One Person’s Email Is Missing? Now It Looks Like That’s True for Six More.
A few days ago, I wrote about the IRS claiming to have “lost” 28 months’ worth of Lois Lerner’s external e-mail. At the time, the IRS was saying that was due to a “computer crash” – specifically, that Lerner’s computer had crashed, wiping out those 28 months’ worth of external emails.
Wanna guess what they are now saying? And no – they haven’t suddenly found Lerner’s “lost” email.
They’ve apparently also has managed to lose email from six more individuals thought to be involved in the IRS scandal. The six individuals include Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller. Miller was fired after the scandal came to light.
Hmm. As I said about the earlier IRS data loss: how . . . convenient.
If I remember correctly and I could be wrong regarding the IRS but, external emails on government systems reside on servers for backup as well as the local desktop/laptop. If her system crashed then I guess all the backup servers went with it. I also guess they are using the likes of the Geek Squad for IT support. DBAs and IT managers everywhere are all screaming…BULLSHIT on this one.
I’m willing to bet the NSA could dig up every last one of those “missing” emails. But that would require direction from a presidential administration that wasn’t complicit and incompetent.
My computer crashed. All my emails are lost but nothing else!
They truly believe the American people are morons.
The American people elected Obama.
Twice.
Case closed.
Touche.
:[
Yep.
Yup x 2
Yup x 3
Yep x 4
X5 plus drinks all around!
Sigh
X6, drinks and free rides home when the bar closes.
Wow, what a terrible thing about all those computer crashes… What a lying bunch of liberal trash.
I’m really concerned about where this country is going.
BTW F–K whats her name, what a piece of carnal nobama shit.
Hey IRS – cough, cough, B U L L S H I T, cough, cough…
If I was an IRS sysadmin I’d be suing for slander.
Ah … all they need is a court order from a Fed judge and they can probably get all they need from the NSA …
Right?
Only if it is signed in secret during a dark ceremony using the blood of a virgin Marine Gunnery Sergeant who has never tasted alcohol.
Ya, I call BS.
No IT manager for a government agency who is worth their pay has less than two backups for networked traffic like emails, probably more.
What a crock.
Not to mention the e-mails went somewhere so the desitnation end should have copies. So pull the back-ups (which are required under gov records law) and scan for her name ine the sender for receiver lines.
The problem there, Isnala, is that you need to know the agencies and/or individuals with whom the IRS folks with missing email corresponded. Without that, you’re talking a universal search (there may have been non-Federal entities involved) – which just ain’t gonna happen.
That’s what the Exchange server sent logs are for.
That would work – unless they were dumping or reusing the log tapes at the same periodicity as they were those used to archive the messages. I’d give long odds that if they were in fact reusing the message archive tapes, they were also re-using the log archive tapes.
What is claimed by the IRS here is at least theoretically plausible. But if true, it’s also evidence of gross incompetence on the part of IRS IT management. As the article I’ve linked below shows, the IRS was actually losing money (in terms of lost work hours) by using this scheme – as well as risking violation of Federal records laws.
Moreover, the timing of the crash (about 10 days after Rep. Camp sent a letter to the IRS on 3 June 2011 asking if conservative groups were being targeted) makes me suspicious as hell. And the fact that the same thing apparently happened to several others – at least one of which also appears to a key player in the scandal – increases that already very high level of suspicion.
Hondo, read some of the more technical details from jerry920 and the rest. From an IT and compliance stand point the “her computer crashed” statement for the reasons her e-mail can’t be retrieved is either complete and utter BS -or- people need to be fire/go to jail for gross incompetence. Having worked with government IT and compliance people in the past, most of them are at least proficient in the job, so these e-mails still exist and are recoverable UNLESS someone intentionally scrubbed them on both the servers and backups, which of course there should be an access/audit log of that event. So someone somewhere has some serious explaining to do because the ONLY way for these e-mail to not exist anymore on IRS systems is for someone to have intentionally deleted them. I won’t even go into just how many regulations and laws said actions would have violated.
