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IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation
phrackthat writes with an update to Friday's news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS's apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes.
Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. ... Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail.
This is a massive conspiracy. The IRS is hopelessly corrupt. We need a special prosecutor and get people under oath. There needs to be a lot of jail time handed out, starting with the vile Lois Lerner.
an ill wind that blows no good
Do these people not run Exchange or some other centralized emailing system? When I used to work as a systems administrator, none of the companies I worked for stored emails on the client side. It was all done through Exchange, held on the company servers and backed up to tape. If a client crashed, at most they lost a few minutes of unsyncronized drafts.
Not to worry. NSA has a copy.
And throw away the key.
These are the kinds of people whom solidify in the mind of the protester the need for Violent Radicalization, and in the mind of the Patriot, the need for Terrorism and Civil War. That path invariably ends in sorrow; nearly every revolution and insurrection has resulted in the election of a despot. America is one of the very few historical example of a civil consequence of Revolution, and it's people very much so, despite it's governments best efforts, believe in a higher existence.
You can only "Nudge" people so far before they break (Yes I'm referencing this book: ISBN 978-0143115267, because so many policy makers think of it as a bible)
Also, the individual who asked or ordered them to do this; that person, jail.
Also, any organization which requested this, those people, charge with treason, then either publicly execute or jail.
Of course they do. This is just someone trying very hard to cover their arse. Not a very good attempt I would say.
What's the matter with you, America? In Europe we go through governments like fat people go through Cheetos. Why can't you people kick these criminals out? They just keep getting re-elected over and over and over again.
I just don't get it.
This is all BOOOOSH!
Having worked in Government IT before. What I can say is that the standard IT model is to not keep any data, especially email, stored primarily on the local desktop pc. What ever is happening is deliberate for sure. The standard model is to have a working copy - your outlook inbox on the local pc, at most, if its not stored on the MS exchange server which it should be to meet any records retention policies. So, to lose the email, they would have to have lost email for the entire exchange email server, and, all of its daily backups, weekly, and monthly backups for the past 2 years, and the hard drives of the local desktop computers. Then, once a critical failure occurred they would have had to purposely made the decision to not restore the backups to retrieve the email, and intentionally lose it. Its managements responsibility to make sure that never happens also.
Bullshit. The same laws apply to me. My email is not "stored on my computer". While it is cached, there are many parts of law that prohibit it from being stored there, starting with the Official Records Act. All email that I send that provides any official direction is stored IAW the official records act. To do otherwise is a crime.
I'm sure the NSA has copies. Perhaps someone should request them?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Assuming they are responding to a subpoena, this is perjury on the face of it. There is no way the crash of a desktop workstation could destroy the contents of a hard drive at the level that all the 1's and 0's are not recoverable by forensic analysis. Not to mention the server and backup records.
Unless the "crash" was a laptop in an airplane crashing into an erupting volcano. Or the disk was overwritten many times by a military grade eraser program and them filed down with an industrial sander.
Peaple need to do serious jail time for this. If this passes without consequences, it will be used by both parties repetitively in the future and the government will become even less accountable in the future.
Are the jackass repubs still fucking this dead story? Tons of libs targeted too. As if they give a shit about that.
They can burn.
Transparency! Transparency! Transparency!
Move along people, nothing to see here.
Seriously...
Check the backup tapes
Why would the user's computer crashing destroy the emails on the server? Why wouldn't the IRS have backups? Isn't this agency's core competency knowing about records and stuff? Can you imagine if GM or Microsoft was accused of evading taxes and all of the incriminating emails vanished due to tragic accidents just as they were subpoenaed? How about an ordinary peasant like you or me?
Even assuming client side storage of email wasn't a ridiculous proposition, what kind of "crash" would render it unrecoverable via forensics? Was it accidentally left on an artillery range? Perhaps it accidentally fell into a nuclear explosion? Were the hard drive platters accidentally dropped into a particle accelerator?
