-On the eve of the millennium, as some Americans party
like it's 1999...
-Six. Five. Four.
- others believe the end of the '90s...
-3, 2...
- marks a countdown to the end of the world.
- 1. Happy 2000!
-Y2K is like a perfect scenario for the collapse of society.
-For many, the fear is from a computer glitch long ignored.
-It could happen that planes fall out of the sky.
-Could the omission of two simple digits
affect the destiny of all humankind?
- But for others... - It's called The Militia,
and by God, no constable is going to break their door down.
They'll shoot them first.
-Y2K is another government plot to steal their freedom.
-This is the biggest lie that's ever been put
before the American public.
-It all spreads panic and paranoia.
-Countdown to Y2K begins.
Gentlemen, caulk your bunkers.
-Until everyone wonders, is this "Apocalypse Now?"
-This is not one of those summer movies
where you can close your eyes during the scary parts.
♪♪
[ Dial-up modems screeching ]
♪♪
-Randy Weaver brought his family
to the top of this mountain nine years ago
because he wanted to be left alone.
Now, a force of 200 police, federal agents,
and the National Guard have surrounded the house.
-Early in the 1990s, the ATF and other federal officers
attempt to execute a warrant
on anti-government survivalist Randy Weaver
over an outstanding weapons charge.
It leads to an 11-day standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
-Weaver is wanted on charges of selling two illegal
sawed-off shotguns to a federal informer.
-When the smoke clears, Weaver's wife,
their 14 year-old-son, and a U.S. marshal are dead,
leaving anti-government anger simmering among his supporters.
♪♪
-You're going to burn in hell!
You have a 15-year-old son. Are you proud of yourself?!
[ Indistinct shouting ]
♪♪
-Weaver's charged with murder,
conspiracy, and some lesser crimes,
but because the FBI and ATF failed to identify themselves
as law enforcement, celebrity defense lawyer
Gary Spence successfully argued self-defense.
-We have to stick with our rights.
We have to fight for them.
And if we fight for them, people can hear us.
-The verdict legitimizes the anti-government hate
at the core of a growing movement
of militant extremists across the country.
-It was very easy for right wing extremists to imagine
that the federal government was willing to go after anybody
that it disagreed with and use lethal force in doing that.
-And soon, that fear and paranoia
will morph a legitimate worldwide technological crisis
into one more example of how the feds are plotting to get them.
The crisis is Y2K, a computer anomaly experts say
could unleash global Armageddon.
-They had proclaimed the world is going to end tomorrow.
You know, this was doomsday.
-People worried about technical failures.
My name is Francine Uenuma. I'm a freelance writer.
And I wrote a piece for Time.com
about the 20-year anniversary of Y2K.
There was a lot of fears about power grids,
our broader sort of infrastructure.
-And nuclear power plants...
♪♪
may cease to generate the electricity we need.
-It's the kind of tricky international problem
most people look to government to solve.
But in the '90s, America's burgeoning militia movement
sees a trap and is arming itself
in preparation of a government clampdown.
-The far right was on their guard.
-5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
[ Static ]
-But Y2K didn't have to be a crisis at all.
Because this Canadian had been warning everyone
about this moment for 20 years.
-Before Y2K, it was a nobody.
I was a computer operator.
I fed paper into an IBM printer.
And then in 1979, I noticed the problem.
I'm Peter de Jager, and I'm not only the Paul Revere of Y2K,
I was also the gloom and doomster.
♪♪
Back in the 1960s, 1970s, at the beginning of the day,
when you started up the computer,
so there was no place for the computer
to get the date and the time
because the Internet didn't exist.
So you had to enter it in.
"Tell me what the year is."
And you type in two digits... '79.
-All these programs were written, you know,
in the '50s or '60s, and data was expensive.
And so they shortened the year to two digits.
-Now, I'd just came out of university,
studying numerical analysis.
♪♪
And I figured that, well, something is going to go wrong
on January the 1st, year 2000.
Because we're going to enter "00"
and the computer is going to think it's 1900.
♪♪
-It's Peter's lightbulb moment.
