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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
Remember this IS the government we're talking about here. They aren't accountable to anybody but themselves. Notice how the IRS sent these computers to its own criminal investigations unit? Yeah...
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.
Yes, of course they do. And they do regular backups. This story only flies with people who are not knowledgeable about computers in a business environment. Apparently the IRS thought there were enough of those that the people crying bullshit could be made to seem like right wing loonies.
But this isn't a right wing vs left wing issue -- whatever the current administration gets away with, will be fair game for the next administration, regardless of party.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Yes, the IRS runs Exchange. Yes, they have back-ups of the servers. However, back-ups from more than 2 years ago may age out. Thus, if you wait 2 years and dd if=/dev/[zero|urandom|random] the harddrive, you can make emails hard to recover.
227-3517
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.
> Yes, of course they do. And they do regular backups. This story only flies with people who are not knowledgeable about computers in a business environment.
Actually, 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 (often just 90 days) except for what each user deliberately saves off. They do it to preemptively destroy evidence that might be used against them. But they never say that, they always have reasons that sound legitimate to the credulous, like lack of resources or being appropriate to the business culture, etc. They also routinely over-write or discard the backup-tapes as part of that retention policy because that would defeat the purpose if they didn't.
I can totally believe that some chucklehead IT manager with experience in that sort of environment decided to implement the same polices for the IRS because it is an industry "best practice."
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.
Of course they do. This is just someone trying very hard to cover their arse.
Simple (unrealistic) proposal for a new law: for every employee under investigation the IRS has "lost emails" for, American taxpayers get a free year to use the excuse, "Oops, I just lost the financial documents for my audit" without any punishment, fines, or further questioning. By my reckoning, we all should have absolute defenses against tax audits until 2021 so far.
That will stop this nonsense fast.
Government is also slow on the technology pickup. The university back home still only keeps emails up to 1 year on their servers (citing space issues) and tells teachers and staff to archive emails if they want them longer. Typically, email hasn't been a "must keep a record of this" on the list of documents you save. The only reason they still have the computers that crashed is probably due to a requirement that they be properly disposed of to avoid leaking out sensitive data, and they just didn't get around to disposing of them.
Fine, sure 3 computers crashed, they were probably way out dated and many computer equipment isn't built to last. How many computers did they retrieve emails from? What percentage of these 3 is of the total?
When you make the rules, you are right when you're wrong.
OK a new size TV
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.
What about where the emails were sent? The emails that were "lost" were sent to the White House, the Department of Justice (Lerner sent other emails that we know of trying to coordinate with DOJ to try to drum up prosecutions of Tea Party groups) and the FEC to try to target any alleged political speech. Each of these departments should have independent backups and records on each of the recipient's computers.
A member of the House has already sent a request to the NSA for any metadata it may have on Lerner's emails. Hopefully this will help track down any "lost" emails and who the recipients were.
Yea, I noticed that slow pickup at the NSA complex in Utah - those are Commodore 64's right?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Yes, but... he still has a point. If the "computer crashed" story doesn't fly for whatever reason, they might throw a local sysadmin under the bus for "implementing a typical industry email purge policy, not realizing that it's illegal for a federal entity to do so". Watch for that story.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Don't hold your breath or you'll turn blue and pass out.
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."
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.
There are specific Fed regs for email. In fact, a hard copy is required. This is a blatant sham.
There are specific Fed regs for email. In fact, a hard copy is required. This is a blatant sham.
Agreed.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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
Nice BS AC. Try again. The IRS Inspector General's office stated in a letter that only 6 groups with “progress” or “progressive” in their names were given any scrutiny at all for potential political activity, while 70 percent of “progressive” groups received no additional scrutiny. The letter continued, “In comparison, 100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names were processed as potential political cases” and subjected to intrusive scrutiny. Finally, the letter concluded that it “did not find evidence that the IRS used [the term “Progressive”] as selection criteria for potential political cases.”
Further, all of the leftist political groups received their approval very quickly whereas most of the tea part groups have waited years and still haven't received approval of their applications! The reason why "repubs" are still "fucking this dead story" is because it isn't dead you brain-dead fucktard. Nixon merely wanted to use the IRS to oppress his political opponents but was denied - Obama fucking succeeded!
We call that kind of hardware failure a "Rose Mary Stretch".
