special to Mercuri News
CAMBRIDGE (IP) -- The Massachusets Institute of Technology’s Office of Public Affairs will be issuing a statement this week, declaring that the Y2K Bug was an elaborate, multi-year hoax, Wired reported today.
According to Wired’s website, MIT’s Technology Review, has accepted for publication a doctoral thesis by two students at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Labs, part of the School of Advanced Computer Sciences. The doctoral candidates, Brad Agdern and William Baker III, admitted they purposefully created and disseminated false statements since 1981, in an effort to “pop the artificial imbroglio of confidence and reliance upon authority figures,” Wired reported.
The paper, titled “Media Frenzy, Hype, and the So-Called Experts: A Thesis for Testing Crisis Readiness and Institutional Responses” is to be published in the April 1st, 2000 issue of Technology Review.
The article documents the many phases of the elaborate project. Over one hundred alarmist stories--written under different pen names--were submitted to various technical journals over a ten year period; Apparently, there was little if any investigation or fact checking performed by journal editors. The duo also instigated the formation of discussion groups at numerous campus computer science departments, both here and abroad.
Several times the students were nearly discovered by suspicious publishers or editors, only to bluff their way through. Anyone who questioned them was accused of ‘technical incompetence.’ A favorite ploy: “Anytime we were painted into a corner, we would all but call the accusing [professor or editor] an idiot. ‘Get me your technology guy on the phone, you're clearly out of your league here,’ we'd scream. They would always, always back down.”
In 1994, the two boys discovered the internet. The web made it easier to widely disseminate false information without being challenged. It was simple to dominate chat boards, list-serves and web sites under a variety of pseudonyms. By late 1996, Y2K fears were in full bloom.
According to sources, the two students have known each other since they attended Friends Academy, an exclusive prep school located in Old Brookville, Long Island. The school confirmed that both boys had attended the academy between 1979 and 1985.
A teacher at the school, speaking anonymously, stated “the youths were inseparable. They were brilliant, but were always getting into trouble.” Each had been suspended several times during their tenure for “malicious mischief.” The teacher recalled that they had been suspended once for “hacking a pay phone in the school’s lobby so that it could call anywhere in the world for free.”
Professor Jeffrey Weitzman, a computer science teacher at the school, recalled that the boys had altered the schools class bells so they rang two and a half minutes early each period, shaving almost a half hour off their school day. It went unnoticed for months, until daylight savings ended in the spring. “They got suspended for that one also,” he recalled.
Intricate pranks have had a long and storied history at the MIT campus. In 1976, engineering students disassembled a Cessna aircraft, and reassembled it in the Dean's office over the weekend. On Monday morning, the Dean walked into his office, only to see a running airplane where his desk was.
Other scientific journal editors noted, however, that this was more than a mere college hoax. Dr. Michael Barrett, the editor of the journal Processes of Physics, stated “The scientific establishment is often challenged by doomsday scenarios: plagues, global warming, weapons of mass destruction, genetic mutations, killer asteroids. How we respond to these crisises—or fail to respond, as the case may be—will determine whether we shall survive as a species.”
Dr. Neil McCabe, a legal ethics expert practicing in Boston, observed that either way, the students may have unwittingly performed a service. “If this was a scam, then they alerted us to how easily our insitutions can be fooled,” McCabe said. “Don't underestimate how valuable that insight is.” He added, “If there truly was a problem, they brought it to more widespread attention.”
As far as litigation was concerned, McCabe noted “Its a question of first impression—I have no clue as to whether there's any liability . . . I doubt that those two kids have half a trillion dollars lying around to make restitution, anyhow.”
Agdern and Baker, both 30 years old, did not return phone calls, but did issue a brief statement by e-mail: “This was a legitimate, scientific experiment, which the Human Race failed miserably. We concocted the COBOL error because we thought nobody could possibly take it seriously. COBOL was a dead language when we first started planning this as eleven-year olds in 1981; Any idiot knows that in COBOL, a date file either flips from 99 to 00 without incident, or prompts the operator for an input, or auto expands the field to 3 digits—i.e., 100. That this got so far without comment by any of the over-paid, so-called Y2K experts is shocking to us. You people are all obviously morons.”
MIT had not determined whether the students would be suspended over the prank.
