Overkill at Interior

Judge, agency must come up with a better solution to Internet flap.

Editorial from the Fresno Bee, December 30, 2001

Forget about making reservations for next year's camping trip in a national park.

Ditto if you're an Interior Department employee seeking to get reimbursed for that last business trip. And don't bother to look for postings on the Internet about what's happening to the flows in and out of some federal reservoirs. A federal judge back in Washington, D.C, ordered some accounting changes inside the U.S. Department of Interior, and its solution was to shut down much of its piece of the Internet.

Well, fine. The judge has cause to be mad. Maybe the department does, too. But this jurist and this agency don't have to take it out on the would-be campers and thousands of innocent federal employees.

If nothing else, this dispute has revealed just how dependent the federal world has become on the Internet, and how ugly and cumbersome things quickly get when it goes away. Judge Royce Lamberth had a rather narrow computer concern about one trust fund. The accounting for this fund is maintained on the Internet. Concerned that hackers could potentially monkey with this fund, he took action.

The judge's order had the legal appearance of being a careful surgical strike. He told the Interior Department "to immediately disconnect from the Internet all information technology systems that house or provide access" to this one trust fund. The agency, however, reacted as if the judge had just taken a sledgehammer to its entire Internet system. So the camping reservations for the National Park Service went off line, as did the reservoir data for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. All kinds of in-house functions, such as those computerized time cards and expense forms, went kaput as well.

From the outside looking in, it's hard to tell what went wrong here. Maybe the judge's order was too broad. Maybe the agency's overreacted, intentionally or not. Maybe - surely - there were technical ways to isolate this one trust fund from the rest of its computer operations. (Of course, it's possible that all the federal computer specialists have gone home for the holidays.)

All that Lamberth wants is for the Interior Department to account for money that appears to be missing from this trust fund, money that is owed to these tribes. That seems reasonable. What's not reasonable is that this dispute should cause a significant part of the federal government to shut down. The sooner the judge and the agency remedy the situation, the better.