Now the Administration is claiming that Lois Lerner’s hard drive was lost, destroyed or recycled, so her emails may be lost forever.
I’m not a networking guy, but I still call BS.
Perhaps if…
- Lois Lerner’s hard drive
- Lerner’s work-group’s email server’s hard drive
- The RAID (large redundant hard-disk) array(s) and/or backup tape(s) to which Lerner’s work group email server backed up its emails
- Any of the number of tapes, and/or mirrors of RAID arrays, to which the emails had been backed up in the interest of “disaster recovery”…
…(in other words, the exact same level of backup to which any private entity would be required to adhere to by law, or face default judgment in the event of litigation, including (especially!) from the IRS, and the level of backup all levels of all serious business practice to make sure they can respond to legal action, to say nothing of things like, well, hard drives going bad)…
…had all been “lost, destroyed or recycled”, they’d have a point.
Odds?
INCIDENTAL NOTE: This post is #11,000 since November, 2006. Apropos nothing.
We need another Snowden to step forward. High crimes and misdemeanors have been committed, the country doesn’t trust the government, and needs to see some perp walks to heal.
I am a network/server guy and everything you said is correct. Have no idea what the fed uses, but for Microsoft Exchange it IS possible to archive your email to a .pst file and store that on a hard drive. BUT, before the archiving, all your email is indeed stored on the Exchange server, which is backed up daily (to clear the log files), not to mention, there may be some off site replication going on to a fed co-location for disaster recovery purposes, which would also have a copies of the email. And all of this is even simpler if the email server is in a virtual environment (VMware, Hyper-V, etc.) and the whole email server is backed up or replicated. Basically this boils down to “my dog ate my homework” and is yet one more cover up by the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.
Oh, one more thing, if I went through our annual Sarbanes Oxley audit and said “No, I don’t have any backups of our email server for the past two years”, I’d be joining the ranks of, what is the phony made up unemployment number now, 6%? But just like Obama care, I’m sure SOX doesn’t apply to the same people who wrote the law.
It doesn’t really matter.
The IRS scandal is just another non-scandal the radical right is trying to turn into something more.
Actually, stopped by not just to laugh at the latest crazy conspiracy theory, but rather to remark, a couple of days late, on the 20th anniversary of the O.J. Simpson chase, one of those events (or non-events, it went so slowly) that leaves a clear memory over the years of where I was at the time — your living room Mitch. It was on television, in the background, very much an anti-climax as I recall. There should be at least a few of the other people present among your readers who might remember that as well; one of the “20 years ago” moments.
Be well!
I’m not a major tech head about such things, but I think it stands to reason that if Lerner SENT an e-mail, somebody RECEIVED it, correct? So, there should be SEVERAL, if not hundreds of e-mail recipients with Lois Lerner e-mails in their inbox–or their junk file–right? I have to believe Lerner didn’t just send e-mails to .gov accounts. Her hard drive is a moot point – a distraction.
The IRS scandal is just another non-scandal the radical right is trying to turn into something more.
Well, I’ll give you this much – you nailed the chanting point, right to spec.
And yep, I remember watching that chase with the whole crowd. Surreal.
Cerberus took a dump on her hard drive.
PoD, would you get that tri-headed dog potty trained already? Sheesh.
I was a little tyke watching the NBA Finals when the chase came on, I’m still annoyed at OJ for that one. We got a special place reserved for him down here already.
In ancient times when storage was horribly expensive, back in 1980, I was responsible for designing our backup strategy for an underfunded state university on a research network of workstations. We had a backup strategy more robust than the one the IRS claims it was running 2 years ago.
Just sayin’.
The IRS scandal is just another non-scandal the radical right is trying to turn into something more.
At the very least, what this shows is just how scandalously incompetent the government is at IT. I assume that even someone with the intellectual capability of a Dog can see that.
Personally, I would say that the House should zero out the bonuses and raises of the IRS until the emails are found. You’d see a lot of IT folks scrambling into their closets if that were the case.
Something is fishy about the IRS explanations. They are required by law to retain emails. Lerner was division head at the IRS, for God’s sake. Lerner was a DOJ lawyer at one point in her career.
I am guessing that there was a loop hole in the law or IRS rules that allowed her to manage her own backup scheme, and that she took advantage of it. Or maybe she was bypassing the backup system illegally or against department rules.
What I haven’t heard is why these emails of legal interest were not backed up.
I wish there were journalists out there who would look into why a division head of the IRS was allowed to not have a robust backup scheme for her public work.
“PoD, would you get that tri-headed dog potty trained already? Sheesh.”
You try training something with 3 separate brains that have a combined IQ below 50 and get back to me Yossarian
Congrats on 11,000 posts, Mitch. Dang, you are prolific.