Thats the point
2 years is a ridiculously short time to "age out" email archives. Especially for an agency that takes longer than that to handle basic interactions. I just got a call last month from the IRS regarding the estate of a relative who passed in 2011. And the IRS claims they have the authority to go back six years for substantial errors so I'd expect them to be keeping their emails at least that long. More realistically, I'd expect them to keep their emails indefinitely. Storage is getting cheaper faster than email accumulates. What does the average person accumulate in a decade? 5 gigs? IRS has around 90,000 employees so that's 450,000 gigs of data give or take. Shit, I've got 32,000 gigs of storage 2' from me. I could expand that to 78,000 by swapping in bigger hard drives. And 144,000 by swapping in bigger drives and adding more ports. That's with stuff I could order from Newegg and assemble on the dining room table. If I went with real equipment, the only limit would be my wallet.
Last company I worked for, had been archiving email for years before I started and hadn't thrown out (or lost) a single email when I left 5 years later. If legal needed something from 2005, they'd give me the particulars and I'd plug them in and the system spit out a compilation of every message that met the specs. I also made an image of every employee's hard drive when they left the company before I put a fresh image on their computer. Just in case they'd stored something important on their local drive instead of their department's server. Only needed that a few times but the cost was so negligible we spent more on donuts and bagels than storing drive images.
Their failure to have a redundant, secure archive of such recent email is either intentional destruction or gross incompetence.
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!
Hardly. Even if we could get such rules passed, we're talking about people covering their own asses against misconduct charges. Which would you prefer in that position? Having your job become more difficult, or releasing evidence that could land you, personally, at the wrong end of a federal court case? After all you'd better believe there's plenty of people still working there who would be implicated as well.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
An exchange server is not infallible or the primary source of discoverable data. The exchange server follows the rules of archiving and message expiration set out in the agency policy. Some organizations have a 90 to 120 day expiration as a default. This is done to prevent over discovery of email archives during a law suit, as well as to maintain some reasonable limit on data storage. If an organization has a competent general counsel, this will be strictly enforced. This means that the local client will contain either a pst or ost (in an exchange environment) that can be pulled that may contain trace elements of the synchronized mailbox. The local pst copy, both deliberate and incidental, do not have the expiration limits that are enforced on the server side. This means the local pst may contain years worth of messages, contacts, appointments, and other stuff. It's a treasure trove of discoverable data, but it's also at the mercy of the hardware / software environment on the client side. Unfortunately, a simple delete and compact on the local pst will mess up most ability to recover anything not in the active portion. This means, it's bye-bye for all intents and purposes.
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
It's not that uncommon. We had six computers in our area crash within days of each other. Of course, that was corporate IT idiots pushing out a BIOS patch that destroyed our disk encryption keys, rendering the devices utterly unrecoverable.
And two weeks after the "oops" incident? The bloody idiots re-pushed the patch across the board, because some computers didn't get it; the update software blindly installed it a second time, wiping all the freshly recovered disks a second time.
I simply cannot believe the IRS admins are any more competent than our IT department.
John
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.
Maybe if your employees weren't emailing so many dick pics, the traffic wouldn't be so high. My email archive of nearly 20 years is 5 gigs. I quadrupled that. Dipshit.
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.
The IRS, like most big government agencies, are mostly filled with people who support big government agencies. On average, the leaders of these big government agencies are unlikely to be sympathetic to a party that claims to want to shrink the federal government (whether they actually do so is a topic for another thread). If the next president is a Republican, he/she is unlikely to get the IRS leadership to attack liberal groups like they have attacked conservative groups.
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...
NSA should be able to extract them from their communication s database
So then fire the agency’s criminal investigations unit.
Did those six computers that crashed just happen to be the systems that belonged to the six people under congressional investigation for politically motivated abuses of authority? Did those six computers happen to include the email server(s) and associated storage devices and include any and all backups? And did all of that stuff just happen to crash in such a way that virtually nothing of any consequence was recoverable in a clean room? All happening at the same time as a congressional investigation began?
I don't believe their IT department is enormously competent. In fact, I believe quite the opposite. However, anyone who thinks this is anything other than a deliberate, coordinated campaign to destroy evidence linking higher-ups (not necessarily including the President, but not necessarily excluding him) is a complete idiot. I can believe their admins are incompetent enough to fail to maintain proper server-side retention policies. What I can't believe is that their regular maintenance plans include tearing out desktop and laptop hard drives and smashing them with hammers. And if you want to believe that, go right ahead, but you know and I know that it's bullshit.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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???
