As the so-called Millennium Bug crisis continues to spread paranoia throughout the computer industry, new reports are calling for government intervention to stay the anticipated chaos. A report to be released Monday by Computerworld magazine claims that the 2000 bug could seriously affect military weapons, and that critics are calling for a presidential declaration of emergency.
"I honestly believe there will be a blue ribbon panel to look at it," says Leland Freeman, a contributor to the Computerworld report and author of the research report "The Year 2000 Resource Book." "It needs to be addressed at a national level. It's been estimated to be a [US]$30-billion problem for the federal government."
Bob Scheier, a managing editor for the magazine, says the US military is trying to address possible glitches in its weapons due to the 2000 bug. Citing previous examples of military weapons malfunctioning because of system timing flaws - including one case of a torpedo turning back on the Norwegian submarine that fired it - the report says the embedded systems in the weapons need to be reprogrammed to make sure they don't misfire after New Year's Eve 1999.
"What's more likely than systems radically going off course is that they wouldn't work when they're supposed to," Scheier reports. "A lot of the systems and maintenance are date based. The default mode would be for the system not to operate. And if you're in a combat situation, not firing could be as bad as it misfiring."
The military is currently trying to resolve the problem, and critics say the problem needs serious national attention.
"There's a flaw in the way the Pentagon is approaching this - Congress has set aside very little money to solve the year 2000 problem, and as a result the Pentagon has told all its system owners that they have to take money out of other programs to pay for year 2000 work," claims Scheier. The Secretary of Defense was not available for comment on the matter on Friday.
The government has already set up a Year 2000 Information Center for business and defense interests, but critics claim this is not enough. Although not a 2000 bug expert himself, report contributor Thomas McInerny, a former Air Force general and president of Business Executives for National Security, is now calling for presidential action. "The president should treat the year 2000 as a potential emergency ... The year 2000 issue is a major challenge facing American industry."
Americans aren't the only ones calling for government intervention. A conservative British Parliament member, David Atkinson, was given permission Thursday to introduce a bill to help prevent companies from going out of business due to the glitch. If passed, it would demand that companies audit the potential for problems within their system and release that information to their shareholders, purportedly to eliminate sticky lawsuits in case of company crashes.
Reports are mixed about the extent to which the bug will affect computers; meanwhile, an entire industry is now burgening around the hyped concern.
