by Stephen Barr
Washington Post
For the past eight weeks, most of the Interior Department headquarters staff has relied on “sneaker mail.” That’s delivering paper messages and documents the old-fashioned way: by walking.
In most Interior offices, links to the Internet have been disconnected. Some employees can use e-mail inside their offices, but most of the department’s 70,000 employees can’t send or receive messages from outside the building or electronically communicate with other government agencies.
This is the new millennium? A Cabinet department responsible for 22 percent of the nation’s land and a $9.4 billion annual budget in electronic isolation?
“We’re going back to the Stone Age,” one employee groaned last week. “Sure, we’re doing the public’s business, but we’re doing it the old way.”
Not quickly or easily, however.
The department’s rangers and law enforcement officers have lost convenient access to crime databases, police alerts and warnings of terrorism threats. Financial managers cannot track the $2 million that employees spend every day on Interior business. Vendors and construction companies are not receiving multimillion-dollar payments for work performed under contracts. Companies that need permits available through the Internet are being asked to fax requests instead.
College students and others seeking temporary or summer jobs in national parks cannot file job applications. Fifth-graders learning about Yellowstone National Park and scientists seeking ecosystem trend data discover that the information is no longer online.
At the National Park Service, officials are filling out 20,000 employee timecards by hand and sending them by Express Mail to Denver for payroll processing. The cards, which are in short supply, are cut for a 40-hour week. Park employees will have to file for any overtime and travel allowances later.
The electronic plug got pulled in December after U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth learned that the computer system managing at least $500 million annually in royalties from Indian land could be easily invaded by hackers.
The judge ordered Interior to restrict access to Indian trust records as part of a lawsuit that claims Indian royalties worth billions of dollars have been mismanaged for 130 years.
As part of the case, Lamberth permitted a computer expert to hack into the system for the trust accounts. The hacker, without being detected, created a false account and altered another account.
A court-appointed special master, who prepared a report on the computer system, called Interior’s failure to protect the Indian accounts “deplorable and inexcusable.”
In response, Interior officials turned off most of the department’s systems. Since the shutdown, the department has been scrambling to identify all systems that contain Indian trust data and to determine which other systems inside the department could provide access to the data.
Critics contend that Interior should have known its computer systems were vulnerable in 1989, when consultants provided the department with studies and assessments. “They are not a financial institution, and they don’t have a clue as to how to protect individual Indian monies,” said Elouise Cobell, a member of Montana’s Blackfeet tribe and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.
She calls the Internet shutdown “a ploy to retaliate” and create hardships for the 40,000 Native Americans who have not received royalty checks for the past two months.
Administration officials reject such assertions and say that computer experts have been working long days — and weekends — to certify the security of Interior systems so they can be reconnected to the Internet. “This is a very difficult situation for everyone involved in the process,” one official said.
Some Interior employees, meanwhile, feel their bosses have let the department slip into paralysis because the litigation and Internet shutdown take up most of top management’s time. In their view, the government’s e-revolution, which began in the mid-’90s, has stalled at Interior.
That may be an overstatement. On the other hand, at week’s end, 90 percent of the Interior Department remained off-line.
“I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel,” one official said, “but hopefully we can get there.”
Tracking TSP Funds A reminder for fans of the Thrift Savings Plan: Returns for the TSP’s five funds are now published every Sunday in the Business section. See Page H13.
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