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U.S. Interior Dept. Unplugged from Internet - Again

Yahoo! News - U.S. Interior Dept. Unplugged from Internet - Again

Tue Mar 16, 2:28 PM
By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Wide swaths of the U.S. Interior Department were taken off the Internet again on Tuesday after a federal judge concluded that the agency still has not fixed security holes that threaten payments owed to American Indians.

It was the third such shutdown for the Interior Department since 2001, when an investigator found that hackers could easily steal money from a system that allocates energy and mineral royalties to 300,000 Indians for use of their land.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said the system still remained vulnerable despite Interior's assurances to the contrary, and the agency could not be trusted to fix the problem by itself.

"The feigned indignance of Interior aside, there is simply no other alternative. Interior brought this on themselves," Lamberth wrote in an opinion signed on Monday.

The Interior Department said the order "is a new frontier in this court's efforts to run the operations of executive branch agencies."

"We are working closely with the Department of Justice (news - web sites) to quickly respond to this order in the appropriate legal venue," the agency said in a faxed statement.

Lamberth, who serves in Washington, ordered Interior to pull all its computer systems offline except for those involved in vital police and fire services.

Bureaus that oversee national parks and provide geological information can also remain online as they have no relation to the trust data, he said.

Divisions that oversee wildlife management, oil and gas royalty payments and Indian affairs were offline Tuesday. Employees are unable to access the Web or send e-mail to those outside the agency, spokesman Dan DuBray said.

The order also shuts down a program that provides Internet access to schools on Indian reservations, the agency said.

Interior could bring its systems back online if an independent reviewer certified them as secure and monitored them on a monthly basis, Lamberth said.

The Interior Department consistently attracts failing computer-security grades from congressional reviewers.

The blackout stems from a class-action lawsuit between the agency and Indians who allege that it has mismanaged trust accounts set up in the late 19th century to handle proceeds from oil, gas and minerals extracted from Indian lands.

Lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a member of Montana's Blackfeet tribe, charges that the government has lost track of billions of dollars and wants the judge to transfer control of the accounts to a court-ordered receiver.

Working with a court-appointed overseer, the agency had been able to bring nearly all of its systems back online within a year after Lamberth ordered them unplugged in 2001. But Lamberth ordered some systems offline again in July 2003 after a dispute between the agency and the overseer.

March 17, 2004 at 08:27 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home