Department of Interior 'Net battle continues

Three years after a judge's ruling in a class-action lawsuit unplugged the Department of Interior and its eight agencies from the Internet for four chaotic months, the department is still fighting to stay online, having averted its third ordered shutdown earlier this month.

Since the chaos of 2001, the Interior Department has invested millions of dollars to improve computer security, a trend, observers say, is cutting across the federal government.

The latest Interior Department Internet blackout was avoided when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled on Dec. 3 that U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ignored evidence showing the Interior Department had addressed his concerns over computer security. Those concerns are part of an 8-year-old class-action lawsuit, Cobell v. Norton, over the mismanagement of American Indian trust funds filed by 300,000 American Indians against the Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).

Lamberth ordered the shutdown in March 2004, which put the Interior Department offline for several days before a stay was granted. The Dec. 3 ruling overturned Lamberth's order.

The Internet shutdowns started in December 2001, when Lamberth ruled that the government breached its trust obligations resulting in accounting errors for some $10 billion owed to American Indians and he ordered an overhaul of Interior Department systems.

The BIA systems were so bad that the Interior Department could not determine which systems housed American Indian trust data and Interior Department was ordered to take all eight agencies offline, bringing four months of chaos that showed just how entrenched the Internet had become in the day-to-day life of the government.

Those hurt worst were American Indians, who went without their existing trust payments as systems were hog-tied. To this day, the BIA remains disconnected from the Internet pending a settlement.

But the Interior Department's seven other agencies are all back up and online, including the Minerals Management Service, Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Office of Surface Mining and the National Park Service.

And the Interior Department is busy working on its computer security.