No ‘Net’ for NPS

By DIANE GLYNN

RIVER VALLEY — Outdoors enthusiasts, national park fans, vacationers and environmentalists, take note—the National Park Service (NPS) website, and all other websites operated by the Department of the Interior, have been shut down until further notice.

In December, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued the order upon evidence that the Department of Interior computer system, which handles $500 million annually in royalties from Native American land, has key security holes rendering the system open to virtually anyone to alter records and possibly divert funds.

The result is the entire Department of Interior system has been shut down until the network can be secured. 

The shutdown was ordered after a government-appointed investigator allegedly cracked the former system successfully.

According to Upper Delaware NPS Superintendent Sandra Schultz, “It’s like having the lights on and the kitchen appliances aren’t working. I don’t know how we all got along for years without it.”

While tourism information is unavailable, safety information normally provided by the NPS website is available from the National Weather Service website and the reinstated U.S. Geological Information Survey website.

Internal NPS functions, such as purchasing, payroll, accounting and property management, are on line. “Only the out-of-agency connections are not working,” Schultz notes.

The court-ordered system shutdown is the latest battle in a long legal war that has been waged in the courts since 1996, after a class-action lawsuit filed by Native Americans against the federal government to demand an accounting of the handling of the funds of 500,000 American Indians, allegedly amounting to billions of dollars.

The money has been held in trust since the late 19th century. Native Americans claim that the tribal funds have been badly mismanaged by the U.S. government. 

The security of the computer system housing the trust money information formed the basis of the case, which includes accusations of misbehavior on the part of employees.

The Department of the Interior insists that over $600 million has been spent to date prior to the shutdown to comply with court orders to secure the system, but those efforts have been unsuccessful.

The NPS website hopefully will be back online sometime in February, Schultz said.