CRYPT NEWSLETTER 53
February - March 1999

Editor: George Smith, Ph.D.
INTERNET: 70743.1711@compuserve.com
          crypt@sun.soci.niu.edu
http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt

Mail to:
Crypt Newsletter
1635 Wagner St.
Pasadena, CA 91106
ph: 626-568-1748

Crypt Newsletter articles may not be copied or reproduced in or
on other media, on CD-ROM collections of data, or offered - in part
or in toto - as part of any database, data survey, information or
research service without prior consent of the editor. Rates based
on word count are reasonable. Queries by e-mail are welcome.


                                       
  Contents: Crypt Newsletter #53       
                                       

 THIS ISSUE

NEWS

Y2K: If you don't believe, just ask Ed.

Y2K: If you don't believe, don't ask us, but say you
did, anyway.

Y2K: If anything crashes, it's our fault, according to
some corporate nincompoop at AOL.

Is a terror incident still a terror incident if it's
lost in inter-office mail?

A real good year for the Gulf War virus hoax: Still more
goobers get gaffed.

Diane Sawyer's excellent EMP gun adventure.
===============================================


Y2K: IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IT, JUST ASK

by Stephen M. Poole


GARY NORTH: THE TRUMPET OF DOOM

You have been warned: Life As We Know It will end in January 2000.
The banks will collapse. The power will go off. Planes will crash.
There may even be a nuclear war.

If you don't believe it, just ask Gary North, easily the most
strident voice -- no mean feat, that -- in the Y2K circus.

A visit to www.garynorth.com is a trip through Dante's hell. The
reader is bombarded with factoid after quote, all attempting to prove
that everything's coming down in January, 2000. According to Bro' Gary,
you should move from the cities or you will die. Do not pass go, do
not collect $200; either run NOW or DIE, period.

Don't laugh. Many believe this -- enough, in fact, to create the real
possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, if enough
people suddenly withdraw their money in December, the banks will fail,
Y2K or not.

But heaven forbid that we should call him an alarmist.

North responds:

"If my critics want to create their own Web sites filled with 'it's
not going to be all that bad' evidence, they may do so. I am unaware of
any such site on the Web today."(0)

I don't know about an entire site, but there are some good pages out
there -- www.serve.com/thibodep/cr/y2k.htm, for one.

North admits that he's not a programmer; he relies on others --
mostly mainframe types who are struggling with 20-year old
non-complaint machines for his information. Chief among these is
Ed Yourdon, who has become a near-Messianic figure to Y2K Gloom and
Doom crowd.


INDIANA ED

If North is the raucous trumpet, Yourdon is the mellow french horn.
They complement each other and were even bedfellows for a while;
North claims to have provided most of the material for
Yourdon's "Time Bomb 2000!"

Lately, though, Yourdon has been distancing himself from North,
lest he become collateral damage when North finally implodes
from sheer hysteria.

Yourdon represents the second group in the Y2K circus: the shrewd
businessman. On the off chance that you haven't heard of him, he's
the leading authority on programming in the world.

If you don't believe it, just ask him.

He'll be glad to tell you.  Yourdon describes himself as
". . . software engineering consultant, daredevil parachutist,
alligator trainer, sword swallower . . . raconteur . . . bon vivant
. . . and author of two dozen books, including 'The Rise and
Resurrection of the American Programmer,' and 'Decline and Fall of
the American Programmer.'"(1)

What that Indiana Jones-esque bio doesn't say is that he has
changed his mind more frequently over the years than most folks
have changed underwear.

In the 70's, Indiana Ed made a name for himself with books and
seminars on structured programming and management.  Now, two decades
later, he insists that "cowboy" programmers should be left alone to Be
Creative.(2)

Yourdon has chutzpah if not consistency; he hawks both "Rise and
Resurrection" and "Decline and Fall" on his Web site, in spite of the
fact that the books completely contradict each other. And in 1975
he once stated that only the "eccentric" or "rich" would have their
own computer.(3)

"Decline" was written during the Bush recession, and played to fears
that American programmers would soon be replaced by cheap foreign labor
and code generators.  A few years later, when it became clear that we
weren't headed the way of the dinosaur, he changed his tune and wrote
"Resurrection."

Do you see a pattern here?


THE MASTER SALESMAN

Hey, give credit where due: Yourdon is a master at telling people what
they want to hear. It's only natural that he should discover the Y2K
bug, too.

The Y2K crowd is an unlikely marriage of survivalist and Christian
Reconstructionist types -- a great (read: lucrative) choir to whom to
preach. Forget corporate seminars; they're vapor in the bucket
compared to this crowd, and Yourdon was tailor-made for them.