According the IRS Inspector General, that actually wasn't the case. It was overwhelmingly conservative groups.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Actually, anyone who has handled email admin for a big business knows they have email "retention polices" [d4discovery.com] where they explicitly delete all email older than X days (often just 90 days) except for what each user deliberately saves off.
Except the IRS isn't a business; it's a government agency. It's completely irrelevant what retention policies businesses use because government officials work for and are accountable to the American people, amirite?
The alternative to saying "we lost the emails you want to use as evidence against us in a criminal inverstigation" is to hand over the emails and turn around to make it easier to put the handcuffs on. Not really surprising they chose the path they did.
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.
Well, even here on /. we have people yelling right-wing loonies so, yeah, they didn't have to stretch very far to win that battle.
>> 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...
Well if you read any of the articles you'd note that what was missing in the original story was any email prior to 2011 due to the computer of the employee involved crashing in the summer of that year.
"The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from the 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the emails from the computers of 82 other IRS employees."
The IRS said in a statement that more than 250 IRS employees have been working to assist congressional investigations, spending nearly $10 million to produce more than 750,000 documents.
Overall, the IRS said it is producing a total of 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, covering the period from 2009 to 2013.
This is going to be "email of the gaps" because the Republicans are just desperate for a scandal they pin on Obama and gosh darnit Benghazi just isn't sticking!
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
Government is also slow on the technology pickup. The university back home...
You do realize that the government doesn't run universities, right?
Be seeing you...
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.
This is going to be "email of the gaps"
Destruction of evidence is another name for it.
and gosh darnit Benghazi just isn't sticking!
You should be more concerned. Just because it's your guy this time doesn't mean it won't always be. What Obama gets away with today will be what the future administrations will get away with. So his administration screws up security for an ambassador, he lies about it on TV for advantage leading up to an election, and there are no repercussions? Well, that's what a future Republican or possibly even a religious nutcase can get away with.
If his administration can contribute to the murders of at least a couple hundred people in Mexico and the US (the Fast and Furious thing), then that's going to hold for people you don't like too.
If his administration gets to use the IRS as a bludgeon to punish its opponents, then guess what's going to happen when someone you don't like gets in power?
Rather than brag about how legitimate scandals aren't sticking to your pet president, maybe you ought to think about the future and what's going to happen when others use those same tricks to avoid accountability and restraints on their power?
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.
That would have a lot more impact if you were a real person. As it is, it reads ironic.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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.
Basically, the only systems that can run non-centralized email systems are Unix-like systems with static IP addresses. I had one such local mail-server running when I had a Linux-box with static IP at University. Other systems cannot really support that and usually SMTP is firewalled anyways, so the central server for inbound and outbound is not only needed, but also technically enforced in addition. The only explanation is that they were unable to archive the emails on that server. Probably incompetence. After all, the government gets the most incompetent sysadmins as they pay the worst and have the worst working conditions.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
May also be "unable to learn from experience", commonly also referred to as "stupid". Probably both.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Funny thing is I got down-modded...I figured that pointing out that any entity performing a criminal investigation upon itself is a pretty clear cut conflict of interest.
And oh...a response from the Woz himself! I actually had a professor who says he worked with you for a while around the time that the Apple III was in development. Also says he wrote the very first commercially sold word processor (or something like that) for Apple hardware. Perhaps the most knowledgeable teacher I've ever had to boot. I can't say I'm a regular Apple customer myself, but I've seen your work and my hat's off to you sir.
Why do we have idiots all time disputing the technical side of comments? Translating to english, the man said "if I can do it, they surely can do it, and they have vastly more resources than my company".
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!
Don't worry, soon Slashdot will be coming out in favor of re-invading Iraq.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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.
No. If it's a right wing party in power then the national media will stay on top of them like stink on shit. ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN will run continuous stories about the scandolous behavior of those right wing politicians and demand an end to the coverup. Look here, we have the IRS admit to being guilty and liberals line up to say that the IRS did nothing wrong. It's mind blowing. I fully believe that President Obama could rape an 8 year old girl on the White House lawn and MSNBC would say it was a neo-conservative plot and find a way to make it Bush's fault. Not that the President would do such a horrible thing, I actually kind of like the guy on a personal level he seems like a good person. Sadly good people seldom make good presidents (Jimmy Carter).
