by Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – Four months after a federal judge ordered the Interior Department
to block computer hackers from an Internet website that contains Indian trust
accounts, Interior Secretary Gale Norton still doesn’t have e-mail.
Nor is Interior’s big National Business Center in Denver or the entire
Bureau of Indian Affairs back on the Internet. Nonetheless, Interior
officials said Monday that the department has successfully relinked 85
percent of its offices to the Internet, virtually ending an electronic
debacle that upset most of the department’s employees, infuriated the judge
and led to cries of protest from members of Congress.
“It created a new culture for us . . . one we haven’t had for 10 or 15
years,” said Interior spokesman John Wright. The department’s abrupt
decision to sever all links to the Internet forced thousands of employees to
quickly learn how to do things “the good, old-fashioned way,” Wright said.
It also inconvenienced a public that had become accustomed to dealing with
the federal government’s major land agency via the World Wide Web, Wright
acknowledged. “We learned how much we had come to rely on the Internet,” he
said.
Interior offices that had become used to e-mailing daily reports to
Washington had to mail or fax them. College professors who had pulled down
scientific reports from the department’s website had to scramble to find
hard copies of them. And lots of people, from individuals seeking
reservations at national parks to researchers attempting to study wildlife
refuges, suddenly had to find new ways of getting information that had been
a few mouse clicks away. Said Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Megan
Durham: “It was really annoying.”
Her agency, one of the last to be reconnected, had tossed out its old
news-release mailing list and gone to e-mail releases when Deputy Interior
Secretary Steven Griles decided to disconnect the department in response to
a Dec. 5 order by U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth.
In Durham’s office, that produced a new horror. “We couldn’t distribute news
releases anymore,” she said.
Dennis Gingold, the lawyer who has led the lawsuit over the security of
Indian trust accounts, disputed how much of Interior actually has been
reconnected. “Their numbers make no sense,” he said. “A month ago they said
it was 90 (percent connected). Two weeks ago it was 45. Today they say it’s
85. “They’re about as honest with regard to those numbers as with regard to
anything else,” he said.
Glen Loveland, a spokesman for Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., one of the lawmakers
upset over the disconnection, said Monday that the department’s promise to
speed interim payments to Indians who live off their trust accounts “is
still a mess.”
“Many, many of our constituents have received only one check,” Loveland
said. That’s despite promises from Interior officials that more than 7,100
payments were in the mail to thousands of Indians who depend on the
accounts.
Lamberth, whose order prompted the episode, has made it clear in subsequent
courtroom comments that he believes Interior officials failed to warn him
how far they would go following his instructions. Members of Congress have
complained that the department needed to reconnect quickly.
Wright declined to say when Norton and the remaining Interior officials,
including the Denver business center, which handles payrolls for some
federal agencies, are likely to gain Internet access.
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