The computer's confusion over what year it is
could lead to cataclysmic consequences.
♪♪
-I started to try and make people aware of it...
My boss.
And he said, "You're worried about a problem
that isn't going to happen for 21 years.
Get out of my office. Someone will fix it by then."
-Peter's boss was misguided because even as he said,
"Someone will fix it," those someones had been ignoring
the two-digit date problem for decades.
♪♪
-In 1970, the Scottish Bank Widows Bank ran into a problem
when they were entering in 30-year mortgages.
The closing date of the mortgage is in the year 2000.
The computer didn't take kindly to that.
Still the standard phrase was,
"Someone else will fix this by then."
-Of course, no one does.
And as the world begins to explore cyberspace,
the issue becomes even more urgent.
-In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee... He's a British scientist...
He invented the World Wide Web,
and that set the stage for the '90s.
[ Dial-up modems screeching ]
I'm Steve Morgan, founder of Cyber Security Ventures
and Editor in Chief at Cybercrime magazine.
So we enter the '90s and it's a whole new world.
It's an online world. Everybody was living differently.
♪♪
-In the early 1990s, our personal computers,
the high-end ones, had 640K of memory.
High-density storage was 360K on a large floppy drive.
I mean, this was the stone age of computer time.
♪♪
-And as '90s PC makers try to change that.
-Featuring the SLC processor... The fastest in its class.
-By enthusiastically introducing faster models
with even more memory to.
-The PS2 SLC.
-Peter's becoming increasingly passionate
about repairing the looming Y2K bug.
-Truth of the matter is, Y2K offended me.
It was a stupid, silly problem, and no one is paying attention.
-Peter's compelled to go public with his concerns.
-Back in 1993, I wrote the article
that kicked all of this off... "Doomsday 2000."
It wasn't my first article on Y2K.
I had written another one called "Tick Tock, Tick Tock,
Time's a-Wasting."
Well, that got no attention at all,
except from one or two journalists who said,
"Ha ha, silly little programmer is trying to scare the world.
Isn't this funny? Ha ha ha."
Computer World, at the time, was the magazine
for the IT industry, out to more than
300,000 people in the US every single week.
-Peter's "Doomsday 2000" article
finally grabs the attention of the computer community.
-Someone would ask, "Well, how bad could it be, Peter?"
And the honest answer of that is pretty bad.
It could happen that planes fall out of the sky,
elevators go into the ground.
Pharmaceutical companies have expiry problems,
inventory control problems.
ATM machines.
All computer systems, especially financial systems.
Wherever you have a computer controlling something,
there was a possibility
the computer wouldn't be able to do its job.
-It means every bank, institution, corporation,
and government in the world
could suffer massive operational failures
at the turn of the century.
But while some insiders are listening,
convincing organizations to take action
against the millennium bug is nearly impossible.
-In the early 1990s, people at the top really didn't understand
how much they depended upon their computer systems.
And then along come people like myself.
And we have to have this fixed by the year 2000.
And, oh, by the way, it's going to cost a truckload of money.
They're going to be very, very reluctant to believe you.
-But Peter's underlying message of impending doom and gloom
does find a receptive audience
in America's rising right wing militia groups,
who increasingly believe they're at war
with the government over their freedoms.
♪♪
Eight months after the standoff with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge,
a compound outside Waco, Texas, explodes with bloodshed,
igniting even more anti-government sentiment.
-The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
launched a raid on the compound
of a small religious sect called the Branch Davidians,
who have a sort of an apocalyptic mindset.
The ATF had information that they had illegal weapons,
which they did.
[ Gunfire ]
- Get out of here! - Alright, calm down.
Let me tell you what they're doing.
Ceasefire. They're ceasefiring.
They want to move their injured troops out of there.
-Four agents are killed.
A number of Davidians are killed or wounded.
This precipitates a 51-day standoff.
I'm Mark Pitcavage, and I'm a senior research fellow
with the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.
[ Police radio chatter ]
[ Clattering ]
The FBI comes in and takes over,
and they basically try to force an end to the standoff,
which goes horribly awry.
