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Major Government Office Still Without Internet

by Terrence O'Brien on January 22, 2008 at 11:37 AM


It may seem absurd, but a major branch of the Department of the Interior still doesn't have Internet access. In fact the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has not had 'Net access since 2001. That means no e-mail, no Google, nothing. If BIA spokesman Gary Garrison needs to look something up online, he actually has to leave his office and walk up to the 4th floor of the BIA offices in Washington, DC and use one of the community PCs in a dedicated computer room.

The disconnection stems from a lawsuit in 1996 over the mishandling of Indian trust accounts by the United States government. In 2001, a judge shut down the Department of the Interior's servers because they were simply too insecure and billions of dollars were at stake. The Department of the Interior has since comeback online, but the BIA is still stuck in the fax age.

We can't decide if it's funny, or sad, but it is certainly absurd. We know that Federal bureaucracy can be extreme, but keeping an entire branch branch of the Department of the Interior stuck in the 1970s is still shocking.

From Boston Magazine

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Tags: bia, bureau of indian affairs, bureaucracy, BureauOfIndianAffairs, department of the interior, DepartmentOfTheInterior, government, internet, politics, weird

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