De Jager Death Threats

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http://www.lineone.net/express/00/01/05/news/n0100splash-d.html 5 January, 2000

DEATH THREAT TO BUG EXPERT EXCLUSIVE BY DENNIS RICE A GOVERNMENT computer expert who forecast chaos because of the millennium bug has received death threats, The Express can reveal.

Peter de Jager, special adviser to Taskforce 2000, has been bombarded with hate mail since the New Year. So-called Doomsday fanatics and businessmen who spent billions of pounds on one of the biggest non-events of all time are furious that his dire predictions proved unfounded.

Speaking from his home in Canada last night, Mr de Jager, 45, told The Express: "One death threat in particular began with profanities and the person on the phone made it abundantly clear that my life is now at risk.

"It could be a hoax or it could be real. I have been forced to change my number and have to be on my guard.

"I have passed the message, which was left on my answering machine and heard by my wife, to the police here in Toronto. It has been accompanied by a number of e-mail messages to much the same effect. Unfortunately, there is little the police can do. These people don't leave a calling card.

"Some of them have accused me of cashing in on the millennium bug fears while others go the other way and say that I sold out to the governments I advised - I really cannot win."

Born in South Africa and brought up in the Irish Republic, Mr De Jager is generally acknowledged as one of the world's foremost experts on the millennium bug.

He played a leading role in advising Taskforce 2000 when it was set up by the Tory government in 1996 to alert businesses to the threat. British companies have spent an estimated #20billion combatting the bug.

Robin Guenier, executive director of the taskforce, said: "This is shocking. Peter is a friend, although we have not spoken for some months because our views on the impact of the millennium bug grew a little too wide apart. Unfortunately he became a bit of a cult figure to some very fanatical groups who wanted the millennium bug to have a severe impact.

"It may be that some of those people are blaming him personally for what has happened."

Mr De Jager was the first person to warn of the dangers of the bug when he started touring the world as a lecturer and consultant nine years ago. He forecast that 95 per cent of computer systems would stop working altogether or malfunction with chaotic consequences.

Some will see the threats to Mr de Jager as the first step in a backlash against individuals and businesses seen - in many cases unfairly - as cashing in on the millennium bug. A spokesman for the UK Federation of Small Businesses said: "We are expecting quite a number of calls from members questioning the way they were all told by the Government to buy anti-virus software when it does not appear to have been needed. Quite a few of them will not be happy about it."

Mr De Jager denied making a fortune out of his lecture tours. But British businessman Karl Feilder has no cause to regret the scaremongering. He has sold five million copies of his anti-virus Check 2000 software in less than three years.

Next year he can expect to increase his fortune at least ten fold when the company he set up from scratch with two friends is floated on the stock exchange. Mr Feilder, 34, the stepson of a GPO engineer who graduated from Hatfield Polytechnic in the 1980s, could retire tomorrow but has no plans to do so.

"I retired once in 1995 when I sold a computer company to Microsoft but I don't know what I'd do with myself if I wasn't working 80 hours a week," he said. Mr Feilder, who is separated from his wife, keeps a Harley Davidson motorcycle in his offices at Farnham, Surrey.

He was so sure there would be no millennium bug problems on New Year's Eve that he gave staff at his 15 Greenwich Meantime offices around the world the week off.

He said: "As far as I am concerned I have helped the 5,000 customers who bought Check 2000 - even though the millennium bug hasn't happened yet. I don't think it will really get started until April. I believe the bug will be a relatively small glitch which will grow in significance when say a million people suffer it at the same time. "The professionalism which businesses across the world showed by getting anti-virus software in for millennium eve has been overlooked." ) Express Newspapers, 1999

http://www.lineone.net/express/00/01/05/news/n0100splash-d.html

-- Alice in Wonderland (downther@bbithole.com), January 05, 2000


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