Yourdon's credentials impress them, and they don't have the
savvy to question his lack of knowledge about how computers
are used in industry.

Programming is a highly-specialized field now; we're split into a
dozen different specialties. Yourdon's field is programming management;
to my knowledge, he has never written a line of code for an industrial
controller.


MISINFORMATION

Why would anyone consider him an authority on Y2K? I have no idea,
given that he makes statements such as this one from
"Time Bomb 2000!":

   "While its unpleasant to think about the power outages that
   could be caused by the computers shutting down, things could
   be even worse: an aberrant computer could, in theory,
   overload and burn out the generating hardware, or cause
   other irreparable damage."(4)

Actually, that's not even true in theory. Yourdon reiterates -- nay,
more than likely, is the original source of -- the erroneous assumptions
made by most Y2Kers: (A), that industrial controllers use date
calculations to do their jobs -- the vast majority don't -- and;
(B) all equipment is wired together in some vast network controlled by
One Big Computer.

Now, let's examine this a little more closely.

Take my radio station. There's a little control circuit
in the transmitter that regulates the output power. It's self-contained
and doesn't even know what a "date" is. We have a separate computer
that sends commands to the transmitter: turn on, turn off, adjust
power and so on.

Assume that the computer becomes deranged, and sends a command: Make
2.5 gigawatts of power. The transmitter would simply ignore the request.
Even if it tried, a breaker would trip, protecting the machine.

The same is true in electrical power generation: there are separate,
redundant systems. If a mad computer asked a generator to produce way
too much power, the generator would simply ignore the request, and if it
tried, it would blow a fuse or trip a breaker. No "irreparable damage"
would occur.

And consider this, too: The truth is that ANY computer code is
susceptible to errors (more commonly called "bugs" by programmers).
In fact, the program that you're using to read this probably contains
one or more bugs.  Most of them are benign, and fall under the heading
of "Annoyances."

Further, the fact is that computers -- even very large networks --
fail every day due to bugs.  We've learned how to work around that ...
something which the Y2K Gloom and Doomers rarely, if ever, mention.

(At my radio station in the past week alone, our Novell Network-based
system has locked up -- "hung," in computer parlance -- twice.  We
simply rebooted and went back to work.)


JUST FOR FUN: THE DOOM CALCULATOR

I followed a link from North's site to www.y2knewswire.com, where
there's a doom calculator to tell you how likely you are to die if
various industries or services fail.

I first checked for the expected level of science; I found it in the
first "news" item: "Excess fluoridation could cause severe fatalities
. . ." Heaven forbid that I should suffer a _severe_ fatality. Also
notice the conspiratorial mania about the dangers of fluoridation
creeping into the topic.

Then I jumped on the calculator. I was asked to estimate the
likelihood of various services failing TOTALLY. Note: Totally! -- in
2000. So, I answered the questions truthfully: I entered zero for all
of them, because the odds of something failing totally are zero, or
darn close to it.

(There was also one question on solar flares. I kid you not. But I
figured: Hey, they're on a roll, don't interrupt.)

I clicked, "Calculate," and was informed that there was a zero
percent chance of a total collapse of society. I felt so much better I
went back and entered "-99%" to all questions. I was promptly assured
that there was a 12036857.8 percent chance that the world would continue
normally.  Now I feel great!

Hey, this research stuff can be fun!


MY PREDICTIONS FOR Y2K

Forget Ed Yourdon. Forget Gary North. Do you want my predictions for
Y2K?

First, George Smith and Rob Rosenberger will have a collective nervous
breakdown trying to sort through the too-rich field of candidates for
the Hysteria Awards. Send your sympathy cards now.

Second, Dell and Gateway will sell more machines than ever.
Governments and large businesses, the primary users of older mainframes,
will finally fire their MIS departments and dump those old machines
for new PCs loaded with NT and Office. (This is happening as you read
this, by the way.)

Third, unemployment will drop to .001 percent in the year 2000, because
said businesses and government agencies will be hiring to fill in where
the computers did happen to fail.

Finally, even the Gloom and Doomers admit that 600 billion will be
injected into an already-roaring economy to fix the Y2K problem.  This
is bad news?

Buy your stock NOW.

If you don't believe it, just ask ME.

_Stephen M. Poole serves as Chief Engineer with Crawford
Broadcasting in Birmingham, AL. He has over 20 years experience in
industrial controllers, programming and broadcast engineering._
=================
Notes:

0. Taken verbatim from www.garynorth.com.
1. Taken verbatim from www.yourdon.com.
2. SunWorld, July 1997: "'Death March' Author Ed Yourdon Admits He Was
   Wrong."
3. Yourdon, 1975: "Techniques of Program Structure And Design."
4. Yourdon, 1998: "Time Bomb 2000!"


