"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Wide swaths of the Interior Department were taken off the Internet again Tuesday after a federal judge concluded that the agency still has not fixed security holes that threaten payments owed to American Indians.


It was the third such shutdown for the Interior Department since 2001, when an investigator found that hackers could easily steal money from a system that allocates energy and mineral royalties to 300,000 Indians for use of their land.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said the system still remained vulnerable despite the department's assurances to the contrary, and the agency could not be trusted to fix the problem by itself.

"The feigned indignance of Interior aside, there is simply no other alternative. Interior brought this on themselves," Lamberth wrote in an opinion signed Monday.

The Interior Department said the order "is a new frontier in this court's efforts to run the operations of executive branch agencies."

"We are working closely with the Department of Justice to quickly respond to this order in the appropriate legal venue," the agency said in a faxed statement.

Lamberth, who serves in Washington, ordered Interior to pull all its computer systems offline except for those involved in vital police and fire services. "

More at :

money.cnn.com/

"The order also shuts down a program that provides Internet access to schools on Indian reservations, the agency said. "


Your government...still finding new and novel ways to deprive native americans

Deprive them of what? The fact that they had their land occupied and we think that giving them a store of value that we created and printed on paper is just compensation is sign enough that we are not really giving them anything in the first place....

Meanwhile Homeland Security has adopted peer-to-peer. Saw it on slashdot.

http://www.groove.net/release.cfm?pagename=press_feb26_2004

Nothing against native americans...but we fought a war over the land..we won a war over lthe land. Isn't this how it has always worked throughout history..if so..why do we owe any one specific group anymore special privileges than anyone else.

To me its actually an insult to injury..its kinda like, "We're sorry we took your land..but you're not getting it back..but here's some hand outs as a good gesture."

zxilton -

That's a very narrow-minded view.

Read up on it and you'll find that we dicked them around on every single treaty we made with them. We painted ourselves as the nice guy and then when we wanted more we just wiped them out and took what we wanted. We're still dicking them around every chance we get. I have several Navajo and Hopi friends that can tell you some things.

WW2 Germany fought a war over quite a bit of land and took it. Does that make it acceptable? How about postwar Soviet Union taking over Eastern Europe and invading Afghanistan? Was that right?

Just because you fight a war and take land doesn't make it right especially when the victor was an unjust aggressor.

They lied then, and they lie now.

you'r right purfus...my grandfather was full Native American on my mom's side...and he had land deeded to him in Oklahoma, land that was oil rich we later found out...the deed he had (it's a long story) got burned. When the Interior Dept/Indian Affairs was contacted...they responded that a "mysterious fire" had destroyed all their copies of the deeds they had in DC...they acknowledged that these deeds existed....I have also talked to other NAs online who had deeds they had lost or had gotten destroyed over the past 80 yrs., and they were told the same story, that a "mysterious fire" had destroyed Washington's copies of these deeds.

The gov promised my people that as long as the grass grows and the water flows...their word and treaty was good...yeah, right!

zxilton - as much as I know about the issues on this board, over 51 years, I have made it a point to learn a LOT more about NA issues. I'm 1/4 Cherokee and Choctaw, which, according to federal standards, is the minimum standard for claiming NA heritage for federal definitions.

As an author myself , I've never written a book on the issue(s), since there are some excellent books out there.

But, the notion that the American gov, won this country by fighting a war with the native inhabitants, is a slap in the face to the children, to the women, to the old men, who were SLAUGHTERED in uncounted incidents, most of which made Vietnam's My Lai massacre
( http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/mylai.htm ) look like a walk in the park.

It has come out how biological warfare was conducted against NAs, such as intentionally giving them smallpox infected blankets, which dessimated entire villages!

I don't blame the Europeans or talk abuot reparations...by I DO BLAME the American Government which lied, reneged on deals, broke treaties, etc., and basically set up perpetual internment camps for Native Americans euphemistically called "reservations".

Native American tribes are sovereign nations, and yet, in some ways, they are treated like prisoners in their own country.