Also, how did the crashes affect all the employees who would have had knowledge of executive branch involvement at the same time? Was it just a tragic "bring your hard drive" field trip where all of the IRS's executive leadership left their emails next to an MRI machine or something?
Can't they subpoena data from everyone else at the IRS who sent or received emails from the employees under investigation?
By it's very nature, there are always 2 copies of every email, one on the sender's PC and one on the receiver's PC.
Obviously a coverup by the IRS. Anyone working in IT knows this is B.S. or total incompetence.
“It is unfortunate that the IRS experienced equipment failure that resulted in several computers crashing and some email data being lost from Lois Lerner’s hard drive between 2009 and 2011,” said Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. “But every equipment failure is not a conspiracy. The IRS has taken every step to restore the data, and has already retrieved the emails sent internally during that time period from non-impacted computers.”
What kind of equipment failure, loses data from more then one computers hard drive AND the email server?
Maybe raid failure? And email is never stored locally on the client, and no one noticed and the backups overridden?
It's possible I guess :/ - I'm not sure how much I'd believe it though.
Tons of libs targeted too.
Name one.
As far as I know, the only "liberal" groups that were targeted were liberal groups that were also against the current administration. Pro-Democrat Party groups, on the other hand, were not targeted.
This is absolutely a political issue and a gross overstepping of power on behalf of the current administration and they absolutely should be investigated for it.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
You'd figure the gov would have access to some powerful hd data forensics teams. Shit I just saved a very important HD that was failing with lots of bad sectors and slow as hell using Acronis backuo. I'm sure a freezer and some other recovery software would worked.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
They are covering their buts and the man that put them up to it. They no longer serve the US population as a bias government organization. WELCOME TO THE NEW KGB OF THE US..
No wonder I got audited after donating to Ron Paul. First time I ever donated. First time I ever got audited in over 20 years of working to pay other peoples bills.
Sorry to repeat myself, but this was a late post to the first incarnation of this story.
Sharyl Attkisson (investigative reporter formerly with CBS) has posted some questions that should be asked:
Coincidence?
I have this mental picture of lots of computers flying off the roof of a building. Or cars backing over them mysteriously. Something like a Monty Python sketch.
Have gnu, will travel.
Who has the "great length"? Obama, Lerner, Pelosi Reid, Jarrett, Levin. They couldn't get a great length between them combined! I pray for a fatal yeast infection and prostate cancer to strike them all!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
someone investigate all these corrupt illegal organizations (mostly right wing, "tea party") that are claiming to be tax exempt, even tho they are primarily political.
Looks like a vast right wing conspiracy to commit tax fraud and steal elections
Senators and Representatives blow like the leaves during elections, but our federal institutions persist. Their executive personnel may turn over, but the organization doesn't.
You can have as many Senate hearings and bluster on CSPAN as you like, possibly even terminate and reappoint senior level officials, but the organizational mission of the NSA & CIA is skullfuckery, treachery and manipulation, and the IRS exists to refill the wallet of the federal government every way imaginable.
What will come of this? Well, a probe into data archiving pract Oh look a tornado just wiped out a town out West and one of the Kardashians is pregnant again. Just a sec, gotta look at Reddit on my iPhone. What were you saying?
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
that an email on someone elses computer came from the shown recipient ?
after all, people could be going to jail, or loosing their pensions: it is not enough to say, hey, lets look at other hard drives; you need forensic chain of evidence.
In fact the IRS was scrutinizing the left wing organizations too. This is just trolling biased BS.
The Congress should provide a list of all IRS employees under suspicion so that the IRS can lose all their emails and documents from the relevant period. Then, the Democrats will declare the investigation closed and we can move to the next scandal. P.S.: I got this plan from Harry Reid, Thanks, Harry!
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Thats the point
can you find HIS emails?
Pop this program on, and "Poof" you have a crash that is guaranteed to wipe the stuff you wanted to hide and do it in a way that is undetectable.
The kind of hardware failure that keeps gov retained emails clean and safe. Meetings posted to all staff, the need for more equipment, tasks many staff know about, that tasks have been completed, the good reviews, requests for office supplies and everything that can be trusted to a court or search by any entity at anytime. .com email accounts via contractors for the duration of a task.
