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Thursday, September 02, 2010

Ind. Law - Still more on: "Can you rely on the Indiana Code?"

The ILB has written much about this, including this entry from August 23, 2008 which began:

Yesterday afternoon several of us, members of the Environmental Law Section of the Indiana State Bar Association, buttressed in the audience by other bar members and a number of professional law librarians, had the opportunity to testify before the highly-regarded legislative Commission on Courts. The topic was our concerns about the Indiana Register and Indiana Administrative Code, which as of July 2006 are only available online, and our concerns about the fact that not all the statute law in Indiana is compiled in the Indiana Code.
Those highlighted words were in my mind today when I read this story by Rosalind S. Helderman and Anita Kumar in the Washington Post, headlined "Crash of Va. computer network has implications for tech world, state politics." Some quotes from today's story:
RICHMOND -- The data storage unit that failed in a warehouse outside of Richmond last week, wreaking havoc in the computer networks of a number of Virginia agencies for more than a week, is a ubiquitous bit of technology used by virtually every major company and government in the country.

The crash -- still baffling to state officials -- exposes the vulnerability of modern, massively complex interconnected computer networks, and is being closely watched by information technology professionals across the country.

"People in the industry are watching in horrified fascination as this unfolds," said Robin Harris, an Arizona technology analyst who writes a blog on computer storage systems. "There's a lot of 'there but for the grace of God go I' kind of thinking."

Here some of the resulting problems are detailed:
More than a week after the initial hardware crash, state officials said operations would be fully restored at Virginia's 74 Department of Motor Vehicles offices Thursday. They estimate that as many as 45,000 people have been unable to renew their driver's licenses while computers have been down, and the agency will extend its hours in coming days and weekends to process the backlog. Officials reported Wednesday that the state's Department of Taxation was able to access taxpayer accounts and issue refunds and liens for the first time in seven days.

Employees throughout state government worked long hours for days to restore computer functions. At the Department of Social Services, local and state staffers had to work through the weekend to ensure that food stamps and welfare checks due to 380,000 residents were not delayed. The Department of Juvenile Justice was unable to release inmates. The Department of Veterans Services, which manages two long-term care centers and two cemeteries, couldn't pay its bills. In all, computers at 26 of the state's 89 agencies were affected.

Read the story for details of all the assurances "that this stuff never goes down."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 2, 2010 10:34 AM
Posted to Indiana Law