[ Sirens wailing ]
The Davidians start setting fires on the compound.
Large numbers of them are burned to death.
-Along with their leader, David Koresh,
76 Branch Davidians die in the siege.
-America was shocked. Both the ATF and the FBI
come under considerable criticism,
but especially, it agitated the far right.
In Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and Waco, Texas in 1993,
federal agents killed multiple people, including children.
♪♪
Both those incidents really riled up the extreme right,
and in fact, helped generate a whole new extremist movement
in the United States, the militia movement.
-And soon, followers of America's militia movement
will commit previously-unthinkable acts
to further their anti-government agenda.
-That was a big wake up call to people in the United States.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
-In the mid-'90s, Peter de Jager
and a group of computer programmers
are attempting and failing
to save the world's computers from the Millennium Bug.
-As I continued to beat the drum,
I became known as the Paul Revere of Y2K
or the doomsayer or the fear monger,
or however you want to phrase it.
I was that guy.
That was difficult and that was frustrating.
While Peter and others struggle to be heard,
another, more sinister group
with their own end of the world concerns
is making its mark, sparked by anti-government standoffs
at both Ruby Ridge and Waco.
America's militia movement is expanding.
-The first militia group emerges beginning
in '94 with the Militia of Montana,
and numerous other groups start popping up
all around the country within the next few months.
The militia movement believed that the rest of the world
was essentially controlled by a global, tyrannical,
socialist One World government.
-They called it the New World Order.
-They believe our own government
was actually collaborating with the New World Order
to slowly strip us of our rights and freedoms,
starting with our right to keep and bear arms.
Because once we're rendered defenseless,
we too will be absorbed
essentially as slaves into the New World Order,
and that is what Americans have to fight against.
-The militia movement, Spear of a New World Order,
becomes a rallying cry for many right wing Americans.
-God bless America and death to the New World Order!
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Their distrust is fueled by Bill Clinton,
who signs the federal assault weapons ban into law in 1994,
providing more ammunition for the militia movement's rage.
-The people of the United States must keep their arms.
It's the only way to stop tyranny.
-It grew remarkably rapidly and spread across the whole country,
and it brought in a bunch of new blood to the far right...
A bunch of newly radicalized people.
-It felt like the Lord is saying "This is the army of the Lord
in the United States for this moment."
-The members see themselves as patriots.
-Like the American revolutionaries in the 1770s,
who took up arms against the tyrannical British,
modern Americans would have to take up arms
against their own government and against the New World Order.
-As PCs connect people in cyberspace,
militia organizers use online bulletin board systems
and chat rooms to recruit new members.
[ Dial-up modems screeching ]
♪♪
Meanwhile, Canadian Peter de Jager,
working out of his basement in Brampton, Ontario,
uses the same resources to warn the world about a problem.
It's about to earn its catchy name.
♪♪
-The term Y2K came out of a shorthand used in a chat room.
♪♪
Y2K sort of has this ring to it of,
you know... it's like R2D2, and it kind of added, I think,
to sort of the ominous or catchy ring, if nothing else.
♪♪
-Despite its easy-to-remember name,
convincing folks to spend time and money
to fix Y2K is a hard sell.
-People are reluctant to listen to bad news.
They go, "Is it working now?" "Yes."
"Is it fine?" "Yes."
"Then don't waste any money on that.
We have other stuff to do."
-While Peter agonizes over the government doing too little,
the '90s militia movement continues to sign up members
by arguing the government is doing too much.
The movement grows to an estimated
60,000 members nationwide.
Aided by anti-government propaganda
passed around at gun shows,
including the infamous videotape "Waco, The Big Lie."
Produced by attorney Linda Thompson,
the documentary helped sow the seeds of a catastrophe
in the mind of a young Gulf War veteran.
- On property they called the Mt. Carmel Center.
-Timothy McVeigh was an anti-government extremist,
but what triggered him was the standoff at Waco.
He actually drove his pickup truck
to the site of the standoff
to give away or sell extremist bumper stickers
and other paraphernalia.
