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(credit: Communications Workers of America)

Pennsylvania utility officials will hold hearings to examine the state of Verizon's copper network in response to complaints from a workers' union that Verizon has let older portions of its network fall into disrepair.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) in October petitioned the state for an investigation, saying that Verizon has done little to maintain copper wires in areas where it hasn't upgraded its telephone and DSL Internet service to fiber. Customers have suffered service outages and other problems as a result, with more than 6,000 Verizon customers submitting quality and reliability complaints to the state since 2012, the CWA says.

"For many years, VZPA [Verizon Pennsylvania] has intentionally failed to maintain its physical plant in non-FiOS areas of the Commonwealth," the CWA wrote. "The state of deterioration is now so advanced that poles are literally falling over, cables are sagging to the ground, animals and insects are infesting broken wiring cabinets, and the safety of VZPA's employees and the public is being jeopardized every day."

In testimony last summer, OPM CIO Donna Seymour said that systems couldn't simply have encryption added, because some of them were over 20 years old and written in COBOL. (The statement was only partially accurate.)

The Office of Personnel Management's chief information officer, Donna Seymour, resigned Monday, two days before she was scheduled to face a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the theft of data from OPM's network discovered last year. A spokesperson for the OPM confirmed to Ars that Seymour had resigned, saying "she has retired."

Seymour told colleagues at the OPM in an e-mail message that she was departing to make sure that her presence at OPM "does not distract from the great work this team does every single day for this agency and the American people," according to a report by USA Today's Erin Kelly.

House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) cancelled the planned hearing for Wednesday on the OPM hack. "Ms. Seymour’s retirement is good news and an important turning point for OPM," he commented in a prepared statement. "While I am disappointed Ms. Seymour will no longer appear before our Committee this week to answer to the American people, her retirement is necessary and long overdue. On her watch, whether through negligence or incompetence, millions of Americans lost their privacy and personal data. The national security implications of this entirely foreseeable breach are far-reaching and long-lasting. OPM now needs a qualified CIO at the helm to right the ship and restore confidence in the agency."

Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton sing the National Anthem at the 1997 Presidential Inaugural Swearing-in Ceremony. Under their watch the gravitational wave detectors got built. (credit: US National Archives)

It seemed an inauspicious time to seek funding for a large physics experiment. During the midterm elections in 1994, with Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America at the vanguard, Republicans stormed to power in Congress after successfully painting President Bill Clinton as a “tax-and-spend” liberal. Gingrich and his new majority promised to balance the country’s budget.

Meanwhile, at the offices of the National Science Foundation, the foundation’s director wanted to press ahead with the construction of gravitational wave detectors that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. There was no guarantee that these instruments would find gravitational waves. In fact, many scientists predicted they wouldn't work. And even if they were successful, the discovery of gravitational waves would not advance the interests of the United States in any material way.

The foundation’s director at the time was particle physicist Neal Lane, who would go on to become President Clinton’s science advisor. When I asked him about the Gingrich revolution and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, he chuckled. “When Gingrich came to town with the Republicans, that could have definitely been a major hiccup,” Lane said.