Clinton on Y2K, Dec 23, 1998

[Bob Olsen <bobolsen@tao.ca>]

      The (US) President's commission supports local community
      preparedness efforts, including storing some food in schools,
      and preparing heated contingency shelters.

      US Information Agency
      23 December 1998

Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1998 13:44:13 -0800
To: GWNN-Y2K-L@pt18B1307.FSH.UVic.CA
From: Caspar Davis <prana@coastnet.com>

Hi.

I've cleaned this important message up and highlighted a few passages
by **'s before and after. Note especially the endorsement of community
groups at the end of the message.

Caspar

***FORWARDED MESSAGE***

Delivered-To: prana@coastnet.com
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 23:26:39 -0800 (PST) To: cii@igc.org
(undisclosed recipients) From: cii@igc.apc.org (Tom Atlee)
Subject: Valuable President's Y2K Commission statement

The following is a very significant document. In particular, it
provides Y2K community groups with Federal validation of their concerns
-- quotes which they can take to local officials to legitimize their
questions, requests and offers of support. This document also gives a
glimpse of the approach the Administration is taking in its overall Y2K
effort. Very thought provoking. -- Coheartedly, Tom

Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 15:14:29 -0500
From: Margaret Anderson <andersonmr@erols.com>
Subject: [Fwd: President's Commission expects "a large series of mild
to moderate disruptions...]

via: "P. Gordon" <pgordon@erols.com>

The following was forwarded to me by Jim Lord <JimLordY2K@aol.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 10:49:40 EST

Subject: President's Commission expects "a large series of mild to
moderat e disruptions in our country"
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1998 11:10:15 -0600

President's Commission on Y2K is going to be working with industry to
do readiness assessments and contingency planning during 1999: "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. 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."

The President's commission supports local community preparedness
efforts, including storing some food in schools, and preparing heated
contingency shelters.
http://www.usia.gov/current/news/latest/98122301.glt.html?/products/washfile
/newsitem.shtml

US Information Agency
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.

* * *
[most of questions and answers deleted here. See original article.]

Let me comment on your second question [about the potential for panic
buying] 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 over-reaction 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.**

* * *

(End of presentation.)

(end transcript)

Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * Oakland, CA
http://www.co-intelligence.org *
http://www.co-intelligence.org/Y2K.html


   .............................................
   Bob Olsen, Toronto            bobolsen@tao.ca
   .............................................