GONE, GONE, GONE TO CROATAN

In related Y2K mania, the Toledo Blade newspaper trotted out
some goofballs in a February 21 piece by Blade National Affairs
reporter Michael D. Sallah.

In a story entitled "Many Try To Flee The Millenium Bug," Sallah
went to Roanoke, Virginia, to report on a local hairdresser
who, along with others from Toledo, was fleeing to the Blue Ridge
Mountains because of Y2K.

"The Toledo man with the goatee and easy smile is among the
emerging breed of survivalists who are taking to remote areas - safe
from any of the disasters brought by the Y2K computer glitch, they
say," wrote the Blade.

``It has the potential,'' said the survivalist for the Blade, ``to
bring civilization as we know it to its knees.''  ``. . . people can
call me a kook,'' he added.

The Blade conceded, "Some say [the survivalist] and others have
gone too far, and in the end, may cause a panic that's worse than
anything the computers do."

Since many people tend to take at least somewhat seriously what
they read in a daily newspaper, Mr. Survivalist's claims, when
given over to 20-30 column inches, would be taken by many to have
some merit earned tacitly by the weight the newspaper assigned to
the story.

Readers might be prone to make the assumption that since the
city newspaper went to all the trouble to send its reporter to Roanoke,
Virginia, in an attempt to get the true dope on Y2K, the article was
accurate and not plagued by fuck-ups.

However, dear reader, you know what comes next.

``This is what causes people to panic, and that's not part of the
solution. They're going to look pretty silly sitting in their
bunkers on New Year's Day when nothing happens,'' attributed the
Toledo Blade to Crypt Newsletter, an "online publication on computer
technology."

It was a funny quote.  But I didn't say it and the Blade reporter
never contacted Crypt News.

Bruce Schneier, the head of Counterpane Systems, a software company
that develops computer security solutions and encryption software,
said it.

My significant other, a journalism grad from Lehigh University,
once told me the head of the department would give a flat "F" to
any would-be reporter who handed in an assignment in which a
source's name was merely spelled wrong.

Crypt News showed this one too her.  Her eyes rolled in her head.

Anyway, how did the Toledo Blade confuse Crypt Newsletter and Bruce
Schneier?

Crypt News called the Blade to find out.

"Oh!" said the Blade reporter.  "Oh no. Oh!"

Hmmm.  A mistake in an article about Y2K doom. Imagine that.



IF ANYTHING CRASHES NEXT YEAR . . . IT'S OUR FAULT

Crypt Newsletter recently received a request for an affidavit
assuring Y2K compliance from America On-Line's director of
corporate information and business systems, Nancye Bates.

Addressed to Crypt Newsletter's "Year 2000 Program Office" in
Pasadena (nevermind that Crypt Newsletter has no "Year 2000
Program Office," that it programs or manufactures no software
or hardware and that it transacts no business with AOL unless
one counts its CompuServe e-mail account), Bates' latter balefully
demands:  ". . . we must request that your organization provide
written confirmation by March 1, 1999, regarding the following:

"1. Whether the releases of your software and or hardware currently
installed at our organization as well as what resides within your
organization will properly process/utilize dates beyond December
31, 1999 and whether it is Year 2000 compliant or Year 2000
Compatible.  In addition, confirmation is needed that the Year
2000 will be correctly processed as a Leap Year.

"2. If the current releases installed at our organization (keep in
mind Crypt Newsletter _makes_ no software much less sells it to
AOL) and yours do not currently address this situation, please
identify the version/release of your software that will properly
process/utilize dates beyond December 31, 1999."

America On-Line calls this its "aggressive approach" to dealing
with Y2K problems.

It appears to be another stupid consequence of Y2K mania:
specifically, the idea that paperwork must be generated that provides
evidence that no one or everyone can be held responsible if the world
ends on January; or that still more paperwork must be produced that
assures no one and everyone is responsible if any kind of technical
glitch at all occurs on anyone's computers worldwide after Jan. 1
that can be blamed on Y2K.

Crypt Newsletter calls this "aggressive approach" a plan
concocted by people, lawyers perhaps, who lack even the common
sense to pour piss from a boot with instructions on how to do so
printed on the toe. However, since when did that criterion
stop anybody?


IS IT STILL A POTENTIAL TERRORIST INCIDENT IF THE THREATENING LETTER
IS LOST IN INTER-OFFICE MAIL?

