Other coverage (the Washington Post was thorough but late): http://slashdot.org/articles/01/12/07/0223216.shtml http://www.indiantrust.org/clips.cfm?news_id=158 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,40340,00.html -Declan ******** http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10955-2001Dec7.html By Edward Walsh Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, December 8, 2001; Page A04 Responding to a court order, the Interior Department has cut itself off from the Internet, crippling the ability of Interior employees to communicate by e-mail and blocking access to information gathered by the department that is routinely used by other agencies and the public. The shutdown occurred Thursday afternoon on the order of U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who is presiding over a long-running lawsuit alleging decades of mismanagement by the federal government in the handling of trust funds for American Indians. Lamberth earlier commissioned a computer security test that concluded trust fund accounts were vulnerable to manipulation by outside hackers. He then ordered the Interior Department to "immediately disconnect from the Internet all information technology systems that house or provide access to individual Indian trust data." The judge also ordered the disconnection of "all computers within the custody and control of the Department of the Interior, its employees and contractors that have access to individual Indian trust data." The Internet cutoff threw the Interior Department back to a time of communicating by telephone and paper documents. It left department employees without access to e-mail, an increasingly common form of communication within the government and between the government and the public. For example, Megan Durham, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said her agency now distributes almost all of its news releases electronically. The cutoff also shut down department Web sites, such as the National Park Service site, which are widely used by a public accustomed to easily accessing government information for research on a variety of topics. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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