Lerner’s IRS Hard Drive? Oop-So.
Remember Lois Lerner, of IRS-targets-conservative-groups scandal and 28 months of missing IRS email fame? Along with the other six IRS employees involved in same scandal whose email also appears to be missing?
Well, the IRS yesterday indicated that recovery of any of those emails, even using forensic techniques, is likely impossible.
Why, you ask? Per Senator Orrin Hatch, according to the IRS Lerner’s hard drive has been “thrown away”. Other sources say the drives have been “recycled”.
Presumably the other six individual with missing email also lost theirs for the same reason (e.g., due to a “local machine computer crash”) – though to my knowledge the specific reason the other individuals’ email was lost has never been explicitly identified. If that’s the case, the same is doubtless true about their hard drives as well.
In the IT world, “recycling” a hard drive can mean anything from running a bad-sector lockout program to find/mark as unusable bad sectors/reformatting the device/reusing the device to “disposed of to a third party and either repaired/resold” to “sold for scrap and destroyed”. Here, I’m guessing the latter was what happened.
In any case, simply locating the device now may be effectively impossible – never mind recovering any data that might remain from 3 years ago.
This just gets more and more . . . oh so “convenient” for those involved in the scandal with each passing day. And that’s especially “convenient” for those who might be involved, but who aren’t yet publicly known – and desperately wish to remain hidden.
Transparent? Yeah. Just as transparent as the proverbial stonewall.
I’m sure the IRS would buy me saying this if I were audited and didn’t have receipts? /s
Well perhaps if you used one of these excuses:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/18/the-daily-caller-knows-exactly-where-the-irs-emails-went/
We hard reformat with 1s and 0s over every sector if we intend to use the drive elsewhere or we drop it in the recycler for complete crunch and destroy.
If I ever tried to pull this crap with the government and claim that 28 months of emails from the one person they were investigating had been the only ones totally lost in a “drive crash” I suspect the fines would be more than a little overbearing. But like Janet Reno before her Lois Lerner will take responsibility and nothing will actually happen.
The most transparent administration in history has more scandals in a year than any two republican administrations had in a decade. Obama’s administration is making Bill Clinton look like a saint. A couple of blow jobs in the oval office and lying about it pales next to these people…
VoV…We use to call it a “zero fill reformat”. As a former DBA and IT Admin guy, I know full well from my contract time in government work, all emails, Office Documents, etc. are backed up on multiple servers, for just the possibility of a local hard crash. What happened to those backup servers? They are talking to the American people who are ill informed of IT issues. I said before, the IRS must use the Geek Squad for IT support if it is that piss poor. But you and I and every IT savvy person knows better. The government employees a huge IT and DBA department force. A lot of contractors but still they do their job. I’ve seen local crashes happen. A new desktop in place and a recovered image from the backup servers and they were back at work in a two three hours.
This.
Every email any govie ever sends ends up on a server somewhere. This ain’t 1997. There ain’t no exclusively local storage.
One can only imagine what was in those emails to prompt The Emperor to enter the code and authorize the launch. You are all familiar with the agent who carries the football. Well, I bet you didn’t know that there is another who carries the soccer ball. The soccer ball is the code name for the laptop that is wired to Cabinet Members only. In the event of a clear and unequivocable impeachable offense, The Emperor enters the code and a full-scale erasure of record evidence is initiated. Poor Nixon had only a tape recorder and an erase button.
In another day, your story would have been high comedy, Air Cav. Today, it’s
probablycloser to the truth than we can appreciate.Funny every command etc I have worked or worked with email is server based not on your desktop hard drive so you can log into other stations and pull up email.
^This
Bingo
Whatever happened to email archiving as required by the 2006 changes to the FRCP?
It states that any and all electronic communications that could potentially be used in civil litigation must be archived. I don’t think there was an exception for government entities, and I’m quite certain the IRS is constantly involved in civil suits.
They are required. As to if they complied that’s a horse of a different color.
I’m in the DoD and our network is so vast it’s pretty much impossible for an email to be truly lost. What kind of architecture does the IRS use?
Every one of these fucksticks needs to be jailed for Obstruction of Justice. PERIOD
+10!
By Eric Holder’s DOJ? He can’t even be bothered to read the Constitution.
The article also addresses the server side issue, saying that data was stored on tape and overwritten at 6 months. If they are backing up their emails to tape, I guess I will maintain my books on a wax tablet, or maybe papyrus and ox blood.
This is the same IRS that wasted Billions of dollars on a state-of-the-art computer system a few years ago and never fully deployed it.
This article contains a historical overview: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-24/irs-chief-tries-to-protect-crown-jewel-computer-system-from-budget-cuts.html
GDContractor…Tape backups! Tape backups!!! Who the hell do they think they’re talking to? I haven’t seen tape backups in decades. Even the cheap as hell, telecommunications industry, your local phone company that is, went off tapes in the early 90ss and use multiple server backup drives for call data and billing information. Believe me, they won’t lose a dime to lost data which is now remotely gathered and has been for years to billing purposes. The IRS wants the American people and Congress to believe we still rely on tape backups. I call bull shit on that. They may have tape systems still in place but not for today’s systems. They are too slow and too unreliable. This pisses me off to know end.
