have been any problems for attacking Baghdad? And in terms of defense, of course, on the part of Saddam Hussein?

My second question, the solutions which I presume have been found at a very high governmental level in the States, what kind of solutions -- are they long- term solutions?

I'm very worried because now they -- we may be able to save hundreds and maybe thousands of years -- what is going to happen in the Year 2000 or 3000? Will there be the same problem? What do you think being at the top of the world?

MODERATOR: This is Rome, very briefly, we note that we only have about two minutes left. So we would like to, of course, let you answer this last question. But to say thank you very much and we're very sorry that we're going to have to end. Thank you.

MS. ABRAMS: Okay, thank you. Thank you, so much to everyone. And let me answer the kind gentleman's excellent questions. And now I'm hearing the Italian.

The military question is an excellent one. And let me say that the U.S. will be prepared by 1999 to assure our national security and to pursue or national security interests. We don't know what Saddam Hussein has done on Y2K. So I can't comment as to whether he would be any more or less prepared for such an event is occurring now.

But it's an excellent question, and it's something that is -- the Y2K is at the top of the list for the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have been charged by Secretary of Defense Cohen to look at solving Y2K -- battling the Y2K bug as one of their most important battles so they are, indeed, ready on December 31, 1999, to do whatever might be necessary to protect and pursue the interests of the United States and our allies.

As for long term solutions. I love the question about the year 3000, but hopefully I won't have to have this job at that point. And I hope we can all be in a much happier state and won't have to be worrying about it at that time. But I do appreciate the question and appreciate this chance to talk to all of you.

MODERATOR: This is Milan signing off, and thank you for a very good hour.

MS. ABRAMS: Thank you, thank you.

(End of presentation.)

(end transcript)

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 30, 1998.

Diane: 'Im rapidly coming to the conclusion that your video conference transcript link was coming from the "dark" side of the USIA web-site.'

This makes sense. Very similar "back-channel" events occurred during the coverage of the Pathfinder mission to Mars. Some of the first downloaded images placed on the NASA website showed what appeared to be anomalies -- unexpected stuff. In a very short time these images became innocuous -- same file name, same URL, just different.

But in the present instance -- where leading government figures are talking (among themselves?) about serious Y2K eventualities here and abroad, contingency plans, preparedness, etc., the fact that such 'leaks' are promptly withdrawn suggests that the policy of our own government, at least, is based on crowd control rather than on developing public awareness and responsible community planning. Which in turn suggests that those responsible for such a policy may share some part of the apocalyptic views of Infomagic and Paul Milne.

I guess I'll have to order my 6-gallon buckets from Glitchproof after all. Pollyanna is a guest who has overstayed her welcome, but seems very reluctant to leave.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 30, 1998.

Let's try a little experiment here. I still have a link or two up my sleeve. There is an excellent, working link to a speech Koskinen gave to some telecom folks about three months. The header at the top of the transcript says, "National Communications System -- Telecommunications Speech Service".

This one says a lot too, if you read it carefully between the lines. First, the link. This is still working as of Wednesday morning, 30 December 1998:

http://www.ncs.gov/N5_HP/Customer_Service/XAffairs/SpeechService/SS98- 025.htm

Let's see if THIS link keeps working after today. Here's a lengthy excerpt. This one says a lot about the government's plans as well...

"As we go forward, one of the issues you're going to talk about, and you've heard from Jeff Hunker on this, is Presidential Decision Directive 63 and the question of the longer-term protection of critical infrastructure. Dick Clarke of the NSC [National Security Council] and I have been working together to ensure that people understand that the Year 2000 is, in many ways, the first real-time example of what difficulties can result if there are major breakdowns in part of the infrastructure.

"There are a lot of similarities between the Y2K problem and other threats to our infrastructure, and there's a paper you have from the NSTAC that describes those. But there are differences as well. One of them, of course, is that we know when the Y2K problem is going to occur. We know the nature of the problem. We know how to solve it.

"Therefore, it is, to some extent, a more linear tact on a problem than trying to figure out how to protect generally against threats or attacks that you're not sure when they're going to occur, what the form will be, and in what context. Nevertheless, it strikes me that we'll learn many lessons in structuring our approach to the Year 2000 problem as we go forward.

"One of the things we're concerned about is to make sure that we coordinate these efforts at the Federal Government level, and that as we reach out in working group relationships with the Year 2000 issue, we avoid unnecessary duplication of requests. So we're working to make sure that the Federal Coordinators of the Year 2000 effort in each of the major departments that are involved with critical infrastructure protection are either the same people or are working closely with the critical infrastructure contacts. We want to make sure that there is a coordinated approach as we make contact with your industry and others, and I would simply ask that if you hear from people who don't look like that they discussed this with each other, let us know. We've got to make sure that we're as efficient as we can be with this problem.

"Our last concern, and Senator [Robert] Bennett [of Utah] spoke about it this morning, is the potential for overreaction in anticipation of what might happen on January 1, 2000. As I said when I took this post in March, we're engaged in a high wire act. We need to get people around the world to take the problem seriously, but, at the same time, we don't want them to unnecessarily panic and take actions that would be counterproductive.

"With this problem, panic can take many forms. It's not just packing up and moving to a vacant lot in New Mexico. Much of the overreaction that could prove difficult will involve large numbers of people deciding, for one reason or another, to change their normal behavior patterns.

"If 100 million Americans change anything they do in their normal pattern of economic behavior, whether it's deciding to take money out of the stock market to protect their IRA's [Individual Retirement Accounts] or show up at their gas stations in the last week of December to fill up their tanks, that will be a problem. As we all learned in the 1973 oil crisis, there's not enough gas in the pipeline to fill up everybody's tank, and if there isn't enough gas or there isn't enough canned food or if there aren't enough drugs available, you can imagine the panic that will result when people say, "See, there isn't going to be enough of everything, and there is, in fact, a great problem here.""

...AND...

"A final issue that depends a lot on you is how we do contingency planning. I was out with the Intelligence Agency CIRs yesterday and I told them the same thing I told our council, which is that we're about finished with the proselytizing and organizing phase, and we're starting to do contingency planning because ultimately we are going to move into the crisis management phase. And the Council will be responsible for coordinating the Government's response to this situation domestically and abroad."

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), December 30, 1998.

Kevin, keep us updated on your cat&mouse improved trap ;-). We *know* all sorts lurking round Forum! Drudge has some mechanism whereby he can see exactly who has visited his site; every once in a while he'll gleefully post White House hits, etc. Wonder if Ed has same capability ...

All joking aside, that picture with the stealth rubber ducky above the NYTimes programmer was too close to be "coincidental." And of course there are far more serious clues.

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxx

-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), December 30, 1998.

Calm down, folks. Some sites, like the library of congress thomas' system and USIA, generate URLs that are only valid for a few minutes. When you post them here and someone else goes to view them, they can't.

I also did a USIA broadcast (to Poland) on Y2K earlier this month. They're interested in it, and you can see my transcript on the site too.

-- Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com), December 31, 1998.

Declan--

"Some sites, like the library of congress thomas' system and USIA, generate URLs that are only valid for a few minutes."

Is there some rationale in this procedure?

Is there someone who decides which web sites are evanescent and which sites are to be preserved, or is the selection random?

This particular site was active for at least a day, and disappeared no more than 90 minutes after my query about it to Maggie Westmoreland.

"Put not your trust in princes." (Niccolo Machiavelli)

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), December 31, 1998.

This topic spans at least two forums (this one and TimeBomb 2000) in several threads. I've started a dedicated Forum:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic=The%20Transcript

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), December 31, 1998.