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 its 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 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 and 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.
"If you had a teenager, a high school student who focused all their efforts on getting an 'A' in biology and let other subjects go by the wayside, you'd have a low GPA too," spokesman Dan DuBray said.
A lawyer for Cobell said the department could resolve the issue by simply getting independent certification that its trust-fund systems are secure, as the lower court has required.
"If it was once problematic, it is their obligation to show that it's no longer problematic," said attorney Keith Harper. "You have to allow for some type of process, some type of protocol to ensure that what you say is happening publicly has in fact happened."