As with most things its not the initial bad act that gets one in trouble, its the lies and covering up after the fact.
Isnala: let’s just say I also have some experience in the area. And yes – as I said above, I agree that if what the IRS claims is true, that would indeed violate law and policy. It may be evidence of gross incompetence and exceptionally poor judgement meriting prosecution.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen many examples of such poor decisions. They’re regrettably common in Federal agencies – until someone gets their ass in a sling due to one. See
http://www.vmi.edu/uploadedFiles/Faculty_Webs/MECH/HodgesTM/Courses/ME457/aberdeen.pdf
for one such example.
While Federal IT personnel in general are as competent (and in some cases more so than their private-sector colleagues), they are often pressured into doing things “on the cheap” because “the funding to do it right isn’t available, so let’s do what we can”. And doing things right never seems to get high enough priority until after something truly bad happens.
Not to mention the hard copies that are supposed to be printed out and filed for ever correspondence by IRS Employees.
http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html
rb325th: that IRS IRM policy/reg appears to have become effective in Aug 2012, amigo. No telling from that current reg what IRS policy was in Jan 2009-Apr 2011 regarding e-mail retention. They may not have had one, or it may have been totally ineffective or bogus.
Gotcha… however I am finding the excuse that her computer crashed, and all those e-mails were lost due to that to be rather unlikely.
I am finding it rather hard to believe that her e-mails were stored locally and not on a mail server.
Got a message myself this morning I needed to clean up my message in my folder on the server as it was reaching max storage.
Not stored on my computer… so if it crashes I don’t lose all that information.
A computer crashed? Oh. How sad. How dumb. How badly they lie.
Seriously, do they actually think people who have been using computers for DECADES (like me and you) will swallow this lines of BS without choking with laughter?
No, they think the kind of people who support them at election time will believe it…or in reality won’t care that much since it was dirty, evil conservatives who were targeted.
And that’s enough to hang on to power.
I’ll bet if you wrote the IRS and told them you had e-mailed the payment to them they’d be able to find THAT mail pretty damn quick when money didn’t show up.
As an IT Professional, I call total Bravo Sierra on that. This is the Treasury Department we are talking about. Modern Email servers all have automatic backup, and the IRS would also be using redundant storage.
There’s a system administrator out there that could blow one hell of a big whistle.
Fjardeson. I echo that. I work in IT for a major newspaper. We have backups and backups of backups. Why? All because of a little PITA called Sarb-Oxley that requires us to maintain these emails for accounting purposes. The only conceivable way a computer (being a desktop) crash could cause her to lose all those emails would be if she were maintaining them in local files on here hard drive (In Outlook it’s a .PST file). It’s strictly against our policies, because we cannot recover those emails kept on desktop if we are required to produce them through discovery. As stated by Isnala, the sender has a copy as does the recipient, often in lengthy strings.
10-4 Jerry, you nailed it. No way the Treasury Department would allow local .PST storage for anything more important than the office softball team stats.
Yea, but probably a SysAdmin who would like to keep his job.
To counter the keep their job issue (not that they probably read this blog) but if an IRS IT person came forward to call BS, help produce the files/e-mails in question and were subsequently fired: I would be willing to help them seek other employment, especially in the Wash/MD/VA area. Heck my new employer is hiring and I’d be more than happy to pass on a resume of an IT person who’s honest and competent.
So if by change you are said IT person or know said IT person, I think between all of us here we can get their back a little as far as employment is concerned. Email the admins here and have them pass your info to me, I’ll see what I can do.
-Ish
I can also add, the way an email server database works is, there is only one copy of an email, and pointers to that location in the database for every recipient and sender. I don’t need to know who sent it, just generalities such as subject, text in the body, etc., and I can extract every instance from the database.
Why do I have a gut feeling that there are some bureaucrats that will serve time for this!!!
I am usually not a tin-foil-black-helicopter conspiracy theorist, but I was sitting here thinking about it. In the same way that I can produce those emails from the database, I can also remove them. Delete them as if they never existed. I can’t control what happens on the recipient end, if it’s outside the Organization, but I can make sure they are removed from my mail servers.
