By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Sometimes you have to read the silence. When the Kansas Office of Judicial Information's electronic system crashed on Oct. 12, many in the legal industry assumed it was a short-term problem. More than two months later, the system is still down for much of the state, including Barton County. County Attorney Levi Morris hopes that will change soon.
"Every week now, we're getting a little more information," he said. "We are now being told, officially, they are going to start turning things on in the month of December. Then we hear, unofficially, that maybe it's going to start this week."
On Nov. 21, the seven justices of the Kansas Supreme Court broke the silence on the incident, calling it a sophisticated foreign cyberattack. A press release stated cybercriminals had stolen data and threatened to post it to a dark website if demands were not met.
"The data is safe," Morris said. "What was flipped off, really, is the web browser, the access point. But all the documents are safe. All the documents are still there. They just couldn't flip back on the online access and online servers without making sure they were clean."
The state announced it had restored public access to files on Nov. 28, but only at two service centers in Topeka. Morris said the shutdown has had limited effects locally, other than using a lot more paper.
"Indirectly, there may be some hearings that get missed or some paperwork that doesn't get filed, but this didn't have any direct effect on any sort of jury trials or preventing any of them from going," he said. "That's the big difference between COVID and this 2.0 shutdown. In COVID, you just couldn't have them. Now, you can have them all but your papers are going to be different."