With some projects you dont use gov networks with backups. With some projects you use federal gov cleared
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It is just like the executive team to bogus the IT team to cover this mess up they created. The one in power to pull this card knows the truth hurts really really bad! I for one believe in the all mighty statement on the US dollar "IN GOD WE TRUST" to cover the honest in this country!
Just fire them all and start from scratch with a simplified tax code. If they complain then treat them as terrorists.
So, we are expected to believe that all government email resides on individual workstations, as opposed to a centralized server that gets backed up reguarly? That's simply absurd.
Evidence of the act of document destruction should be harder to cover up than the documents themselves. Now it's x7! Obama is going to have no choice now but to throw all seven under the bus to avoid impeachement. Usually I am a pessimist, but I'm predicting actual jail time for at least one of the seven.
Why are we so focused on the tea party thing? Didn't they also say they were looking into open source projects as well? Doesn't that effect us more?
The IRS employees responsisble for the "lost" emails and Tea Party persecution are praying to heaven that Hillary Clinton wins in 2016. If a Republican takes office there will be an independent council, grand jury indictment, a trial, likely conviction and jail time. Also Republican political appointess to the IRS who would make damn sure that the IRS stopped stonewalling and that every shred of evidence would be turned over to congress.
If Hillary wins and the culprits recieve no punishment that would be license for the IRS to engage in open and rampant corruption. Once the IRS knows that it can engage in criminally corrupt conduct without reprecussions then the floodgates will be wide open to unrestrained corruption, discrimiation and repression in the IRS and any othe federal agency. I though those Republicans crazys stockpiling ammunition and AR-15s, screaming "The gooberment's gonna get us" were, well, crazy. And I still do. It's just that reality is changing to conform to their delusions.
"But the Republicans will be doing it for partisan motives!" scream the Democrats. Why should I give a shit about that, so long as justice is served?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
God what a bunch of stupid fucks, if the IRS isn't using the equivalent of a centralized mail server, then they all just need to be shot and we no longer pay taxes, ever.
Fucking idiots, if they do use a centralized server, then what fucking difference does it make if a person's PC was wiped? All the e-mail is on the centralized e-mail server.
Jeebus - just go look on that server, check the backups (or were they so much more than fucking stupid that they didn't backup their non-existing central e-mail server?)
I feel cheated that I'm not getting a new excuse each time they refuse to produce.
Come on folks, theater requires you at least an attempt to show that you are not stonewalling.
Let me suggest,
1) We were all doing xxx on our computers and got a virus.
2) What do you expect from computers which came from the lowest bidder.
3) We Googled how to get Emails off a computer and worked, but it wasn't copying them off, it was deleting them.
4) We have a policy not to keep E-mails longer that 3 months.
5) What was the question?
Targeted, total deletion. The flip side to reading the internet.
Can anyone speak to the emails they are discussing here? It's obvious that any competent IRS email server would have been backing these emails up, but if they were using Outlook, there is a well known issue regarding the size of PST files, corruption, and subsequent purging of the files. Often administrators will purge the user's inbox after their local PST file has been backed up. Then, that file is remounted in Outlook, or kept on the local machine for use at a later time. If these (or the old Exchange data) weren't being backed up, this is not only poor administration but likely a breach of law.
The second possibility is that other email services outside the IRS were being used. If they are trying to get to this email, I'd like to know.
I'm not defending what they're saying, it all sounds like bullshit. I'd just like someone with some understanding of the technicalities of what's going on to chime in.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
wow, the IRS thing is awesomely ridiculous. All the people under investigation have had computer crashes that prevent their emails from being delivered to the prosecutors. What are the odds?
I can see it now...
Prosecutor: "Give us the emails for Lerner!"
IRS: "Uh, sorry, computer crashed, lost his data".
P: "Really? Well, umm...I guess that is possible. How about chief-of-staff Flax? I need his emails too"
I: "Computer crashed; what a coincidence. We lost his data too."
