Re: Mix talks about corporate gubmint by-ins

[Jim Burnes <jim.burnes@ssds.com>]

Sparticus wrote:
> 
> Corporate America Saves the IRS. What a headline. Corporate America wants the IRS to be
> able to survive to tax us all into oblivion, when what they ought to do is turn their
> backs on the IRS, walk away and let them fall in on themselves just like the Soviet Union did.
> If we're lucky, around December 31, 1999, the IRS will crash along with their computer systems.
> 
> Sparticus
> 
> 

I'm not sure that there is anything they can do about it anyway.  The
contract to fix the IRS's Y2K problem won't be awarded until October of
1998 (!!).  That leaves them 8 months until software oblivion to fix the
problem.  They have an estimated 60 to 80 million lines of code to fix and
test. (some of the code they don't have source code for, some of it is in
assembler) 

The Social Insecurity System started their fixes around 1992 and have
averaged (with 400 programmers) 1 millions lines of code debugged and
tested per year for Y2K. 

You do the math.

This wouldn't be a problem if the IRS was a self-contained entity, but we
all know that isn't true.  I've downloaded their request for prime
contractors to fix the thing.  It includes dataflow diagrams for most of
their *known* systems.  Using my PDF viewer I had to zoom 8 times (at
about 2-3x per zoom) to go from the total system view to the point where
individual systems began to resolve.

The interconnectivness between their systems is unbelievable.  From a
security standpoint that means that the weakest link in the chain
determines the viability of the whole system. 

And the IRS's accounting systems are tied into the accounting systems of
every major corporation in the US. 

The Fed, Wall Street, the US Government's Command & Control System and the
obiting GPS sattelite system all have the same problem.  (ohh...and I
forgot to mention the national railroad car routing system -- "where was
that wheat seed destined for?") 

The end result would be an interesting study in complexity and catastrophe
theory. 

For me, I will be on an extended fishing trip somewhere in the Rockies. 

If the system crashes then the joke will be on the megacorps that
volunteered to fix the thing.  All those US FRN electronic ledger entries
won't be worth the diskspace that holds them. 

Or so it would seem.  As the programmers who work on the system realize
that it will be impossible to fix the system, they will be buying hard
assets and leaving the Y2K project like rats from a sinking ship. 

The best thing that congress could do now is (1) chastise the agency for
alleged abuses and push for (2) a simpler tax code that doesn't
necessitate excessive bean counting for the populace and (3) eliminate the
"income" tax and replace it with a VAT tax or preferably (4) get the
several states to pony up a percentage of their sales taxes to the fed -
to be held in escrow every month by the states and forwarded unless the
state has a major gripe.  That would gets the feds attention real quick. 

It would seem they are implementing (1) and (2) already.  Could (3) and/or
(4) be coming?  I can't believe, giving the paranoia of the Feds, that
they are going to take the risk of letting the Y2K destabilize the entire
nation. 

Despite the fact that the people in charge piss me off sometimes I really
like the fact that 7-11's open every morning, that I can pick up a nice
greasy breakfast from Burger King if I wan't and that I can buy a new car
or fly to visit my family or place a long distance telephone call or buy a
new 9 gig HD for my Linux box or any of the 10 thousand cools things that
are available in civilization.

If any of the federal infrastructure protection specialists are listening
in on cypherpunks (and we know you are), then maybe you ought to pay some
real close attention to the things that are the most likely to bring about
TEOCAWKI (the end of civilization as we know it).  Y2K is much more of a
threat that the four horseman of the infocalypse. 

What really worries me is an idea I call "the population carrying capacity
of civilization".  With high technolgy in place the PCC is much greater
than with low technology.  I think thats obvious.  With so much of
civilization (especially the financial sector) depedent on computers, I
think that carrying capacity is about to go way down.  Lets say it goes
down 10% on Jan 1, 2000.  That would be .1*250,000,000 = 25,000,000
(dead/starved/homeless?)

I know I'm probably making a judgement error somewhere.  I'm certainly not
a Christian post-contructionist-millenialist.  I'm not waiting for the
savior to come down and bring us all up to heaven.  I don't savor living
in the wild for longer than my camping trip and am not a "survivalist".

I'd just like to keep getting my greasy Burger King breakfast, browse my
Barnes and Noble on the weekends, have a decent cup of java once in a
while and and enough time for my network feed to upgrade to a 320kbps
xDSL line.

Something tells me that if the IRS, the FED, Major Banks, US Army C&C, 
GPS Satellites and the Railroad shipments fail within months of each
other we are not going to be browsing Barnes and Noble on the weekends.

Jim