Anyone alive in the United States is now aware that Secretary of
Defense William Cohen, assorted lawmen at the FBI, and every domestic
terror expert inside the Beltway think that anthrax bombs are being
cooked up in basements inside and outside the country and it's only
a matter of time before one of them goes off in a big city.

Having worked hard with the mainstream newsmedia to create this
impression, it has come as a surprise to them that anthrax scares
have become the current cruel practical joke du jour.

And in the last two months, at least thirty of these hoaxes have
been phoned or mailed in in California.

The result is the police rush around, hazmat teams converge and
the people having the misfortune to be in the way pay the
price.

Just before Valentine's Day, the Los Angeles Times was struck by
just such an anthrax hoax.  Hundreds of police converged on Spring
Street, the Times downtown LA location, and cordoned off the area,
snarling traffic.  A hazmat team was summoned.  There was much
useless handwringing.

A few days later the Times ran an editorial that seemed to
grudgingly admit that too much stock had put into the declarations
of the Richard Preston's of the world, Preston being the author
of a piece of fiction called "The Cobra Event" about bio-terror.
It was time to take a step back, the Times seemed to say, and
reexamine some of the issues even though the threat of bio-terror
was probably real.

What you didn't read was that the anthrax "threat" had come to
the Times in an envelope marked "anthrax" two days _before_
the police, the FBI and everyone else was summoned.  The
envelope had been put into inter-office mail to the Times'
security office where it languished for two days before
discovery.


A GOOD YEAR FOR THE GULF WAR VIRUS HOAX!

The past twelve months have been a very good year for the
Gulf War virus hoax.

The 1991 Infoworld April Fool's story written by reporter
John Gantz about a National Security Agency-developed computer
virus smuggled into Iraq from France hidden in a chip in a printer
continues on with a life of its own _a full eight years_ after its
genesis. The joke piece about the virus that attacked
the Iraqi air defense computer network during the Gulf War was given
a shot in the arm late last year by James Adams' book on
information warfare, "The Next World War."
Adams had been hooked by the original April Fool, US News & World
Report, which had passed on the hoax as fact in its book on the
Gulf War, "Triumph Without Victory," in 1992.

In the March 1999 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, at the end of
an article on "information warfare," science reporter Jim Wilson
takes the sucker-bait: "In the days following the Gulf War, stories
circulated that [information warfare] weapons had been unleashed
on the Iraqi air defense system.  According to these accounts,
French printers exported to the Iraqi military were intercepted
and equipped with special chips developed by the [National Security
Agency]. On these chips were programs designed to infect and
disrupt the communications systems that linked anti-aircraft
missiles to radar installations."

Popular Mechanics, a magazine seemingly aimed at a readership
that gets an erection over stories about the amount and variety of
bombs that can be dropped on foreigners by a B-52, can be found on
almost any neighborhood newsstand.

More good company: A few months ago ex-CIA chief William Webster
and journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave were also gaffed by the Gulf War
virus hoax in a Center for Strategic and International Studies report
entitled "Cybercrime, Cyberterrorism, Cyberwarfare."

Perhaps it is time for the publisher of Infoworld to consider
charging for reuse of the magazine's April Fool's joke.


20/20's EMP GUN SPECIAL STALLS . . . DIANE SAWYER'S CAR; SAWYER
USES OLD CRYPT NEWS JOKE AS FUEL FOR THE FIRE

Interestingly, "EMP gun" inventor David Schriner showed up on ABC's
20/20 in mid-February to demonstrate the effects of one of his devices
in an expose on the threat of home-brewed directed energy weapons
for an overawed Diane Sawyer.  After donning fancy protective suits
and unusual-looking copper mesh headgear, Schriner tested his weapon
on Sawyer's sports car at China Lake in California. At a range of
about 5-10 feet and with the weapon pointed
directly into the car's open engine compartment, Schriner's
electromagnetic pulse gun made Sawyer's idling car . . .
run roughly. Once, said Sawyer, the electric locks in her car's doors
went up and down, too.  And once, Sawyer's car alarm went off.
While Sawyer stood well away from her car,
farther away from it than Schriner's contraption, electronic
videocameras inside the car continued to work during the firing
of the "weapon." Nothing was destroyed.

(One can imagine the reaction of a general asked to use a "weapon"
that, at a range of a few feet, can perform these feats. Just throwing
the case of Schriner's EMP gun into the engine compartment of Sawyer's
car would certainly have produced a bigger bang.)

While 20/20 tried hard to create the impression that the viewer
was witnessing a new and dangerous technology in operation it
is more helpful to frame the newscast in a broader perspective.

