A C M / S I G S A C (A CM's Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control) C H E C K L I S T F O R S E C U R I T Y A N D C O N T I N G E N C Y P L A N N I N G "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, then you obviously don't appreciate the seriousness of the situation." That parody of Kipling has become a cliche, but it can be an apt characterization of the manager confronting a data processing (DP) emergency. Well-prepared DP managers, however, may keep their heads, and their jobs, for a much more laudable reason: because they know that their contingency plans are adequate to deal with the situations they encounter. With organizational dependence on DP growing at unprecedented rates, little could be more important today. 1 H I S T O R Y This document was originally developed by the Ombudsman Committee of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), chaired at the time by Dahl Gerberick, as part of their 1976 report "Privacy