P: "Hmm, well I got four more suspects..."
I: "Yeah, uh, let me see that list. Okay, computer crashed, computer crashed, computer caught fire, exploded, THEN crashed and... oh, you're in luck with the last one!"
P: "Are you telling me it didn't crash?"
I: "No, isn't that great? Too bad the computer was accidentally was destroyed in a bizarre pet hippopotamus incident. But don't worry, hippos are now banned from all IRS offices."
Yes, the IRS still runs Windows XP. Their systems are an archaic cluster of crap. Remember, the IRS just collects the money but doesn't get to keep it and spend it on upgrades. Only police departments and judges can do that using forfeiture laws.
Investigators from the House Ways and Means Committee interviewed IRS technicians Monday.
The federal IT sector is heavily outsourced -- the investigators should be looking to see which firm(s) provided IT services to the IRS in 2010 and bringing those firms in. There should have been contract documents specifying requirements about backing up email servers.
This part is also laughable:
Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said.
Sorry, but federal government IT standards in 2011 required that PCs run XP or Win-7. Even a Linux and BSD guy like myself knows that XP was reliable enough that it is extremely unlikely that both of their computers crashed with data loss.
I can't find the specific federal IT standard that was in place during 2011, but it did require the use of Windows XP or later. Here's a September 10,2009 article titled: "Federal agencies prepare to make the leap from XP to Windows 7": http://gcn.com/articles/2009/0...
WTF? Were they using fucken POP accounts or something?
NSA should be able to extract them from their communication s database
So then fire the agency’s criminal investigations unit.
It would have really been a life saver when those few year old drunken emails were discovered had my computer crashed and Google lost them..how the f*&* is this a valid explanation???
I guess you stopped paying attention to this story quite a while ago, which is understandable. They only made that argument for a week or two. They have since admitted wrong-doing, first blaming it on a field office, but later documents showed to orders came from Washington. I don't recall the EXACT numbers offhand, but something like 342 conservative groups were targeted and 4 liberal groups ended up being sent over in the stack. It has now been shown conclusively that the order was to target conservative and libertarian groups. The question now is who gave the order. Nobody active in politics on the left brings up the few liberal groups who got mixed in the the conservatives and libertarians anymore - they know that's not just a losing argument, but one that makes them look like liars when the numbers are mentioned.
Bush appointed Lois Lerner.
You laugh, but for the segment of Slashdot still hung up on blaming everything on Bush, this is their go-to response to this whole mess.
Here's one... http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Somehow I bet they were asked for her 'computer emails' instead of her emails or some other screwed up interpretation of the request. Hell with her computer crashing, its irrelevant.
>> anyone who has handled email admin for a big business knows they have email "retention polices" where they explicitly delete all email older than X days...to preemptively destroy evidence that might be used against them...
He's right. Here's a typical article relaying that point from last month:
http://resources.infosecinstit...
You can target everyone who was sent or sent mail to anyone who lost email - you find out who that is simply by gathering a list of everyone that person communicated with a month before and after the period they lost the email for. You might miss a few people in the middle but it would be pretty close, and you'd probably get most of it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It you vote republican or democrat, then you asked for this. So fuck you all! This is YOUR fault! And only yours! Assholes all of you! Your fucking majority rule is fucking up my life...
Posting AC due to abusive moderation on my account. Yes, fuck the moderator also that is doing this.
-F
Emails aren't lost because of a computer crash. Workstations don't function as their own Exchange server. The emails will be processed by a central server, and EVERY email is backed up as a business record.
There is no question that there is corruption in the Government. The only question is how high up it goes. The say is:
Power corrupts.
Absolute power...is actually kind of neat.
The IRS has the power to just arbitrarily make decisions about what is income, what is property, how it is calculated for tax purposes. That should not be a power delegated to the IRS.
