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Access "Data security failure: How the government broke our trust"

Published: 13 Dec 2012

"Temporarily Unavailable" reads the notice on the Bureau of Indian Affairs Web site. Temporary, in this case, is nearly three years...and counting. A U.S. District Court judge ordered the Department of the Interior to disconnect from the Internet in 2001 because of concerns raised in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of a half-million Native Americans, who are suing the government for mismanaging the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust fund. "It's all about broken trust," says Elouise Pepion Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit (officially known as Cobell v. Norton), which claims the government can't account for as much as $150 billion the fund has collected over the last 117 years. The disconnection has had an impact. Nearly 10,000 government employees have no Internet or e-mail access and must do business by telephone, snail-mail and fax machines. Interior officials say the ban is driving up operations costs because remote Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) employees can't access online applications; some have to ... Access >>>

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