As for the Lerner business, I’d subpoena every IT guy the IRS has, particularly those who are responsible for servers. Put ’em up on the Hill with the full star chamber treatment. Someone will talk. Meanwhile, I’d be sending subpoenas to the White House and a number of people on Capitol Hill, including our guy Al Franken. Obama will claim executive privilege, but that’s fine. It’s time to find the new John Sirica on the DC circuit. If we can’t find one, that tells us something equally important; i.e., game over.
The OJ deal was *just* the sort of meaningless spectacle that would captivate a moron’s imagination enough to mark the anniversary.
I am guessing that there was a loop hole in the law or IRS rules that allowed her to manage her own backup scheme, and that she took advantage of it. Or maybe she was bypassing the backup system illegally or against department rules.
What I haven’t heard is why these emails of legal interest were not backed up.
I wish there were journalists out there who would look into why a division head of the IRS was allowed to not have a robust backup scheme for her public work.
Alternate view: They were backed up. It’s the government – an entity in this country that is uniquely allowed to generate its revenue at gunpoint. Look at the data center they built out in Nevada. Look at the technology the NSA is capable of using against the public. They’ve got the best technology money can buy. A simple hard drive crash lost the emails?
Bull. Shit.
It’s a lie. She’s lying, the testimony is a lie, whoever said the hard drive crashed is lying, whoever said the hard drive was recycled is lying. They’re just hoping the LIV public is stupid enough to go “oh…hard drive crashed…emails gone…shoulda used Carbonite”.
Unfortunately for them there are enough of us who are A) hostile to this administration and B) educated in the ways of IT/network administration that we should be able to cause enough backlash to derail their party train.
swiftee is spectacularly on point. People need to be cuffed, perp walked, and sentenced to spend decades rotting in federal PMITA prison
correction: whoever said the hard drive crashed caused the emails to disappear is lying, whoever said the hard drive was recycled so we can’t ever get them back is lying.
Doggone is acting as a wonderful picture of how badly politicized the left is these days. Even if we could ignore the fact that it clearly indicates the IRS is obstructing justice, any IT manager who relies on a single hard drive to keep critical documents needs to be fired.
And if she can’t see that, she is a political hack for whom the “slow white bronco” chase” (what’s this about John Elway again?) is more important than clear incompetence and corruption in the IRS.
You try training something with 3 separate brains that have a combined IQ below 50 and get back to me Yossarian
Sadly, I don’t have access to Oval Office.
Bill C-
I am extremely interested in why these emails were not backed up. I think that if you go down that road you’ll get to a point where the DOJ or Lerner herself gave her permission to keep an email account exempt from the rules.
You try training something with 3 separate brains that have a combined IQ below 50 and get back to me Yossarian
Actually, I thought that sounded pretty much like DG. I guess the experiment was a success.
And wasn’t it DG who was on here sometime back, demanding that Chris Christie’s “Bridgegate” emails be produced because the situation reeked of government abuse?
PM: I simply don’t believe they weren’t backed up. I think they were, redundantly, just like any medium to large private sector corporate IT department would do. Not only that, I believe the federal government MUST have everything backed up, by law, for FOIA inquiries. I think they’re just outright lying because A) they think they’re above it all and B) they don’t think the Republican led inquiry board DESERVES a truthful answer.
This won’t see any resolution until multiple people are physically behind bars.
I must join the “BS” chorus.
I have a feeling these emails were logged, backed up, and indexed in a few different ways, and on a server. The fact that the explanations are vague and even mention problems on the client make me truly suspicious.
That is not to say that her emails are available at this time.
But if they are not available, it is most likely because agency policy dictates that the email messages are unrecoverable after a certain (and relatively short) time. In Minnesota, the reason given for this policy is to avoid legal discovery, but they conveniently cut off responsibility as well. :-/
Addendum: If she WAS using a private email account, then A) there’s a good chance that private email provider has copies, especially if it’s Google/Gmail. I know at our work, private/non-corporate email content is monitored: “UnitedHealth Group monitors all personal webmail traffic for company policy violations. Any unauthorized use may, subject to applicable local laws, result in discipline, termination of employment, civil fines and/or criminal penalties.”
*IF* she had a local client that really did store emails on the C: drive (say…Thunderbird or similar) then I could see them being gone. They had to go thru the firewall, but I could see the firewall merely letting them pass and not recording content. But I am extremely skeptical that they would think that far into it.
I would like to know more about the software/infrastructure she used to send these emails. I’m surprised that hasn’t been raised in the hearings. Or if it has, why hasn’t it been made public? Millions of inquiring IT minds would like to know.
DG,
On the off chance that you actually read the and respond to those who’ve replied to you, please answer the following; Given that:
…then tell us how you think the IRS’ story – the emails vanished because “a hard drive broke” – is plausible?
I’m dying to hear this.
Please be specific.
Or if it has, why hasn’t it been made public?
Mainstream journos reporting about IT?