I like the part where you ignored the issue that none of this happened "yesterday" and all happened many years ago for apparently legitimate reasons, which are what happen when you don't ever fund an agency to update it's hardware and hire more IT support.
You know I bet if someone asked, they could probably figure out the average rate of computer failures in the IRS and put a number on the estimate rate of lost email correspondence. Probably work all that up into some kind of report, maybe the kind that congress would then ignore like they've done at every juncture because despite a 7 to 1 return on dollars invested at the moment, nobody ever wants to increase funding to the IRS to prevent tax fraud.
So no, I'm not concerned. Because like everything else once this fishing expedition points the finger back at bills and instruction which has Republican signatures from Congress on it as well they'll mysteriously lose interest in the problem. Oh, what's that about cutting funding for embassy security? That was championed by who again?
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
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...
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.
about 10 years ago an article about "Losing History" as result of govt leaders using email. We can look at letters and notes written by Roosevelt, Churchill, and others to see what they were thinking when making major decisions. But with emails that are volatile historians years from now will not be able read the same by Bush, Cheney, and others.
mfwright@batnet.com
Keep dreaming with your head in the sand. If you can't buck up and admit there's a problem here, there is no hope for you. You're a partisan and your opinion is rightly devalued.
The IRS itself has stated Lerner's emails from 2009 - 2011 have been lost. That is a problem no matter who's side you are on. It's not about "pinning" something on Obama, it's about keeping the IRS (and all government agencies) in check so they aren't abusing their power.
Instead of offering any sort correct and accurate "signal" of actual useful information you dump about 20 sentences, berating him adding to the noise. You are either signal or noise and you AC rant is the same crap you accuse him of.
http://www.irs.gov/irm/index.h... You can see in the document they are held under FISMA standards and Their exchange was backed up regularly.
If you look at the IRS MAnual wqhere it explicitly states they backup their exchange server according to FISMA standards regularly and offsite, or they are non compliant.
Good enough?
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
I like the part where you deliberately Ignore the fact that the IRS has admitted their guilt in targeting Tea Party groups, and has fired people for their involvement in the actions and those implicated are pleading the fifth to protect themselves in front of courts. If they've done nothing wrong, then they have no need to plead the fifth as the truth would be revealed during the court cases. Ollie North may not have been guilty too, except that he was.
Because you usually have more than 2 parties in Europe. We don't.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I said "may" age out, subject to official policy and budget constraints. Alternatively, emails related to assigned case files need to be saved, archived on CD, and/or printed out for the case file. Emails with general instructions such as "Ask for more information from 501(c)'s which have to following words in their name..." are considered internal, and not case related. The email servers are for work only, so most email is plaintext or attached PDFs / Word DOCs. The emails probably use less space compared to what you would see from private accounts.
227-3517
In fact, a hard copy is required.
BWAHAHAHA!
Oh, man, you're killing me here. That's the funniest thing I've seen here in a long time.
Numerous government organizations use 90-day retention policies for email. They're deleted from the server, which is why people keep PST files -- which they probably shouldn't either, but network admins bend to the will of executives...you know, in every organization everywhere.
NARA makes pretty damned clear that the only federal government requirement for archiving email is when it's a "record" and goes on to describe what a "record" is.
http://www.archives.gov/record...
The only argument here is if some of those emails constitute "records" or not.
All of you idiots keep linking that without reading the actual report
Page 6
We did not review the use of other named organizations on the BOLO listing to determine if their use was appropriate.
Can you read the things you link for us? Do you see that the "investigation" didn't even both to review other named organizations? Yes, the BOLO list included "Tea Party," but the report didn't bother to look at any of the other names on the BOLO list.
"Tea Party" absolutely found more conservative groups, but there's no indication if "ACORN" was on the list(spoiler alert: it was!), and if it absolutely found more liberal groups.
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.
From the report (specifically page 6):
In August 2010, the Determinations Unit distributed the first formal BOLO listing. The criteria in the BOLO listing were Tea Party organizations applying for I.R.C. 501(c)(3) or I.R.C. 501(c)(4) status. Based on our review of other BOLO listing criteria, the use of organization names on the BOLO listing is not unique to potential political cases.16 EO function officials stated that Determinations Unit specialists interpreted the general criteria in the BOLO listing and developed expanded criteria for identifying potential political cases.17 Figure 3 shows that, by June 2011, the expanded criteria included additional names (Patriots and 9/12 Project) as well as policy positions espoused by organizations in their applications.
