Regional BLM web sites closed because of lawsuit

Regional BLM web sites closed because of lawsuit

December 20, 2001

By Janelle Holden
journal staff writer

A court order requiring the Interior Department to shut down its web sites and Internet access has closed regional BLM web sites and stalled BLM employees.

"We’re just sort of semi-paralyzed," said Tom Harris, the BLM’s web master in Durango.

The shutdown was ordered after a court-appointed monitor, Alan Balaran, reported last month that Indian trust-fund accounts were not being adequately protected by the Interior Department. Balaran said the accounts could easily be altered by a computer hacker.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the shutdown to safeguard the trust funds, which process more than $500 million in annual payments for mining, ranching and timber royalties from Indian land. As a result of the court order, 43,000 Indian beneficiaries have not received December payments.

But Internet access will gradually be restored once officials have convinced Balaran that adequate safety measures are in place, the judge said.

"We’re just doing everything to make sure everything is secure as they requested," said Debbie Harrington, a BLM public-affairs specialist in Washington, D.C.

Safeguarding the trust fund is among the issues in an ongoing hearing to determine if Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Neal McCaleb should be held in contempt of court.

The Interior Department is charged with failing to fix a century of mismanaging the trust fund and piece together how much 300,000 account-holders are owed.

Harrington said there is no time frame, as yet, for when Internet access and e-mail will be restored for the BLM, but the BLM’s Internet access may take longer than other Interior departments to restore because the BLM carries much of the trust responsibility for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ assets, like oil- and gas-drilling and grazing permits.

Harris said his computer was confiscated simply because he was working on an environmental-impact statement for an oil- and gas-leasing project on Southern Ute tribal lands.

"I don’t even have a functioning computer right now due to this legal wrangle that we’re all experiencing," said Harris.

"I was one of a handful people who were actually working on the Southern Ute EIS for oil and gas and somehow that made us tainted and they actually came and took away my hard drive."

Although the U.S. Forest Service is underneath the U.S. Department of Agriculture and not the Interior Department, the court order has affected blended offices in the area that staff both Forest Service and BLM employees, and are managed by one person.

For instance, the San Juan National Forest web site is up, but a link to the Durango Public Lands Center web site will not open, along with a link to the Anasazi Heritage Center web site. BLM employees at the center are allowed to send e-mail within the state, but not out of state, said an employee on Wednesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.