Have you heard the MPR reporters trying to describe what’s in the Deloitte MNSure report?
BTW, the slashdot commenters on this story, http://politics.slashdot.org/story/14/06/19/1254217/irs-recycled-lerner-hard-drive, overwhelmingly assume that there is some nastiness behind this “lost email” claim. Slashdotters are no friends of the GOP or the Tea Party.
I just can’t wait for the first IRS case against a taxpayer that uses the lies that Lois Lerner and the IRS are using. As painteddog pointed out, any private company that fails any of the government shake downs called Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA meaningful use or Gramm-Leach-Bliley, they would have to pay some hefty fines, plus someone’s head at that company would roll. In fact, at least 50 CIOs lost their jobs last year due to HIPAA issues alone.
I truly hate to do this, but I have to say there is a possibility the IRS is telling the truth. And not like “okay, yes, it’s technically possible Elvis is alive and living in Michigan” but more like “it’s possible because that’s how my employer’s system worked until this year.”
I subscribe to an email list-serve so I got lots of emails, many with documents attached for recording questions. My employer had a limit on bytes per employee. I routinely got “your mailbox has exceeded its limit” messages from the county’s IT people. I had to go into the mailbox and delete old messages. My Deleted Items folder only went back a month. Anything older than that was not accessable (at least not to me).
We’ve switched to Microsoft Outlook 365 first of the year so there’s more storage now, but back then, yeah, our system was similar to what the IRS is claiming they had.
I’m worried that they’re trying to let the clock run out till Barry’s term is ending and just prior to that he pardons all the scumbags.
Mainstream journos reporting about IT?
I remember an NPR report some time ago that attempted to explain what a mainframe was. It basically boiled down to them saying it’s like a computer you keep under your desk, only bigger.
To them, a virtual partition is something Germany did to the Sudetenland. It’s no wonder they’re buying the hard drive crash BS.
Joe Doakes,
Don’t mistake inbox and personal storage limits for backup. A sysadmin can limit you to a tiny amount of storage – but that storage can (and, if you’re with government or any business with an regulatory exposure) must be backed up and accessible for discovery.
So I’ll say it’s possible – but neither likely nor plausible.
Lerner is a lawyer and (I’ve heard) a partisan democrat. She knew that her communications were official correspondence. If their was any chance that they held information she wanted to keep, she could have kept it. All you have to do is CC your gmail account.
Powhatan, yes, but the trick is that if it’s required by law, you have a system that keeps the records. And if that system did not in fact exist, thousands of IRS IT employees and contractors are keeping very, very quiet about it.
Good points, bikebubba.
It is funny that many government entities around the country, are required to retain emails for at least 3 years. Until last week, I was working for a company that sells email archiving solutions. It attaches to an email server, then essentially gets a copy of any email either inbound, outbound or internal. Those copies are then unable to be altered, deleted or hijacked, based on the duration of retention limits set up within. Documents with legal holds applied, can’t be deleted until the legal hold tag is removed. Documents could also be retrieved easily via a variety of search parameters. These systems are fairly inexpensive compared to the costs of just one records search off of Exchange or Domino servers for specific emails ala GM’s ignition switch issues, by a lawyer or IT geek.
bosshoss, hope that you’re doing well in a new job or on your job search or retirement!
I should have spoken even more directly. If indeed it is the law that these records need to be kept, and it is, no sane IT director implements this by leaving it in the hands of individual employees. Rather, it’s a central, automated system that records this data. You don’t want a system that has 100,000 potential points of failure.
Don’t mistake inbox and personal storage limits for backup. A sysadmin can limit you to a tiny amount of storage – but that storage can (and, if you’re with government or any business with an regulatory exposure) must be backed up and accessible for discovery.
Two points.
First, the reason you get a tiny amount of storage is because it’s not the cost of storage devices that makes storage expensive, it’s the human element of administering the servers and managing the backup/restore procedure that drive the costs.
Second, most companies have very strict retention policies on employees that make them delete emails after fixed time periods. This is done to make future legal discovery difficult, since by complying with those policies it indemnifies the company if the emails can’t be found. This is important since the peons can’t be trusted to destroy incriminating emails, while those who would be the normal target of a legal assault are smart enough to not put that stuff into writing in the first place. (That Lerner wasn’t smart enough not to put that stuff in writing tells you all you need to know about her ability.)
If/when they track down the emails expect a mass exodus from O’s administration. I hear a lot of people are prepping their resumes, and alibis.
Oh, joy and rapture if that were true, POD. I won’t believe it until I see it on CNN, however.
(CNN because they’re still carrying Obama’s water, and not MSNBC because they’re just meth-induced batshit cray-cray)
When I say mass exodus, I mean people leaving voluntarily and getting shady pardons so they won’t have to testify. It’s the DC way you know, then they become lobbyists