Furthermore, the criteria for expanded scrutiny:
Figure 3: Criteria for Potential Political Cases (June 2011)
“Tea Party,” “Patriots” or “9/12 Project” is referenced in the case file
Issues include government spending, government debt or taxes
Education of the public by advocacy/lobbying to “make America a better place to live”
Statement in the case file criticize how the country is being run
Certainly seems to skew HEAVILY towards tea party/conservative groups...
Now, given I've read the report and quoted DIRECTLY from it (I've linked the report for you), who's the idiot, and who's the one that swallowed the story from the progressive/liberal side of things that would love to see this go away? Who benefits from the IRS "losing" the e-mails? The same group that wants this to go away. Essentially, the liberal side of politics in the US.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You keep repeating the same tired argument.
"We added 'Tea Party,' '9/12,' and ''Patriots' to the BOLO list."
And then they specifically fail to mention the other watchwords they put on the BOLO list which weren't right-leaning. ...and they specifically mention in the report that they didn't bother to look. The "16" in your quote is the footnote you keep ignoring where it says exactly that.
I like the part where you ignored the issue that none of this happened "yesterday" and all happened many years ago for apparently legitimate reasons, which are what happen when you don't ever fund an agency to update it's hardware and hire more IT support.
Do you know why I "ignored" that? Because those weren't legitimate reasons. And it is interesting how the IRS also lost those emails on recipients' servers too.
Because like everything else once this fishing expedition points the finger back at bills and instruction which has Republican signatures from Congress on it as well they'll mysteriously lose interest in the problem.
It mystifies me how people can continue to make completely bullshit claims like this. You are the one not Congress who should be making sure that something like the IRS affair and subsequent destruction of evidence doesn't happen again.
Oh, what's that about cutting funding for embassy security? That was championed by who again?
Doesn't matter. Hypocrisy is no excuse for ignoring that Obama got away with lying about a serious problem where people died in order to win an election. It sets a precedent. When the Republicans do this instead of Obama, what are you going to do then?
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.
This is not comparable. The Bush email system was an attempt to obey the law - specifically, the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act prohibits using government property to engage in partisan politics. The NRC and Bush set up a private email system and issued laptops that would use that system so that communications with the NRC would not run afoul of the Hatch Act. There were allegations that some governmental business was conducted on this email system. Also, the LA Times stated only that "thousands" of emails may have been lost - not 5 million. The 5 million allegation came from a partisan report citing "confidential sources." The NRC was not obligated under the law to retain emails. The IRS was obligated to retain and print hard copies of the emails and the "crashes" occurred shortly after Congress launched an inquiry.
Because like everything else once this fishing expedition points the finger back at bills and instruction which has Republican signatures from Congress on it as well they'll mysteriously lose interest in the problem.
It mystifies me how people can continue to make completely bullshit claims like this. You are the one not Congress who should be making sure that something like the IRS affair and subsequent destruction of evidence doesn't happen again.
Oh surprise surprise, this can't possibly be Congress's fault because that would imply the party with a majority there would somehow be responsible. Thanks for proving exactly my point.
So - back at you. You keep claiming that progressive groups were targeted just as much, and had as much screening. What terms were used to identify them? What was the actual rate of progressive groups that were targeted, delayed? Why didn't the Inspector General and the IRS apologize for targeting them?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Oh surprise surprise, this can't possibly be Congress's fault because that would imply the party with a majority there would somehow be responsible.
Both parties have majorities. And this really is a stupid excuse for ignoring malfeasance. Further, it is worth noting that the IRS shenanigans started after several requests by congress members. So Congress may well be involved, just not in the way you expect.
Absence of proof isn't proof of absence.
The fact that the report had to specifically call out the fact they didn't look at any other BOLO triggers speaks volumes. It might just be saying they didn't want to invite any more controversy, but it certainly says something.
They do, and their official policy is 6 months of tape backup. After that, it is gone/overwritten. Whether the IT department followed the rules or not having only a 6 month retention period, I don't know.
Cool. So your belief - absent facts - that others must have been just as bad as what we have definitive proof AND admission for, is all you have. In other words - empty faith. And when it comes to legal action, absence of proof IS proof of absence.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
Didn't we already re-invade Iraq about a decade ago?