Not that the most transparent administration would, of course…
There is no way in Hades that this was an accident. This administration doesn’t even try to fake it any more.
Someone DID destroy evidence here, I’d bet my last box of .22LR on it.
From a CNN story:
“At that point, the agency says its computer system had a strict limit for the e-mail capacity of each employee’s account.”
LOL, So do I, and it applies to 99% of my user base. But not the bosses, they get as much as they need.
Bravo Sierra indeed!
And who, exactly, is going to do anything about it? Holder? Bonehead? Reid? If you haven’t noticed, there is nothing that scares The Emperor except the possibility of one day having to say he was wrong about something. Otherwise, he does what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants.
Whatever the basic crime MAY be; this has become a criminal conspiracy, and an ongoing criminal conspiracy (being maintained) within our government. It appears to me to be within the intent of RICO statutes, and subject to severe penalties for anyone involved, prior, during or after the basic crimes. Yes, I do intend to imply that racketeering and conspiracy crimes are involved……
Okay kids, that is not how emails works. In order for the lovely and talented (LAT) Ms. Lerner to get an email, it had to be sent to an email server. An IRS mail server. And stored in BIG database file containing all the other emails that were sent to IRS people. When the LAT Ms. Lerner started her machine and logged into her email, the emails were copied from that server to her computer where she could read them. She can delete her copies but she cannot delete the copies in the BIG file on the server.
If she sends an email, that email is copied from her computer to that BIG database file where the email server connects to the destination email server and copies the mail. So the BIG email database has a copy of every email ever sent or received by the entire IRS.
That email server is managed by people who, unless they are complete and total fucking morons, would have backed up that file. I know that this is a stretch but most IT people who work for the US Government are competent so that file was backed up. It never mattered if the LAT Ms. Lerner had a laptop or if it crashed. Unless she controlled her own mail server (nevah gonna happen) there is a backup.
Show me the IRS Backup and Recovery procedure that says to delete the email server database backups before three years, then show me the logs showing that the tapes were scratched and reused and prove that there aren’t other backups (like a disk image) then maybe I will think about it some more. Otherwise, someone is lying; probably several “someones”.
Supposedly, they were only keeping 6 months of backup tapes, then re-using the tapes. Even though they had to retain everything by law.
And employees were instructed to archive to their desktops when they ran out of space. Then Lerner’s hard drive crashed.
That kind of set up would get anyone I know laughed out of IT.
Did the other 6 have crashes too?
Search for this paragraph: 1.15.6.6
in this document: http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-015-006.html.
These two paragraphs are interesting:
IRS offices will not store the official recordkeeping copy of e-mail messages that are federal records ONLY on the electronic mail system, unless the system has all of the features of an electronic recordkeeping system, some of which are specified in paragraph 2 above. If the electronic mail system is not designed to be a recordkeeping system, ask an E-Mail/System Administrator to instruct you on how to copy the information from the electronic mail system to a recordkeeping system or produce a hard copy for recordkeeping purposes.
IRS offices that maintain their e-mail records electronically will move or copy them to a separate electronic recordkeeping system unless their system has the features specified in IRM 1.15.6.6.2 above. Backup tapes are not to be used for recordkeeping purposes.
You are correct Richard. That is how it’s supposed to work. I imagine the Government uses a SANS or other type of mass storage with multiple hard drives that are mirrored to each other.
If, and this is a big if, they had their email server on its own, well that’s a big no go.
Even in the small Law Firm I worked for back in the day had one email server. Of course it was backed up nightly by tape on the server it’s self, but we also backed it up through a 50 TB Sans server that had 50 hard drives that were all hot swappable and mirrored to each other.
Jerry920 is also correct as far as the actual databases go. You don’t need specifics to locate it in the DB, just some bits of info to search through it with.
Jerry920 is also correct about sys admins and email limits. No sys administration is going to leave just the basic DB copies, they themselves will do multiple backups themselves for nothing less than CYA. I had about a dozen backups from various times in the month in case the regular backups were screwed for some reason. Hell, we even shipped out weekly backups off site to a records company “just in case”.