Another part of my heritage is Jewish, and do you think for one second, that if the government set apart enclaves called "reservations" and stuck Jews on these, that it would be tolerated by American Jews?

And that's not to say that NAs have been cowardly in opposing governmental acts like this, but what has happened is that those who HAVE protested, have been arrested, prosecuted, and treated like criminals...just like the gov would like to treat filesharers or anyone else who doesn't fall in line like good "sheeple".

I just saw Hidalgo the movie the other day...the massacre of innocent NAs echoes the same kinds of scenes shown in The Last Samurai.

This gov, like the English gov, has largely killed people in "wars" to further their agenda of territorialism and greed.

For example, remember the Boxer Rebellion in China, or the Opium Wars?
Know why that happened? If you do a casual lookup on Google...you keep seeing references to the Boxer Rebellion as a "war on foreigners" , like some sort of violent xenophobia...but the truth is...by the early 1800s, the British were exporting large amounts of Opium, (from India...see the British East India Company) to China to introduce it into the black market. They were making lots of money, because there was a growing class of Chinese who were becoming opium addicts....

The Chinese emperor was very concerned because it was felt the growing numbers of opium addicts not only would lead to a national health problem, but was destroying the social fabric, and as a result, the emperor tried to stop this opium trade and make opium illegal. Enter a term we are having to deal with now...FREE TRADE...

In Chapter 9 of a book called
THE CHINESE OPIUM WARS by Jack Beeching, in Chapter 9, a British official of the time was quoted as saying this:

""Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade."

The British merchants made a LOT of money in the opium trade, and they were adamantly opposed to the actions of the Chinese government to stop them from exporting all this opium to China.
England (with help from the US, Russia, and France) went to war twice with China to force them to accept all this opium coming in , and in fact, it became official policy for England to force more opium into the interior of China to produce more and more opium addicts, to force the Chinese government to legalize opium.

In similar fashion, the government here, through various covert acts and nefarious traders, introduced hard liquor to the NAs here, after seeing they were more susceptible to the effects of ethanol than Europeans...and indeed, to this day, alcoholism is a particularly bad problem on the "rez" where people try to escape the hopelessness of life there by drinking.

Don't mean to rant...but believe me, anyone who gets into a serious examination of the history of the treatment of the aboriginal peoples of this country, will be exposed to the lying, cheating, theft, fraud, sadism, treaty breaking, murder of the Native Americans of this country...

and yet, NAs have served proudly in this country's wars...one movie showing how one tribe contributed greatly in the communications aspects of WWII..the Code Talkers, in the movie, Windtalkers with Nicholoas Cage.

end of rant...
~Code

I agree with you Code - I for one come from a Chinese background and is a more or less a product of the vietnam war. First generation in my family of course. It really intrigues me though how many times the US has screwed people of different ethnicities (here and over seas) and has kept the great American image. My family is greatfull to be here - I'm just wondering am I greatfull for being a citizen in the next 20-30 yrs down the road.

ghost1735- I agree with you 100 percent !

In this country to...we don't hear enough about the exploitation of the Chinese immigrants in California in the 1800s, who worked on the railroads.

Here's a few links on that
http://cprr.org/Museum/Chinese.html

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/china1.cfm?

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award99/cubhtml/chron.html

"Nothing against native americans...but we fought a war over the land..we won a war over lthe land. Isn't this how it has always worked throughout history..if so..why do we owe any one specific group anymore special privileges than anyone else."

Hmmm...we fought a war over Iraq....we won the war over the land....
So, if according this theory we own Iraq...why does gas cost me so much when Iraq was one of the biggest oil producers....

Know why that theory is wrong? Because "might does not make right"....
According to that theory, if a big aggressive guy wanted your house and car...and he was able to kick your butt...then he should be able legally to take possession of your house and car...

What a horrible world you are advocating with that view...
The fact the government stole this country from the Native Americans who had been here for centuries...should never be a source of pride...but shame...

The Germans took over France during WWII...so if we take this theory to its logical conclusion...the French should be speaking Deutsch..and the national language of France should be Deutsch....But...

Die nationale Sprache von Frankreich ist nicht deutsch...

und das ist gut !