Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 08/01/05 issue

Interior officials accused of covering up IT security flaws

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

Senior Interior Department officials have been accused of threatening to demote the Bureau of Land Management’s CIO in a bid to deter her and other federal employees from testifying forthrightly about the department’s IT security flaws.

Plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit over funds the department holds in trust for American Indians asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to charge Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Department CIO Hord Tipton and others with civil and criminal contempt for retaliating against the bureau’s CIO, Ronnie Levine.

The court now has heard more than 50 days of testimony in a hearing intended to determine whether the court should order Interior’s systems to be disconnected from the Internet again [GCN, April 5, 2004, Page 5], as the plaintiffs in the case of Cobell vs. Norton have requested.

Judge Royce Lamberth is under no deadline to rule on the latest episode—the request to disconnect Interior’s systems from the Internet or the claim of contempt—of this 9-year-old saga.

Lamberth first severed nearly all the department’s Internet links in December 2001 to protect trust data from hacking.

Since then, department officials have obtained Lamberth’s permission to reconnect most of their systems after having upgraded their security.

A key point in the current hearing has been whether department IT officials have been honest in their testimony and with other evidence presented to the court about their efforts to upgrade the department’s IT security. The plaintiffs, who represent some 500,000 American Indians seeking to recover upwards of $100 billion missing from the trust funds, contend that the department consistently has tried to mislead the court and conceal IT security flaws. They claim that faulty IT exposes the funds to theft and makes it impossible to account for them.

According to the plaintiffs, Levine resisted efforts by Interior higher-ups to misrepresent Interior’s IT security. Department officials retaliated by filing a negative report on her job performance, according to hearing testimony.

More news on related topics: IT Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Security



GCN Popup