Interior Dept. back online as judge mulls site security

The U.S. Interior Department was back online Thursday after an appeals court said it could connect to the Internet while the court considers whether payments owed to American Indians are vulnerable to hackers.

Interior Department employees had been unable to use e-mail, and most of the department's Web sites had been offline after a federal judge concluded on March 15 that the agency had not fixed security holes that threaten Indian trust-fund payments.

A U.S. appeals court in Washington said Wednesday that the department could restore Internet operations until it heard the case. The court could hear the case as early as next week.

"The department will continue to work aggressively with the U.S. Department of Justice in our appeal," Interior Secretary Gale Norton said in a statement on the agency's Web site.

The Interior Department oversees one-fifth of the nation's land, including national parks, and handles relations with American Indians.

Internet operations have been shut down three times since 2001, when an investigator found that hackers could easily steal money from a system that allocates royalties to 300,000 Indians for the use of their land.

The blackouts stem from a class-action lawsuit between the agency and Indians who allege that it has mismanaged trust accounts set up in the late 19th century to handle proceeds from oil, gas and minerals extracted from their lands.

Lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a member of Montana's Blackfeet tribe, charges that the government has lost track of billions of dollars. She wants the judge to transfer control of the accounts to a court-ordered receiver.

The Interior Department regularly ranks at the bottom of computer security assessments conducted by congressional and government investigators.

An Interior spokesman said the agency had spent tens of millions of dollars to beef up the computer systems that handle the trust accounts, at the expense of other operations.