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Monday June 5, 2006
Security problems at Interior:
Cobell Accountant Corrects a Former Interior Official’s Mistatements Federal Computer Week Regarding Joel Hurford’s comment piece, “Hurford: Failing at FISMA,” in Federal Computer Week’s May 8 issue, the former chief information security officer at the Interior Department still misapprehends the most basic law and federal guidance regarding information technology security, and in the process, he has trivialized the serious computer security issues that Interior faces.
The long-running Cobell v. Norton lawsuit (now Cobell v. Scarlett) is, at its heart, about the federal government’s inability to properly account for its management of other people’s land and money.
In this case the land and money belong to the individual Indian trust beneficiaries. Because the government manages other people’s land and money, the standard of care is necessarily higher. In the context of IT security, this means the government must secure American Indians’ trust data to a greater degree than it might secure the National Park Service’s reservation programs.
The Court of Appeals in this case has held: “The federal government has charged itself with moral obligations of the highest responsibility and trust in its relationships with Indians, and its conduct should therefore be judged by the most exacting fiduciary standards.”
The hearing referenced by Hurford was commenced as the result of an instruction from the Court of Appeals to assess the security of Interior’s IT systems.
During the course of 59 days, the district court compiled a massive record and concluded that: “Interior’s IT security program remains to this day…a disorganized and broken management structure that is not in compliance with governing statutes and regulations, Interior’s fiduciary duties to individual Indian trust beneficiaries, or even the department’s own IT policies.”
Indeed, the inspector general’s contractors were able to hack into Interior’s trust systems and remained there undetected for weeks and sometimes months, ultimately concluding that they could have “easily compromised the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the identified Indian trust data residing on those systems.”
Hurford now claims, without citing any evidence, that the computer security report card is not accurate and that it is not “evidence of organizational failure and a preponderance of individual risk.”
Hurford is simply not believable.
That is not to say that the report card is the only indication that Interior is unable to secure its IT systems. To the contrary, the district court took overwhelming evidence during the hearing to support its finding.
Geoffrey Rempel
Editor’s note: Rempel is an accountant with the Cobell litigation team. He attended every day of the 59-day court hearing into the Interior Department’s computer security problems.
