U.S. court says Interior Dept. can stay online

The U.S. Interior Department can keep its computers connected to the Internet despite the fact that payments owed to American Indians are vulnerable to hackers, an appeals court ruled Friday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that a lower court in March didn't give the Interior Department enough of a chance to make its case before ordering the agency to pull its Web sites and e-mail systems offline.

Though an expert had shown that Indian trust funds could easily be tampered with by hackers, there was no evidence that anyone had actually tampered with the accounts, a three-judge appeals court panel said.

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Had the lower court considered evidence that the department had taken steps to improve its computer security, "there would have been no factual basis for disconnecting Interior's IT computer systems from the Internet," Appeals Court Judge Judith Rogers wrote.

The appeals court has allowed Interior to stay online temporarily while it considered the case.

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Internet operations at the agency have been shut down three times since 2001, when a court-appointed investigator found that hackers could easily steal money from a system that allocates royalties to 300,000 Indians for use of their land.

The blackouts stem from a class-action lawsuit between the agency and Indians who say that it lost track of billions of dollars in oil, gas and mineral royalty payments.