"Hi, Doug? Scott here. Change in plans. Heard about EMP-T. I'm headed to Washington tomorrow. The story here is better than I thought and dovetails right into why I'm coming back early. I expect to be in D.C. until next Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. I'll call when I have a place. Oh, yeah, I learned a limerick here you might like. The Spook says the kids around here say it all the time. 'Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. It followed her to school one day and a big black dog fucked it.' That's Amsterdam. Bye." **************************************************************** Chapter 20 Friday, January 8 Washington, D.C. The New Senate Office Building is a moderately impressive struc- ture on the edge of one of the worst sections of Washington. Visitors find it a perpetual paradox that the power seat of the Western World is located within a virtual shooting gallery of drugs and weapons. Scott arrived at the NSOB near the capitol, just before lunchtime. His press identification got him instant access to the hearing room and into the privileged locations where the media congregated. The hearings were in progress and as solemn as he remembered other hearings broadcast on late night C-SPAN. He caught the last words of wisdom from a government employee who worked for NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technol- ogy. The agency was formerly known as NBS, National Bureau of Standards, and no one could adequately explain the change. The NIST employee droned on about how seriously the government, and more specifically, his agency cared about privacy and infor- mation security, and that ". . .the government was doing all it could to provide the requisite amount of security commensurate with the perceived risk of disclosure and sensitivity of the information in question." Scott ran into a couple of fellow reporters who told him he was lucky to show up late. All morn- ing, the government paraded witnesses to read prepared statements about how they were protecting the interests of the Government. It was an intensive lobbying effort, they told Scott, to shore up whatever attacks might be made on the government's inefficient bungling in distinction to its efficient bungling. To a man, the witnesses assured the Senate committee that they were committed to guaranteeing privacy of information and unconvincingly assur- ing them that only appropriate authorized people have access to sensitive and classified data. Seven sequential propagandized statements went unchallenged by the three senior committee members throughout the morning, and Senator Rickfield went out of his way to thank the speakers for their time, adding that he was personally convinced the Govern- ment was indeed doing more than necessary to obviate such con- cerns.