I hear you battle buddy, but that’s what the article Hondo linked to says….tape drives. (I bought my first RAID MB in 1998, and I’m a cheap bastard.) Keep in mind this is the same IRS that sent 655 fraudulent refunds to a single address in Lithuania just last year.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=_h2jU8L-J8H8oASChYKQCA&url=http://nypost.com/2013/11/07/irs-sent-655-tax-refunds-to-a-single-address-in-lithuania/&cd=2&ved=0CC4QFjAB&usg=AFQjCNEXH9bSeloqtij4TJ0LrLx07FTsWA&sig2=-1dE2WaFnmTir2EZV1IA3g
And the same posse that brought us healtcare.gov (which requires no link reference).
Wanna borrow a pitchfork yet?
I really liked the wax tablets and ox blood.
“it takes a long for us to create backups, the damn chisels keep getting dull; maybe if we used softer rock …”
I’ll bring pitchforks, you bring torches!
If I recall my training correctly, government e-mails are official “records,” and under federal law must be preserved. They can only be destroyed pursuant to a specific schedule that spans decades. Violations are a federal crime.
Sea Dragon…You are correct. Thus the reason to “erase emails and data” post haste.
There’s a funny thing about emails: They are sent somewhere. Is it possible to reach into an email recipient’s account and remove the email, read or not? If not, well, you see where I’m going.
It’s possible, but it has to be done wherever those servers are. According to GDContractor above their data storage is early 1990s technology so it’s likely those emails are long gone. In the Army we just spent $100 million upgrading to an enterprise architecture so our emails should never disappear. Our servers have probably multiple backups and the user’s hard drive isn’t part of the equation. In theory you could look for the recipient or sender of Lerner’s emails, but without knowing who was on the other end it’d be next to impossible to search for them.
Did you guys know that the Deep Throat garage is being razed to be replaced by a new structure?
Well, while all of you are moaning ang groaning and speculating over this inhouse treachery and the band of cowards behind it, you ought to have enough sense to realize that someone innocuous mousy little desk jockey IT geek, somewhere, has it all saved and buried and will turn it loose when the timing is right.
Clinton’s BJS pale by comparison? Oh, hell, come on! This makes Watergate and the break-in at Ellsberg’s shrink’s office look like mere mischief by high school dropouts.
Does anyone have a copy of the current White House enemies list?
Obama is basically Nixon with darker skin and better press.
This crap didn’t work for Rose Mary Woods and her 18 1/2-minute “gap in the tape.” It ain’t gonna work for Obama.
So, this begs the question…
Did they lie to congress about getting them the emails last year or were they simply stalling while looking for the lost hard drives?
No. they lied to Congress to stall long enough to ensure the hard drives had *all* been recycled.
They still haven’t found Jimmy Hoffa, have they?
Jimmy Hoffa deleted the emails and ‘recycled’ the hard drives.
yeah, that’s the ticket……
A bigger question: if and when they do find Hoffa, will he have Lerner’s missing hard drive in his coat pocket?
Oh, Jimmy will probably have someone’s pecker in his left hand and the ‘missing’ hard drives in the other.
Maybe that is why we don’t have some of these scandals in the Military… I have my local backup of my .pst files from at least the last 10 years and the server is still carrying at least 8 gig’s of my emails and attachments (sorry ‘6 shop). Worst case scenario- the server is backed up on a routine basis. Ironic thing is I’m not even that important and my stuff cannot be lost/ “crashed”/ or otherwise missing… I just hope the common folk are smart enough to see this the smoke and mirrors.
I wish I had your optimism. We’re so polarized in this country now that liberals will ignore this story, dismissing it easily as “oh, well, that sucks that the files are gone, but I really doubt there’s a scandal there anyway”. At worst, they’ll shrug their shoulders and say that the IT people are incompetent.
And it’s -possible- that’s all there is to it, but there should definitely be an investigation, as there’s no way in hell those emails should be lost like that. Hell, I have emails from twenty years ago saved!
(And I say all this as a liberal-leaning person, mind you.)
The only way back from this, I think, is that the ‘outrage’, on either side, of the issue du jour, needs to be turned DOWN, not up. So that people don’t instinctively get defensive and unwilling to consider other points of view or compromise on what should happen next. That’s my two cents anyway.
oh, so the White House uses tape back-ups too? If mails were sent from the IRS to the White House, for instance, they should be on servers at BOTH ends. This ‘recycled drives’ fairy tale is for the technology-ignorant ONLY. Hell, if the technology is that old, ask Putin – THEY probably have better records than we do.