And after the end of the standoff,
he obsesses over Waco conspiracy theories,
and in particular, the conspiracy videotape
on Waco by Linda Thompson,
who became one of the pioneers of the militia movement.
- The ATF... - Thompson claims
in "The Big Lie" that the Branch Davidians
didn't start the fire that killed 76 people.
It was a false flag operation, where government agents
framed the members of the apocalyptic cult.
-Now they're finishing off the job right now.
They're destroying the crime scene.
America, this is the biggest lie that's ever been put
before the American public ever.
-And Timothy McVeigh watched it over and over again
and, you know, became outraged
at the federal government, and, you know,
eventually got the idea that he wanted to attack.
-And on the second anniversary of what extremists call
the Waco Massacre...
-Here, tanks methodically push what remains of the house
and evidence into the fire.
-Timothy McVeigh, along with Army buddy Terry Nichols,
execute their monstrous plan.
-The Oklahoma City bombing, which happened on April 19th,
1995, was a huge fertilizer bomb in a truck.
Tim McVeigh drives it to the Bureau Federal Building
and sets it off.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
♪♪
It becomes the worst act
of domestic terrorism in United States history
and the second worst act of terrorism, period,
in our country's history, second only to the 9/11 attacks.
-The bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack
on innocent children and defenseless citizens.
-The Oklahoma City bombing kills 168 innocent people,
including 19 children.
-Oklahoma City was hard for us to process.
You're looking at that at a young age
and saying, "What would drive somebody to do that?"
♪♪
-It shocked the whole country
and the images of firefighters
cradling the bodies of bloody infants,
you know, that they had taken out of the rubble
had just a tremendous effect on everybody.
-But not everyone responds in the same way.
Despite the carnage being aired on live TV,
right wing extremists believe McVeigh is a patsy
taking the fall in another big lie.
They credit the government with the attack
and accuse the media of engineering a cover up...
All of it to convince Americans
to go along with the New World Order.
-They killed 86 people in Waco.
I don't see why they'd have a problem with killing 168 more.
-In the summer of 1995, just a couple of months
after the Oklahoma City bombing.
I actually created a website about right wing extremism.
And this was at a time when the World Wide Web was so tiny,
that I literally could and did look at every mention
of the word "militia" on the entire Internet.
When these groups first started popping up
and claiming to be descended from the original historical,
legitimate militia, the historian in me was like,
"What? That's totally bogus."
When the U.S. Justice Department creates
an anti-domestic terrorism program,
they hire Mark Pitcavage,
who quickly identifies a new possible trigger
for right wing extremist attacks...
Y2K.
-For anti-government extremists
who think that the United States government is collaborating
with the New World Order to take over,
Y2K is like a perfect scenario for that.
There could be, you know, a significant collapse
of society, and the government would use that as an excuse
to do everything on its nefarious agenda.
-Militia members look for any opportunity
to spread their message,
including a surprising appearance on "Donahue"
before millions of Americans.
-Do you think that the feds are coming,
they're going to suspend the Constitution,
they're going to take your guns away.
-The government comes for my gun, I'm simply going
to let them have it. - You'd pull the trigger
on a federal agent coming up to your place?
-I will. A man's home is his castle.
If I had to die proving that, so be it.
♪♪
-Concern that confusion over Y2K
will be the catalyst for more extremist violence,
Congress calls a hearing to lay out the facts
and invites the Paul Revere of Y2K,
Peter de Jager.
-I was a nobody... you know, Y2K person without portfolio.
And then finally, governments were beginning to wake up,
and I testified before the U.S.. I testified in Australia.
I did some work with Tony Blair and them over in the U.K..
-As international governments wake up to the perils of Y2K,
so do media outlets around the world.
-The government is not a little behind,
but way behind. - Tremendously behind.
The wake-up call is now.
-With pressure mounting on the U.S. government,
the need arises for someone
to lead the bureaucratic charge for Y2K.
The question is who.
Having spent 20 years in the private sector
and 25 in the public sector,
I've, as they say, spent my life dealing with crises.
So one night, the president called.
So we talked for about 10 or 15 minutes.