How does this come as a surprise to anyone, our government and Americans "loses" just about anything::
memory of the Iran-Contra scandal details
the focus on "terrorism" that has kept us
the idea that it was Bush JR that could have stopped the recession if his people had even the slightest interest
that Reagan's administration signed the laws that current (and past) administrations use to spy
common sense that bullets do not stop mid-air
that "equal" doesn't mean reverse discrimination or "sort of almost like"
knowledge that grease is not a food group that one can live on
a clue that the right wing is never honest, ever
the ability to stop screwing out country by spending billions playing games with oil bandits
Ya, IRS, um, sorry, I'd pay my taxes this year, but my computer crashed. You know how that is.
Anyways, hopefully next year we won't be having this computer crashing problem anymore, right?
Be seeing you...
There is really nothing more to say.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
Quick version: IRS didn't want to (or was pressured to) not spend 10 million on a REAL archive system, so used users' desktop harddrives for that purpose instead, which is of course risky.
Table-ized A.I.
Sorry for the language, but you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. You are guessing out of your ass based on fragments of info.
Idiot!
Table-ized A.I.
and flagged more progressive groups for review
"Review" meant a very different thing for groups that had things like "Tea Party" in their name, such as intrusive demands for information on participants and not actually approving any such groups for 27 months.
In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.
That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn't be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.
In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.
Your talking points are obsolete.
While the grandparent hasn't submitted references for this particular claim, several other people have for various claims which are comparable. For example, this story says there were "perhaps dozens" of similar progressive/liberal groups which passed during a time when no group with "Tea Party" and similar strings in their name got through.
A line like "liberal groups were also flagged" is generally the kind of garbage well-they-do-it-too stuff that drives me crazy, a pretty pathetic attempt to disarm outrage, and it's used by both parties. As a note, though, in this case, it seems to be true: the Obama administration made political decisions to deny non-profit status selectively. I'm aware of a health care non-profit in my area that was denied federal non-profit status during this time period. The lawyers involved had never seen anything like it-- the argument from the IRS was that "people who can't afford health care do not constitute a charitable group." (Whereas they pretty much hand non-profit status out to anybody else who asks for it.) But apparently free clinics and patient advocacy didn't fit into the "Affordable" Care Act (aka Huge Giveaway to Insurance Companies Act) narrative.
There's no need to look for conspiracies here. So long as we reward cost cutting and even abject failure (eg. the White House emails loser is now a CEO) we'll get poor practices instead of good ones.
To be frank, it's a workplace culture where such losses are acceptable and paying for preventative measures is not.
The Obama administration has lied under oath, and they will gladly do it again, and again, and again, ad infinitum
As long as no one dare to prosecute those fuckers, the Obama administration won't give a fuck about justice, about laws, about the Constitution
... but YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT !
The IRS has continued to stall the investigation and has refused to cooperate
The only HORSESHIT there is is fuckers like you who drank all the motherfucking liberal cool-aid there is
You're regurgitating a false narrative, constructed to mislead. The IRS's own Inspector General found wrongdoing.
More troubling I find the idea that things that you disagree with shouldn't be aired. Seriously, a federal agency very conveniently loses records, which if found would be the smoking gun, and you say there's nothing to see here, move along? Really? Merely because you're politically opposed to the victims? Sad beyond words...it's shocking that educated people really behave this way.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Where the fuck are the backups? Really......I am fairly confident the IRS uses Exchange. They have backups, sorry but a computer crash does not cover the loss of e-mail. Where is the mail on the servers?
What amazes me that even with clear corruption and cover ups some people will still bring out the party line, shout random BS, and then run away so they don't have to listen to facts they would rather repress.
Don't worry, soon Slashdot will be coming out in favor of re-invading Iraq.
Best Slashdot Co
Out of nowhere the Snowden-lover Soulkill suddenly wants government all over everyone, keeping records, looking over shoulders.
Nice consistent philosophy Soulkill.
Given that the Koch brothers are bankrolling the entire Tea Party 'phenomenon', the IRS was more than justified to investigate their tissue of lies claiming to be a non-profit citizen-led organization.
