The Bureau of Land Management's web site has been very useful to me. Unfortunately, it is down again. The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2003 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com. - Court Again Pulls the Plug on BLM's Computers About a year and a half ago I wrote an article in this newsletter with the title, "Bureau of Land Management Computers Knocked Offline By Judge." In that article I described orders issued by U.S. District Judge Royce to Secretary of Interior Gale Norton. 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 following day, many of the government's Web servers, including several containing genealogically valuable information, were disconnected from the Internet. You can read the article I wrote at: http://www.eogn.com/archives/news0152.htm. Three months later, the genealogy records were again made available online. See http://www.eogn.com/archives/news0212.htm. Apparently little has changed since 2001. In a new Memorandum Opinion and Preliminary Injunction issued this week by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., the court stepped in again to pull the plug on the Bureau of Land Management's systems. According to the former CIO of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: "For all practical purposes, we have no security, we have no infrastructure... . Our entire network has no firewalls on it. I don't like running a network that can be breached by a high school kid." Details may be found in the court's document at http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/96-1285as.pdf and in a recent issue of Government Computer News at http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/security/22935-1.html