Then the next night, the vice president,
Al Gore, called me, and I said, "You know,
if you get the pope to call me tomorrow night,
I might take this job."
I'm John Koskinen. I was the chair
of the president's council on year 2000 conversion.
I'm responsible for coordinating
the federal government's role
in ultimately 170 countries around the world.
♪♪
So, needless to say,
I signed up to take on the responsibility for Y2K.
-But is it too little, too late?
With only two years until the year 2000,
people fear Koskinen won't be able to avert disaster.
We went from, "This is silly. This is nonsense."
To, "Oh, my God, we're not going to have enough time to fix it."
[ Indistinct shouting ]
-There he is.
-These things that you're talking about...
You did them to Jerry..
-Jerry is very is very dangerous.
-By 1998, even as Hollywood turns
right wing conspiracy theories
into a movie storyline, far right talk radio hosts
are claiming Y2K is a legitimate government plot.
-You're the children, and the government's
your mommy and daddy. Big brother.
Let me tell you something.
Let me tell you something right now...
They're going to do this.
-Y2K has a very significant impact on the far right
in the United States in the late 1990s.
-You had so many people who truly believed
that these events were connected
and part of something larger and more nefarious.
I remember in the '90s, driving around and seeing,
you know, the bumper stickers on the truck,
"I love my country, but I fear my government."
-But behind the scenes,
despite the potentially huge cost of failure
and his exceptionally late start,
John Koskinen's work as the new man in charge of Y2K
is much more mundane than nefarious.
-The president gave me the job and an office and said,
"Don't let the world stop."
So I show up in the old executive office building
and I flip on the light switch.
And it occurred to me what happens on January 1st, 2000
if you flip the switch and there's no power.
Stoplights don't work. Phones don't work.
You know, criminals can run wild.
So the art form was to get everybody
who had a system worried enough to pay attention to it
without panicking everybody who depended on those systems.
-Ultimately, Koskinen has to get
tens of thousands of organizations
to fix their systems by changing two-digit dates
to four-digit dates in millions of lines of computer code.
-Social Security had 52 million lines of code.
So there were thoughtful people who thought,
"You're never going to get it done. It's impossible."
-With the Y2K clock counting down,
Peter de Jager steps up his speaking engagements
to help spread the word.
-The vibe was John the Baptist.
A cartoonist for one of the newspapers over in the UK,
drew a caricature of me in robes,
you know, ringing a bell type of thing.
We certainly played into that.
My ties always had clocks on them.
♪♪
-When he's not on the road,
Peter's focused on his burgeoning website traffic.
-We had an online mailing list, and at one point,
we had 80,000 subscribers.
We used to get 4-500 emails to the mail list every single day.
Well, this was me working out of my office in the basement,
organizing this global communications network.
♪♪
-Peter also teams up with John Koskinen
to coordinate their efforts.
-One of my strategies was to talk to people
to see what they knew.
Peter de Jager was, to his great credit,
one of the early warners about the risk of Y2K.
-We would keep in regular communications, which was key.
John Koskinen approached it from an organizational issue.
We started at programmer level and raised the threat
of lawyers getting involved so that directors
would open up the purse strings and get this done.
-But the downside to successful Y2K messaging
is how easily those messages get distorted
in the new '90s Internet age.
-When you create enough noise and the media gets on...
-And more and more experts are warning
that the year 2000 could bring a date with disaster.
Then people who know nothing about the problem,
all they hear is this fear mongering that's going on...
And there was a tremendous amount of it.
-And there won't be any elections in the year 2000.
There will be a declaration of martial law.
You must teach your children
to use a weapon and use it well.
-Many people on the far right became convinced that Y2K
could cause the collapse of society.
So, for example, for white supremacists,
they are concerned about society collapsing.
[ Sirens wailing ]
And all the non-whites coming out of the cities
into the countryside,
and that this could start a race war.
-The far right's fear of a collapse of society
helps revive survivalism across America.
-We have about a year's supply of food here for Y2K.
-You have to stockpile food, weapons,
survival goods, and gear.
-If it's a case of my family or some other one,
then I'm going to opt for protecting my family.