And indirectly (because campaign money is now free speech), those calling for this witch hunt are also funded by the Koch brothers.
The hammer should come down on these people as hard as it does on some poor bastard who lost a receipt come audit time.
I don't think USA Today is an approved source of information. Come back when you've got a quote from MSNBC or maybe the Huffington Post and the liberals might accept it.
PEOPLE MISS USE POWER!
...wants to talk to you.
So Question: It was and still surprisingly is by some considered best practice to store email on a centralized server type computer. (Redirect the home folder so everything is in one place) so 6 people in the same office loose their email because of a computer crash? well which computer? the one that some body redirected their home folders too? Where are the backups? Good question but what I keep finding is that the centralized storage method described above tends to implemented by the same people that use Outlook and well .pst's just don't backup properly when people leave the client open. So maybe the IRS should use Exchange or GMail or give up on Outlook and use Thunderbird (whose mail store does back up properly) But honestly I see a whole bunch of people foaming at the mouth here that have either forgotten what it is like to be on the disaster recovery side of things or who like Sharyl Attkisson just don't know the first thing about IT. There is a reason why is some government agencies important stuff gets printed and filed and the expense gets picked up by the taxpayer.
PS politics aside, Congress created a unwieldy tax code that no real person can navigate successfully. The guidance on these political groups was basically unintelligible according to the press I've read so perhaps we need to give these IRS employees a pass and put the blame squarely where it belongs with a dysfunctional Congress that churns out impossible regulations every time they actually get together to pass something.
This focus on Lois Lerner is a republican red herring. The real scandal at the IRS is the billions in fraudulent return payouts they make every year. The Republican-led congress has cut the IRS budget by a $billion, but it's a net loss when one factors in the loss due to the fraudulent return payouts (identity theft) and the reduced take from collections (about $8 billion). Read the article at the Boston Globe website. The IRS budget cut increased the deficit.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
Think there might be a link between Tea Party/Libertarian groups and tax rebels who, for ideological reasons (not for personal gain of course) refuse to pay their taxes? Is there a possibility that the IRS was simply doing it's job?
From Article II of the Nixon Articles of Impeachment:
And a few bullet points later, using the machinery of government to corrupt investigations.
I knew this whole thing stunk when she plead the 5th -- either she had crimes to hide, or she was innocent and deciding "not to participate in their political game", said use of the 5th thus being a crime itself.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I seem to remember the last time some really important documents were lost they were found somewhere in the vicinity of Hillary Clinton's desk. That might be a good place to start looking...
"In addition, 10% of people on those lists have been audited by the IRS."
It seems only natural that the IRS would want to investigate the members of a group whos central platform is tax evasion.
How is this any different from the DEA targeting members or NORML?
The NSA has them all archived somewhere . . .
It's either actual incompetence and an accident, or it's feigned incompetence with a purpose. Either answer is bad for citizens.
In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications
Ok not that I'm really following this story, I'm sure there are better numbers elsewhere, but in this quote: "perhaps dozens"? What does that even mean? Perhaps thousands? Perhaps millions? Perhaps none? This implies they don't actually know any numbers.
Gedanken experiment: tell the IRS "Sorry I didn't pay my taxes. I lost my W2." and follow with their reaction about responsibility for your documents and fulfilling your obligations.
Bush White House email controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_e-mail_controversy
"Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act.[1] Over 5 million emails may have been lost or deleted.[2][3] Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the Karl Rove lost emails, leading to damaging allegations.[4] In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been deleted.[5]"
Capcha "habeas"
"crashed" == was wiped
Not in 2011, it's funny that all those computers crashed in the same year.
The "crash" happened about 30 minutes after they received the request for the emails.
This is beyond absurd. "crashes" and "glitches" (which have already been pointed out here to be non-technical absurdity in it of itself), have exactly zero impact on the recoverability of messages stored on an Exchange server. Organizations set policy-based retention periods, typically somewhere in the range of 2 - 7 years, at which point data is intentionally purged. This gives the organization as a whole a set footprint of liability, and it is extremely important that the organization follow that policy to a 'T'. I have seen before where an organization says "our retention policy is 2 years", but we do not find hard mechanisms in place for purging data after the 2 year mark, which opens them up to massive indiscriminate seizure of data in a lawsuit, because they have shown there may be valuable data outside of their policy guidelines.