Computer crashing just doesn’t stop anything anymore because IT will just either fix the crashed computer hardware or replace it. Either way it’s getting imaged and once you login, the server resets up the desktop for that user. It’s why you can have different users use the same machine.
I call BS as well.
The solution I want is to close the IRS, go to a simple flat tax scheme. I would give up exemptions for a simple low rate for EVEYONE.. Remove all opportunity for discretion and mischief by politicians and burocrats and reduce their power significantly
So basically, what you are all saying is that the people who are relaying this information to the media are LYING IN THEIR TEETH, right?
Just want to be sure I understand.
Hmmm… I seem to recall an incident some time ago in which the occupant of the Oval Office lied his ass off about a burglary at some hotel in DC and about another burglary at some shrink’s office. And he got fired for it. Well, he was forced to resign, but ‘fired’, ‘resigned’ – big diff.
I hope the people who are responsible for this disgusting mess get their asses handed to them, just as happened 42 years ago. I swear, it’s like deja-vu all over again.
The fish always stinks from the head, you know. I can smell it from here. The thing is, you have to wonder what the hell it is they’re really afraid of. And if they have nothing to hide, then why are they lying like dead dogs in the noonday sun?
At least we now know what they were doing all that time they were ignoring the subpoena, or request, or whatever it was. Given enough time, and knowing who both sent and received the emails they didn’t want anyone else to see, sure, they could successfully scrub them. There was plenty of time to get folks hired (assuming they were not already in place) at the servers or anywhere else they needed to be to get it all done.
Yeah, unless someone somewhere accidently kept hard copies of them, they really are gone. Must be nice to be so unconcerned with being accountable to the people who pay your salaries. What a bunch of crooks.
P.S. Like the RICO idea. Still. But, whenever I suggest it, folks seem to think it doesn’t apply. Uh-huh.
“P.S. Like the RICO idea. Still. But, whenever I suggest it, folks seem to think it doesn’t apply. Uh-huh.”
Nevertheless, it does smack of racketeering, which has hundreds of definitions.
It *IS* a conspiracy, is ongoing and growing. It is an unconstitutional abuse of government office, and will not stop. Active energy input is required to maintain the inertia and direction of the conspiracy.
Anything that was ‘lost’ or deleted can be recovered. Ask an IT geek about hard drives and why yours started with a capacity of 500GB, but now has a capacity of 490GB. It isn’t software that’s hiding in those 10 gigs.
And for that matter, if it went somewhere on the internet, it’s hanging around, waiting to be called up.
Nothing is gone for good.
Apparently the Census Bureau is using the same email system as the IRS. One that “looses” thousands of emails.
Money quote:
“Months ago, I filed several requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for internal emails between Philly Census supervisor Fernando Armstrong and his mentor Stanley Moore, who, up until a few weeks ago, ran the Census Bureau in the president’s hometown of Chicago.
Moore, who is an octogenarian, suddenly was reassigned. But after telling me there were 2,000 pages of communications between the two men, Census suddenly could only find a handful of chit-chat emails.
It returned my check for the 2,000 pages.”
http://nypost.com/2014/06/16/census-playing-a-game-of-seek-and-go-hide/
I believe it can finally be said that this is the most corrupt administration ever. Had a republican done all this shit; they would have been impeached and the investigation/reporting on every media outlet would have made Watergate look like an ad for Brylcreem. Yet, the media is mostly silent on this administrations corruption, deception, and incompetence. Nope; no media bias here. And the nutless republicans just let the shit go with not even a whimper from their feeble selves.
Sick and tired and fed up.
Time line sucks.
Congress asks for emails.
10 days later, computer crashes destroying only external emails.
And the IRS is just NOW revealing the ‘crash’
And, oh yeah those other 6 people you wanted emails from? Yeah their computers crashed also and only deleted external emails…..
Looks like it’s Special Prosecutor time. And NOT one appointed/approved by Holder