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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (207616)	12/6/2001 1:22:29 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Let's set principle aside for a moment. Here is the practical consequence of allowing the Federal Government to grasp control of ever-larger chunks of the Nation's wealth: startribune.com There is nothing unusual about this department. You would find the same level of incompetence and outright fraud in ANY department you looked at. The reason this department is being scrutinized is that they aren't misusing resources of the common, which nobody cares about, but instead are misusing resources that a small group of people has a proprietary interest in. Security concerns prompt judge to shut down access to Indian trust system Associated Press Published Dec 6 2001 WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A federal judge ordered the Interior Department on Wednesday to unplug its computerized access to a trust fund for American Indians, one day after investigators reported that computer security problems are putting hundreds of millions of dollars at risk. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth brushed aside arguments by government attorneys that the report, by court-appointed investigator Alan Balaran, showed no evidence that trust data files had been altered by unauthorized individuals or hackers. The report detailed how easily a court-appointed investigator was able to hack into the accounting system at the Interior Department and manipulate financial data. The government computer system is essentially a bank that manages $500 million a year in royalties from land owned by 300,000 American Indians. Lamberth noted that Interior's system had no firewalls to prevent intrusions, systems to detect hackers, or auditing methods to determine whether account information had been manipulated. "You don't expect a thief to leave a calling card?" Lamberth asked Justice Department attorney Matt Fader. Fader said Interior Secretary Gale Norton had already ordered all Internet access to the system terminated while firewalls are installed. "No computer system is every entirely protected," Fader said. Lamberth ordered that any computer that could access the accounting system be disconnected from the Internet to safeguard the trust money. Plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit say the government has mismanaged royalties from 54 million acres of Indian land for more than a hundred years, costing the beneficiaries more than $10 billion. Almost two years ago, Lamberth ordered the Interior Department to revamp its accounting system and demanded that the government piece together how much the beneficiaries are owed.