Interior Dept. back online — with a flourish

After being ordered off the Internet by a judge, the agency is now on Facebook.

The Interior Department is back online.

The agency, which oversees federally owned land, not only has a spiffy Web site , but also pages on YouTube , Facebook , Flickr and Twitter .

This represents a quantum leap for the department, which had been ordered off the Web as a result of a 10-year-old multibillion-dollar lawsuit by Native Americans of mismanagement, the Washington Post reports .

Judge Royce C. Lambert issued an order in 2001 for the entire department to be disconnected from the Internet -- and later ordered three more disconnections because of concerns over computer security breaches the allowed hackers access to hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties from Indian lands.

Five bureaus were offline until 2008: the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of the Special Trustee, Office of Hearings and Appeals, Office of Historical Trust Accounting and the Solicitor's Office.

A 2008 report by the agency's inspector general found that the department had "persistently failed to meet minimum standards in information security."

-- Kathleen Silvassy, Congress.org

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