-And as you get closer to the end of the decade,
you have a lot of survival expos more explicitly,
call themselves, like, Y2K survival expos.
-As these events flourish, they give militia groups
the opportunity to meet in the real world
and exchange their incendiary government beliefs.
-It becomes one of the core beliefs
of the militia movement of the 1990s,
that there are actually 600-800 concentration camps
already built in the United States, fully manned,
but empty, but ready for people to be rounded up when Y2K occurs
and the government steps in
to do all of its nefarious things.
And so they go to look for evidence of these camps,
get over fences and take photographs
of federal facilities that they think have been turned
into a concentration camp or are scheduled to be turned
into a concentration camp.
-The militia movement's suspicion triggers
a deadly plan in Texas.
-A militia cell with members from a variety
of different states plotted to attack U.S. military bases
that they thought were housing "New World Order"
foreign soldiers, and settled upon Fort Hood in Texas.
They wanted to attack on the 4th of July.
And if it weren't for some undercover officers
on the Missouri State Highway Patrol,
they might have been successful.
-Instead, the FBI arrests Kansas militia leader Bradley Glover
and accomplice Michael Dorsett in a Texas campground
with a lethal cache of weapons.
In late '90s America, with the specter of Y2K looming,
extremist threats of all kinds are increasing.
1999 arrives with a cacophony of doomsday predictions
about the end times.
-The doomsday preppers started to get involved.
They were basically saying, "We're all going to die."
♪♪
-Our island in space. Our civilization.
-As the one-year countdown to the millennium begins,
Leonard Nimoy goes where no one has gone before,
delivering the Y2K Family Survival Guide.
-How could the omission of two simple digits
affect the destiny of all humankind?
-The New Year ushers in a heightened level of anxiety
from the spiritual realm.
-I believe that Y2K may be God's instrument to shake this nation,
humble this nation, start revival
that spreads the face of the earth
before the rapture of the church.
-Some fringe religious groups become convinced
that the end of the world is near
or some other cataclysmic event is coming soon.
-One such apocalyptic cult is Colorado's Concerned Christians,
led by Monte Kim Miller,
a former pharmaceutical executive.
America is Satan's kingdom, counterfeiting
the true earthly kingdom of God to come from Israel.
-Miller believes the U.S. president
and the Antichrist are one and the same,
and that Y2K will bring the second coming of Christ.
♪♪
He even moves his Concerned Christians
to Jerusalem to prepare for it.
-In what form did God speak to you about this?
-He speaks through my mouth.
♪♪
-Just months later, on January 3rd, 1999,
police in Israel arrest and deport Miller
and 13 other cult members.
-Police suspect they plan to carry out violent acts
to bring about an apocalypse in the year 2000.
-While America's doomsday cults are stirring up trouble abroad,
on U.S. soil, survivalism is on the rise.
-The number of patriots for profit,
so to speak, really were huge...
People trying to make a buck
by selling you a year's supply of dried beans,
by selling you 40,000 rounds of ammunition.
They would have like these big, underground,
like, plastic bomb shelters...
Like, they looked like septic tanks,
except you're supposed to live in them.
You know, bury it underground, fill it full
of supplies and stuff.
"And we got a sale this Sunday!" You know?
"Conveniently just for you."
-Call now and order your ultimate Y2K survival kit.
-Y2K survivalist goods are in high demand across America.
John Koskinen and Peter de Jager are forced to do damage control
to stave off the public panic
that could cause desperate runs on the nation's supply chain.
-Are you really confident that you were all ready?
-We're confident that the basic infrastructure
of the United States is going to function effectively.
-I did more than 2000 media interviews.
-Everywhere where there's a computer program,
you are affected.
-The noise level got very, very high.
I remember one conference where the speaker in front of me
was actually telling the audience
that nuclear weapons were going to launch...
That there is a nuclear holocaust going to happen.
I got up and said, "The speaker you just heard...
That's absolute B.S.. It's nonsense."
[ Crowd cheering ]
-But end-of-the-world paranoia is reaching a fever pitch
in mainstream media.
-100 day countdown to Y2K begins.
