Judge Disconnects Interior Dept., Again

jeremycec writes "Evidently, nothing's been resolved since 2001, when this happened the first time. In these Memorandum Opinion and Preliminary Injunction documents from Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., we see how the court stepped in to pull the plug on a system, which, through its abject lack of due care, left someone's important financial information wide open to attackers. According to the former CIO of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: 'For all practical purposes, we have no security, we have no infrastructure, ... Our entire network has no firewalls on it. I don't like running a network that can be breached by a high school kid.' So, when the BIA could get no relief through Interior's IT Dept., it went to the courts. Source: Government Computer News "

Comments

BIA IT DEPT DOA

[theblackdeer]

it's true .... my mother in-law works at the BIA, and hasn't had email for years. i've offered to do real cheap contracting to help them set up a small, secure network in their regional office, to no avail. they were still waiting for the gov IT dept to work it out.

It's politics, nothing more.

[RatBastard]

The simple fact is that the Department of The Interior hates the BIA. They resent them like hell and are doing nothing to help them at all. Standards, routers, etc... have nothing to do with this.

It's high time that the BIA be moved from Interior to the Department of State anyway. The American-Indiands issue isn't a land issue, it's a deplomacy issue. But that's just more politics and not relevant to the story at hand.

You should know better than to believe the writeup

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot, after all.

The BIA isn't suing anyone. They're *being* sued.

The case is Cobell v. Norton -- the plaintiffs are Native Americans and Norton being the Interior department, of which BIA is a part. (Side note: Gail Norton has been held in contempt of court at least twice that I know of as part of this case.)

So, what we have here, is a suit by individuals (more or less) against the Interior department.

Yes, WE get to pay for the government's defense, and, when the government loses, the full judgement to the (fully deserving, IMHO) plaintiffs.

Go pursue your anti-governemnt, anti-PC campaign elsewhere: it isn't relevant here.

Lawsuits aren't worthless here, they're pretty much the only lever the endlessly screwed-over Native Americans have against the interior depatment. I'm happy to see them succeeding at it.

Re:No wonder

[deanj]

The other flaw with this is the following:

"The preliminary injunction followed a hearing this morning in which the plaintiffs in the Cobell v. Norton litigation, who represent American Indian trust beneficiaries, sought the injunction. The goal of the injunction is to protect American Indian trust accounts from intrusion via the Internet. "

The American Indians requested that the injunction be put into place, and it was granted.

This has nothing to do with what administration is in power.

This is actually a dick swinging contest

[MemRaven]

Rather than everybody babbling about crap based on the original case, I read the memorandum document. Basically, the status here is:

• The government agreed to secure machines that had certain types of sensitive information, and to allow someone to verify that those machines were secure.
• One machine was discovered to be insecure because apparently it WAS in the DMZ for a legitimate use and thus could be portscanned (it was just insecure)
• The people scanning it told the gov't that they were going to do a full penetration scan (so that they didn't get prosecuted), which everybody had agreed to and agreed would be private (i.e. nobody would try to secure the box in advance of the penetration)
• The machine magically vanished off the network right before the penetration scan with a bit of a bogus explaination
• The government and the guy responsible for doing the scans got into a big pissing contest that they refused to settle peacefully.

In other words, it seems like some parts of the government was attempting to do the right thing here, but some other parts got seriously upset when they discovered that the Special Master (the guy responsible for verifying compliance that the machines were actually secure) was actually doing his job and not just taking their word that they hadn't leaked information about the machine that was going to be penetrated, fearing the consequences.

Quite frankly, I'm a little confused as to why the government had to allow a full exploit to take place rather than accepting the warning of "this machine is insecure, secure it now," except that maybe it's with an eye towards preparing for the day when the courts aren't constantly portscanning them.

The real story behind this

[Shoten]

In a nutshell, the Special Master for the court has brought in an outside consultant to do pen-testing of DOI systems. The problem is that this guy is just hacking away willy-nilly, and there are no rules of engagement or lines of communication. In short, there's no way for DOI to know this guy's attacks apart from those of any black-hat, and there's no way to prevent him from doing more harm than good (or notifying DOI should he screw something up, as is prone to happen in pen-testing). SAIC, the company working to improve DOI security, has asked for some changes to this, and was turned down. As a result, the DoJ has intervened, pointing out that what the consultant has been doing is not legal and is actually hacking in the very illegal sense of the word. This is the backlash from the Special Master in return for that.