Because of a lawsuit, Cobell v. Norton, genealogists are being
denied access to the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management Web site.
This site contains (or did contain) hundreds of thousands of records related
to homestead claims and land sales. The site has been very popular amongst genealogists
looking for records of ancestors in the western states. The site is offline
today with no planned date for its return.
It seems that U.S. District Judge Royce has threatened yet again
to hold Secretary of Interior Gale Norton in contempt as he ordered her department
to "immediately" disconnect from the Internet every single computer,
server, and system that has access to individual Indian trust data. The problems
and lawsuit arose from the government’s extremely long delays in paying
for oil royalties and grazing leases. The records were housed in a computer
infrastructure that was so weak that a court-appointed investigator and his
team of security experts were able to break in and repeatedly access, modify
and even create data—all without raising a response from the government.
Judge Royce ordered Secretary Norton to "immediately"
disconnect from the Internet every single computer, server, and system that
has access to individual Indian trust data. The Secretary of Interior did just
that. If you try to access the Bureau of Land Management sites, you simply get
an error message saying, "Not available."
You can read more about this ongoing issue at several news sites.
One with a lot of details is the admittedly biased Indian Trust site at: www.indiantrust.org/clips.cfm
My thanks to Judy Swett for letting me know about the BLM online
access problems.
Dick Eastman Online