Gentlemen, caulk your bunkers.
[ Explosion ]
♪♪
-To prevent an international crisis,
Koskinen organizes an emergency meeting of the United Nations.
-We had 170 countries gathered at the United Nations,
which was the largest meeting in history,
other than the General Assembly meeting at the U.N..
-But despite Koskinen's best efforts,
anxiety and doom continue to spread.
-People thought that this was going to be
a disaster for everybody.
- What if they're right? - My gosh.
-The survival of millions hangs in the balance.
"Y2K: The Movie."
-In November of '99, an internal FBI report
detailing the threats of Y2K domestic terrorism
is leaked to the public.
-We did have a concern of terrorist groups
would try to take advantage of any chaos that happened,
because you're going to have huge crowds.
One of my concerns also was people hacking into systems.
-Towards the end of 1999,
there's inside information about the hackers of the world
putting together a Y2K virus that will strike at midnight.
-There are also threats to disrupt or destroy
some of the nation's critical infrastructure.
In the days leading up to the millennium,
the Feds move against the far right extremists
they consider most dangerous.
-There were members of a militia cell in California
arrested, plotting to blow up energy-related facilities,
and a militia leader in Florida
who were plotting to attack a nuclear power plant.
-Border police in Washington state also catch a fugitive,
Ahmed Ressam, sneaking in from Canada
with £130 of explosives in his car.
His plan? To detonate a suitcase bomb at LAX
on New Year's Day 2000.
Despite his arrest, U.S. authorities are forced to wonder
how many more terrorists are still out there.
♪♪
The last day of 1999 finally arrives.
♪♪
At 8 a.m. in Washington DC.,
Auckland, New Zealand will be the first city
to meet the year 2000.
John Koskinen is anxiously watching
from the Y2K command post two blocks from the White House.
-We've got a control center, and then we have
a couple of hundred workstations.
We got Mexico and Canada.
We've got all the federal agencies,
some industry groups.
-7... 6... 5...
4... 3... 2...
1!
[ Fireworks explode, crowd cheers ]
-And so as we started monitoring New Zealand,
we're watching the world turn,
and you can see these celebrations,
and nobody is, you know, dying or nothing's blowing up.
-While we are encouraged by the positive reports thus far,
we should all remember
that we have many miles to go before we sleep.
-With half the world still in 1999,
Koskinen has devised a special way
to demonstrate his confidence in America's Y2K preparations.
♪♪
-People were saying, "Hey, you know,
planes are going to drop out of the sky."
-So at 6:30 p.m., Koskinen boards a commuter flight
from Washington to New York, so he can be in the air
for London's New Year's celebration
at midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
-I needed to demonstrate, if we were confident at 7:00,
we were going to be okay.
♪♪
While Mark Pitcavage is attending
a New Year's House party,
he's also on standby for ABC News
so he can respond in case there's a terrorist attack.
-And I said, "You know, look,
if all the computers do collapse,
I'm not sure you're really going to be able to air your program.
But if something happens and extremists do something,
I'm going to be at a friend's house
celebrating New Year's Eve. Here's their number."
-So I'm on the plane. Virtually and nobody's flying...
13 people, and four or five of whom are reporters.
And a young reporter from The New York Times
says, "The guy in the tux in the first row
is now very nervous because he didn't realize
he was flying to New York during the transition period of Y2K."
-When the new millennium arrives in London without incident,
it marks another Y2K milestone,
but America still awaits its arrival.
Not even the hosts of late night
are joking about the potential dangers.
-This terrorism thing is kind of frightening.
- And no one knows. - Right.
-Well, one of them is.
-Top ten effects of Y2K, here we go.
Number 10...
-Stuff's gonna 'splode.
♪♪
-With the millennium just seconds away, the countdown
in Times Square begins.
-Are you ready?
-Of course, everybody's counting off.
You know, it's not often you get to count...
Count down to a new millennium, right?
-In 10, 9, 8, 7...
-There were all of these predictions of doom and gloom.
-5, 4, 3, 2, 1...
-And what happened?
-Happy 2000!
