Now that claims of compliance are trickling in, especially from the government, it's becoming clearer that there is a great deal of information which is being consciously withheld from the public.

Either we are being misled about the state of repair, or we are not being told the history and details of the successful remediation which has been completed. Take your pick.

We are only being told what's "ready" or "compliant" or when something "is expected to be ready." These are statement of conclusion and opinion. If it's all the same to you, Mr. Government Man, I'd like to know the facts and I'll draw the conclusions. Or more accurately, I'll depend on some independent source of expertise to help me draw conclusions and to relate those conclusions to the facts in a logical way.

y2knewswire features a spot on this topic. For full story, go to www.y2knewswire.com The story lists 52 questions for a cadet journalist to ask about the government compliance claims. Even the sarcastic questions are actually valid. I've pasted the first 17 of the questions below.

52 Y2K QUESTIONS ABOUT THE 92 PERCENT All the questions journalists should be asking, but aren't.

Where are the statistics showing system testing results?

How many bugs were actually found?

How many bugs were actually fixed?

Who independently verified the systems are now working (and where is their report...)?

When exactly did these systems go on-line?

If the federal government really has a handle on the Y2K problem, why did Y2K remediation costs unexpectedly rise nearly $3 billion to a newly-estimated $6.8 billion?

For how many days have these systems been running on-line?

Were any problems experienced when the systems went on-line, or did everything work perfectly?

Why didn't we hear announcements of agencies moving into the testing phase?

Why didn't we hear the announcements of agencies moving into the implementation phase?

What is the name of the project manager at each federal agency who is signing off on the full compliance of these systems?

What is the name of the lead programmer at each federal agency who is now looking for new work?

What is the status of the previously-categorized "mission-critical" systems that were dropped from the list?

Have the systems been end-to-end tested?

How many embedded systems were checked for compliance?

How many faulty embedded systems were found?

How many embedded systems were replaced?

*end paste*

There are an addditional 35 questions, each of which seeks a fact which would be interesting to understand the process of remediation.

Similar questions could be asked of big business.

That's this week's bottom line. There is a story out there; the work has been done and there is a great tale of management success and human achievement to herald, OR, the work hasn't been done. Either way, it's a big story. Why can't we hear it.

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), April 01, 1999

Answers

Making a decision when you don't have all of the pertinent facts is a tough nut to crack, but that's the way of the world. The fact that we haven't been given the facts, is enough for many people to draw their own conclusions. It's like that old story about knowing that something is wrong because the dog is NOT barking. Ie. it is conspicuous by its abscence.

I think that the questions are wonderful, but I seriously doubt that a bureaucrat would stick his neck out to answer them. Perhaps the first step here is to come up with a list of things that would normally occur IF all the remediation was done, and then note what is not said or done so you can deduce what is going on.

Considering the low standards of honesty in Wash.D.C., as promulgated by the Pervaricator In Chief, using a linguistic form of reverse engineering to figure out what is going on might be highly effective.

-- Ken Seger (kenseger@earthlink.net), April 01, 1999.