A request for White house server data will draw the executive privilege card I bet. That is, if their tape does not overwrite @ 6 months.
Heck, I bet Obama gets to read Angela Merkel’s emails going back for years. The irony.
According to the IRS policy document I found and posted here yesterday, tape backups and hard drives are not considered adequate for legal records retention. If they lost hard drive okay. Even if they lost the tape, okay. Where is the retained record? This cannot be incompetence or accident – I simply refuse to believe it. This can only be stonewalling. Seems to me that we damn near impeached a president for this — could it have been in the 70s when I was still in the Army? That long ago?
Richard, the IRS policy document for which you posted the link yesterday appears to be dated/have become effective 27 March of this year. Lerner’s missing email is from Jan 2009 to Apr 2011.
“So that people don’t instinctively get defensive and unwilling to consider other points of view or compromise on what should happen next.” How’s this: “Look, we’ve all lost emails. It happens. And we get that, sometimes, for a variety of reasons, computer hardware is discarded and that, later, the discarded hardware causes unforeseen difficulties. So, now, let’s discuss what can be done with respect to Ms. Lerner and the IRS situation. Our proposal–and, mind you, it’s just that–a proposal–s this: First, we lock the bitch up for a week in a dark, chilly, and damp cell. Second, we provide her with a pencil and paper with instructions to write down the answers to a list of about 100 questions, beginning with ‘Who directed whom to delete your emails and when and how was the direction issued?’ Third, we put everyone in her immediate office and those in government with whom she was known to have frequent contact under oath and ensure each knows the perjury laws.
There is more but we don’t want to monopolize this discussion. Your turn. Danish? Bagel?
This corrupt administration doesn’t even try to hide it’s nefarious goings-on anymore. What a cold slap to the face of every American citizen. It’s nothing but a big. “fuck you” to every honest citizen.
The only logical conclusion to draw is that the IRS is anti freedom and an enemy of the American people and must be put out of business
I think you have that backasswards, you, with one of the greatest tags I have ever seen: Herman J. Messkit. On the one side there is government and, on the other, the American People. Time was they worked for us (sorta kinda,anyway) and, at least, they feared negative feedback from the public they ‘served.’ No longer. We work to serve their needs and we are regarded by them as the enemy, the arrogant bastards.
Too easy.
Since they don’t have the sent box.
Request ALL email from EVERYONES In box during that time period.
You know, to filter for her email.
Bet that would be an interesting fishing expedition.
I am about the farthest thing from an IT expert as you can get. However, in one of my previous jobs, one of my collateral duties was as Information Systems Security Officer, and I did attend Information Assistance training as part of that duty. So I know enough to say that it is virtually impossible to permanently delete emails–even when you are trying to do so. And the idea that emails were permanently deleted because someone’s desktop “crashed” is beyond ludicrous. This whole thing just screams for a Special Prosecutor with subpoena authority and dedicated FBI support. People need to go to jail.
“Information Assistance” should read “Information Assurance”. Fat fingers are fat.
I am probably the 9th guy to say this but … find the IT guy who is responsible for IRS records retention and try him for felony “not doing your job”. “Convenient” does not begin to describe my reaction to this.
Oh, these people are so full of it… Everyone knows that they are covering their six.
Here’s something interesting I heard, I haven’t read all the comments so I don’t know if anyone else picked up on it; not a single repair company or technical service or *anything* was called when this alleged “hard drive wipe” occurred. Nothing. No one was called to fix the problem, or even try to recover the lost data.
This leads to two possibilities; either the hard drive still does exist and they’re completely bullcrapping, or the hard drive doesn’t exist anymore (which is likely).
Either way, the data does not just “vanish”; it’s on the servers, and it is backed up.
Furthermore, why doesn’t someone just subpoena Lehrner’s phone, or her texting records? I find it hard to believe that she simply did not text anyone. It’d be easy to find a smoking gun, because you don’t “lose” texts. They’re always still around somewhere.
Over at Ace of Spades on the thread about whether or not all this is technically possible someone brought up the documents Sandy Berger snuck out of the national archives in his pants-anyone remember that?
I had forgotten-turns out he pled to a misdemeanor and got a fine and loss of his clearance for three years. So I guess these guys a running the same play book, knowing that they will get a slap on the wrist and the eternal thanks of the politically well connected. But, hey, we’ve all got a new excuse to try when we get audited.
So what your saying is next time one gets audited they can use the ‘my recipts were on my hard drive which recently crash’ and the IRS is just going to accept this?… About as good as the dog ate my home work…
Or the excuse can be ‘I had the docs in my pants leg and they fell out at the bus stop and I didn’t notice till I got home’.
Gee whiz, if I can recover every idiot e-mail I’ve ever deleted going back to 2004, when I got my computer, am I expected to believe these e-mails are actually gone for good?
Come on! Even grade schoolers can come up with better excuses than these maroons! This is pure unadulterated bull crap, and all of you know it.