-What a sight in New York City...
Ringing in the new millennium on Times Square.
-After years of anticipation and anxiety,
Y2K has arrived in America.
-It was 12:01 a.m.,
and the ball had dropped in New York
and all the TVs were still on
and people were checking their microwave ovens.
They're checking their phones. All the phones work.
You know, by and large, everything worked.
-Sure enough, there were no viruses.
No planes fell out of the sky.
Elevators didn't plummet to the ground.
-It was nothing but just a big yawner.
-No major problems to report,
not only in the United States, but in fact,
throughout the world.
-Now, the reality is that there were tens of thousands
of Y2K problems, but the thing is,
you didn't hear about them.
-It's true. Behind the scenes in Washington,
Koskinen's been putting out fires all night.
-The Japanese reported that the computer safety systems
monitoring their nuclear plants wasn't functioning well.
The Department of Transportation is saying the low-level
wind shear detectors at all the airports
in the United States failed.
And I sent them a note back saying,
"Well, you're kidding, right?" And he said no.
[ Clears throat ] "When you landed at LaGuardia,
there were no low-level wind shear detectors
and the defense intelligence satellite system has gone down."
So I had a conference with the Defense Department,
the State Department, and the CIA,
and sure enough, it went well.
There were things that didn't work, but nothing systemic.
-One bomb does go off, but it's in Russia...
When President Boris Yeltsin announces he's stepping down,
the Vladimir Putin era begins
in the midst of millennium celebrations.
-[ Speaking in Russian ]
♪♪
-Koskinen has been working two years
to prevent a catastrophe in the U.S.,
but as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
-Only took about 6 hours before the media began
to be full of stories saying,
"Well, that was a hoax. What a waste of money."
-Things couldn't be going more smoothly... so smoothly,
some are even asking if all that preparing was necessary.
-So at midnight, I took a big cake up to the reporters,
and Sam Donaldson of ABC was there and he said,
"Well, this is all a big waste of time."
And I told him, I said, "Sam,
you all don't care because nobody died."
I said, "If there's not blood in the street,
you think it's not a problem."
-The public backlash against the two faces of Y2K
is harsh and immediate.
-So the guy who wrote the Paul Revere story...
I would have loved to have seen him having coffee
the next morning and, you know,
like everything's okay. Like, how do you live with that?
-Peter struggled as a result of having been
so visibly associated with Y2K,
which was a great shame, because he did a wonderful job
and was very responsible about it.
-The year 2000 was difficult.
I'm bipolar, okay?
And basically, I was in a one-decade-long manic stage.
And then when I came down,
I stopped doing media interviews at all.
We received death threats.
People were upset.
The reality is, Y2K was an issue.
We know it was an issue because we went
and tested, systems failed,
and rather than have them fail, we spent money to fix them.
-Those Y2K fixes cost
an estimated $400 billion worldwide.
♪♪
-It was the first time the world came together
on a single project.
If John Koskinen had had not been appointed to that position,
I do not believe the US government would have
gotten its act together in time.
-Couple of months later, I'm renting a car
from a local company in Raleigh Durham Airport,
and I get charged $10 for underage driver.
And I said, "What's that?"
And the guy said, "Oh, that's our Y2K problem.
It keeps thinking you were born in 1839 or 1939
and it's now 1900 and you're actually -39 years old."
And I said, "Where were you guys when I needed you?"
-Surprisingly, over the last year or two,
there's a growing realization that we did dodged a bullet,
and I think that has been exacerbated by COVID.
If we ran Y2K like we were running COVID,
we would have failed.
Y2K had a single message.
-In allegiance to the Constitution
of the United States...
-If Y2K happened today,
you would have everybody cherry-picking
and getting their information from their own sources.
It's not that misinformation is new.
It's that it wasn't as easy and it wasn't as prevalent.
♪♪
We truly were that '90s generation.
We were the last ones that really kind of remember
growing up without technology.
From a historic lens, it's a seismic shift.
And I think in 100 years, they'll be talking
about the '90s as the era where everything went,
you know, digital and became this whole technological world
Kind of crazy.