Unknown to viewers, Sawyer's primary information -- predominantly taken
from Congressional testimony -- was over a year old, some close to two,
at the time of the broadcast.  In the intervening period, no EMP
gun threat had emerged in America, unless one counts the equivalent of
one glorified microwave oven capable of making one journalist's car
occasionally run roughly.

And during the segment, Sawyer claimed "results" of testing of
electromagnetic pulse on a Cobra helicopter at Junction Ranch
in China Lake were "classified."  They were not. They had been
published on the World Wide Web over a year earlier. (And the
links to these can be found buried in a number of stories
Crypt Newsletter published on the subject a year ago.)

Sawyer's story also relied heavily on hearsay. For example, she
claimed: "Russian criminals have used an
[EMP] weapon, we're told, to disarm security and rob a bank."

Like those beguiled by the Gulf War virus hoax, Sawyer had been
caught up in another joke.

Crypt News had concocted a story about the robbery of Russian banks
by EMP gun in 1996 for the Joseph K Guide to Tech Terminology and
repeated it in slightly different form in stories for the publication
and the TIME's Netly News in 1997.

This story, had been used as a humorous _fictional_ example of the
hearsay about EMP guns that one might expect to encounter. In the
context of the Crypt Newsletter, it was clearly used as a joke, but
in the context of 20/20, it had mutated into alleged news, just as
the Gulf War virus April Fool's joke did in 1991.

Returning to the official silliness surrounding EMP weaponry,
evidence can be found in the public record that the U.S. military
has been trying to develop such weapons through most of
the Cold War.  From the Sixties until the present, a vast trove
of speculative and frequently quite hare-brained literature has
been published on EMP guns. Not restricted to the military and the
government, private citizens have also written extensively on the
power of the mythical weapon to exert mind control, generate
weather, and instigate earthquakes -- to name only
a few manifestations.

However, simply because the U.S. military appears to be spending
money -- even big money -- on such research does not constitute prima
facie proof that such projects are productive.  The boondoggle known as
Star Wars is, perhaps, the best known example. Operating under the idea
that directed energy weapons -- nuclear weapon-pumped lasers -- could be
used to act as an intercontinental ballistic missile shield, that
program eventually collapsed under the weight of its own scientific
fraud.  [Although the Clinton administration appears to be doing
its damndest to resurrect some Bowdlerized form of it.]

More obscure examples also pepper the history of the U.S.
military.

Operation X-Ray, a project conducted in the New Mexican desert
in 1942-43, aimed at producing a "bat bomb," which consisted of
bats armed with miniature phosphorus grenades. Working at devising
a weapon loaded with incendiary bats to be dropped over Japan,
X-Ray scientists came a cropper during a test when the bomb
malfunctioned. That is, the bats in the bat bomb did what bats
do -- flew back to the test site -- and burned the installation to
the ground.

One major difference between Operation X-Ray in the 1940s and the
chupacabras of cyberspace at the end of this decade is
worth mentioning.  Operation X-Ray was not the object of much
mythologizing by the media, government or policy analysts.

As a theoretical exercise, let's transplant X-Ray to the present day.
In the context of a society that musters Congressional hearings to
analyze emerging threats to national security, it is intriguing to
posit incendiary bats as a secret project said to be just discovered
in our military, or in Russia's.

In such an environment, "experts" of dubious quality would be
brought forward to explain how the technology to transform bats
into bombs was being transported across international
borders.  Some would testify that bats had burned down
a building in a foreign country, possibly Russia.  Oth
er "experts"
would explain that bats were indigenous to many suburban
communities in America and that a bat could be made into a flying
bomb for a minor investment of $200 in sundry hardware and kerosene or
phosporus.   Teenagers with large allowances would be said to
be already doing this. Doomsayers would also point out that the
procedure to turn local bats into flying phosphorus grenades was
freely available on the Internet.

And then the "experts" would recommend what legislation might
be needed to prevent the sale of this dangerous know-how to
terrorists and how the average American household or small business
should be upgraded to provide protection from the emerging menace of
flying furry mini-napalm bombs. Finally, the burning bats story would
appear on a TV newsmagazine expose.  The viewer would be shown a
videotape of a flaming office building with the voiceover: "Many
experts say a terrorist attack by incendiary bats would probably
look like this."


-------------------------------------------------------------
Acknowledgments: Electronic clippings courtesy of David Isenberg
and Steven Aftergood to whom the Crypt Newsletter is mighty obliged.
-------------------------------------------------------------
George Smith, Ph.D., edits the Crypt Newsletter from Pasadena,
CA.

copyright 1999 Crypt Newsletter. All rights reserved.
 