Here's my open invitation to our friends at the IRS: Feel free to ship me your audited Exchange servers, one global catalog DC (doesn't have to be the FSMO role holder, I'll just seize the roles over later), and your backups from the time period in question. Just let me know what mailboxes you need recovered from which time periods, and I'll just export them to PST for you. I can only assume if you're running Windows XP that your Exchange is probably no newer than 2003, which seriously sucks, but recoverability will be the same. My fee will be quid pro quo: My household will not be required to pay any Federal income taxes for the next 10 years. Oh I guess I should also mention - NSA? can you fwd this invitation over to IRS? thanks!
Of course it can. You're an idiot, shill.
You are trying to recover emails from the end users pc? That's ass-tarded. You grab the archives from the email server, probably exchange, problem solved.
Does the IRS assume we're all idiots? Clearly they do. Sorry, I didn't take a screen capture of the email, so now it's gone into the ether. Except that it's stored in archives on the exchange server. I'm not sure about US Gov regulations, but working for the provincial government here, we know they have a policy of keeping those email records for at least a year, if not more.
There's no excuse, this is BS.
considering that every one of those tens of thousands of computers are running FUCKING WINDOWS , then you are provably a drooling idiot if you think the probability for unrecoverable data loss is anything less than 1.0.
It is nice to know that some of the old Slashdot is still around. I expected something like this and you did not disappoint.
P.S. Fuck Beta.
Lost email? Call the NSA for some fresh copies!
First, the lies of omission in the story and 90% of the top rated comments: both liberal and conservative groups were scrutinized by the Bush-appointed head of the IRS, and the only group to actually be denied tax-exempt status was a liberal one. More conservative groups were looked at because far more conservative groups were created after Roberts unleashed the hounds with Citizens United, and the Koch-Adelson cash took astroturfing to 11.
Now, back to the lede. Teabaggers are the best thing that ever happened to Obama in multiple ways. They're the only thing that lets him claim liberal cred without his pants spontaneously combusting. They kept his right wing ass from getting primaried in 2012. They keep the Democratic base wimpering in a corner as party hacks browbeat them with the Lesser Of Two Evils bullshit, and cries of "who do you think would do a better job, President Palin/Paul/Ryan/Cruz?"
Obama is farther to the right than either Bush or Reagan on multiple fronts. Teabaggers give him cover by being even more batshit right wing crazy than he is. Teabaggers are part of the reason Obama has gotten away with his multiple attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare, privatize military pensions after spending years attacking Republicans for wanting to do the same on SS, spy on the electronic communications of the entire planet, and so on and on and on and on. The other two parts being the biased conservative media and a Dem party that surrendered all their principles as soon as it was "their guy" doing it.
Obama persecuting the Tea Party? He owes his presidency to the Tea Party.
Right, that's wasn't the point of their story. They merely determined that a certain category of political group, which happens to be in opposition to the current administration, experienced huge problems in getting approval while groups that tended to be in support had an easy time of it. They didn't bother to count the number of the latter.
Yet if a tax-paying citizen does the same it's obstruction of justice.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
This is, belive it or not, the biggest political scandal within living memory, possibly in all of American history.
An arm of the federal government targets citizens for intimidation based on their political beliefs, likely at the behest of the White House. When the jig is up, the miscreants do everything they can to lie, obfuscate, and destroy evidence.
Political revolutions have started over less.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Did they lose the e-mails of any other employees NOT under investigation. I'll put money on that being "NO". Prima facie evidence of conspiracy and racketeering.
the trouble is a special prosecutor will likely take long past the next presidential cycle and depending on who is elected nothing may come of it.
you need a more investigative press or a public who cares
Didn't we already re-invade Iraq about a decade ago?
And their CIO