HURRICANES have turned some forecasters at the National Weather Service into
media stars. The past few Atlantic hurricane seasons have been hugely rich in
powerful storms. With the entire state of Florida a potential bullseye,
Americans are justifiably curious about major storms. Television networks have
been more than ready to slake that curiosity with up-to-the-minute interviews
and updates from the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
But forecasters are only as good as the data they receive, and recently they
have been forced to rely on an ageing weather satellite for their Atlantic
forecasts. GOES-8 exceeded its five-year design lifetime a year ago, but its
replacement, GOES-11, had been grounded for a year by engine problems.
So weather service officials breathed a giant sigh of relief earlier this
month when GOES-11 made it into orbit, just in time for this year鈥檚 hurricane
season. Had GOES-8 failed before GOES-11 was ready, the television networks
would no doubt have turned to another favourite topic of the American public:
how the government can find so many ways to screw up.
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STILL on satellites, the Pentagon decided earlier this month to drop the
pretence that scrambling signals keeps anything secret. So it has stopped
scrambling signals from its fleet of global positioning satellites. The GPS
navigation system has been providing everyone from field biologists to pilots to
mountaineers with fixes on their locations for the past decade. But the system
had a built-in flaw鈥攖he military worried that terrorists and the like
could use it to pinpoint targets, so they 鈥渄egraded鈥� the satellite signals which
GPS users employ to triangulate their position. So pilots standing still on a
runway got readings saying they were actually moving, and users had to be
satisfied with locations within hundreds of feet of where they actually were.
But soon enough, private enterprise came up with equipment that could correct
the built-in error. So the military has now called it quits and stopped the
scrambling.
Perhaps there鈥檚 something going around . . . a sudden realisation that, well,
sooner or later people are going to find out the facts, so why lie? Hey, it was
only this month that the government finally decided to let the Environmental
Protection Agency publish online its database on chemicals stored around the
country and the threats they pose to public safety. Until now, that information
was considered too dangerous . . . yes, that鈥檚 right, terrorists might misuse
it. Maybe a new philosophy of openness is blowing through Washington?
Yeah, sure.
OF COURSE, a pessimist sees a disaster as an expected event in an unfair
world. An optimist sees it as an opportunity to make the world a better
place鈥攐r at least to gain a little publicity.
The name James Sensenbrenner should be familiar to faithful readers of this
column. The Wisconsin Republican is chairman of the House of Representatives
Committee on Science. He rarely misses a chance to step into the limelight. So
even as millions of computer users, including your faithful if occasionally
foolish correspondent, were cleaning up after the cyber-cataclysm caused by the
ILOVEYOU bug, Sensenbrenner decided it was time for action. Only a week after
the virus鈥檚 appearance, he organised a hearing to investigate the causes of the
outbreak and ways of preventing future disasters.
Now you have to congratulate Sensenbrenner for his alacrity in tackling this
vexing problem. But would it be too much to hope that Congress would move with
similar alacrity on some of the more pressing if less flashy issues it has on
its plate? Like passing a spending plan before the end of the fiscal year, just
for instance.
