IRS Recycled Lerner Hard Drive

phrackthat (2602661) writes The Senate Finance Committee has been informed that the IRS recycled the hard drive of Lois Lerner, which will deprive investigators of the ability to forensically retrieve emails which were supposedly deleted or lost in a "crash." This news comes after the IRS revealed that it had lost the emails of Lois Lerner and six other employees who were being investigated regarding the targeting of conservative groups and donors.

Comments

White collar prison

[Anonymous Coward]

More people need to go to prison for "white collar" crimes. The brash disregard of the law has turned into an epidemic because everybody with an ounce of clout is let off the hook with a slap on the wrist.

Re:White collar prison

[Joel Cahoon]

More people need to go to prison for "white collar" crimes. The brash disregard of the law has turned into an epidemic because everybody with an ounce of clout is let off the hook with a slap on the wrist.

Who would go to prison though, the person who ordered the mail to be deleted, or the IT admin who received an order from above to do something that he thought shouldn't be done (just like nearly every other order he gets from management)?

You seem to be implying that it would be unjust for the IT admin, who was "only" following orders, to suffer consequences for his illegal actions. I do not agree, but you have raised a crucial point; let's follow this course of thinking to its logical end.

If the lowly peon isn't held accountable for his direct actions, then the next time management asks him to do something wrong or illegal, there's one less reason for him to refuse. If he refuses, he can be assured of repercussions from management, but experience has shown him that threat of legal consequences is low if he complies; the path of least resistance is clear.

But, if you do hold him accountable for his direct actions, this has some interesting indirect effects, aside from the obvious direct consequences. The next time he or someone else is asked similarly to do something wrong or illegal, he's got to weigh the consequences on both sides. These concerns can be raised to the manager making the request as a reason (that would be less likely to result in repercussions for the IT admin) not to comply. Even if the threat of legal repercussions alone is not enough to deter the IT admin from complying with an illegal request, his moral or ethical views coupled with this threat may be enough to change his actions. The manager will have a harder time finding an IT admin to perform unlawful acts on his order. The threshold of reasons to even request such acts will be raised.

Let's not forget that the primary reason laws exist is to shape societal behavior; punishing or "rehabilitating" individual deviance should come secondary, as means to this end. If laws are not enforced, in this particular case if we let people off too frequently for "just following orders," then the laws can never have their intended effect: to prevent this whole stupid fiasco from happening in the first place.

That being said, let's not forget that overly broad interpretation and overzealous application of laws can result in witch-hunts which can be just as harmful, for reasons not entirely unrelated. Balance.

Re:White collar prison

[operagost]

You're presuming the IT guy even had any idea that something untoward was going on. That's unlikely. Many of us here are admins or have been on the past. When disabling accounts following a termination, have you always known why that person was terminated? I often didn't know when it was an involuntary dismissal.

Re:White collar prison

[idontgno]

If the lowly peon isn't held accountable for his direct actions, then the next time management asks him to do something wrong or illegal, there's one less reason for him to refuse. If he refuses, he can be assured of repercussions from management, but experience has shown him that threat of legal consequences is low if he complies; the path of least resistance is clear.

What you're advocating is that the IT puke be arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced, and punished for... working an anonymous hardware ticket in the IT task management tool. Probably one of dozens added to the system in any day.

I'm sure you're envisioning IT minion being called into Big Bad Evil Bureaucrat's office and being told "This hard drive contains crucial evidence which will destroy every Great and Evil thing I have worked for so long to accomplish. You must destroy it... use the Impractically Slow Hard Drive Destruction Machine in our Sea of Japan secret volcano base."

In practice, I'm sure it was the IP weenie going "Huh. A hardware decommisioning ticket from Remedy. A dozen hard drives."

Yeah. There's individual moral responsibility. But while we're at it, let's imprison undertakers for destroying murder evidence in cases where the murder isn't uncovered until after the burial.

Re:White collar prison

[sjames]

All that does is put a bunch of people between a rock and a hard place. Go after the person who gave the order.

Besides that, it is likely that the person who recycled the HD didn't know and perhaps didn't have the authority to know that there was anything on it but a virus laden copy of Windows. The IRS is big enough that the PC guy and the mail admin might not know each other.

Shit already rolls downhill, it doesn't need the force of law added to it.

Re:White collar prison

[AK Marc]

And what if the illegal act was the result of a legal order?

They "recycle" thousands of drives a year. The manager knew this one was more "interesting", but the IT worker didn't and couldn't. It'd be like throwing a mail-man in jail because a letter he delivered contained a threat or orders for a terrorist cell.

How deep is the rot in Washington?

[pastafazou]

The politicization of the IRS should be the biggest scandal ever. How many other institutions are being used to pursue a political agenda instead of their true function?

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[Oligonicella]

Hatch (R) and Leahy (D) both disagree with you and they're in a better position to judge than you are.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[msauve]

Selective enforcement is a violation of the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[bill_mcgonigle]

How many other institutions are being used to pursue a political agenda instead of their true function?

All of them.

Except that is their true function. Don't mistake the window dressing for the window.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[amosh]

You... you know the actual story, right? Not just the fox news version?

This isn't an issue of "politicization". The IRS was finally DOING ITS JOB and reviewing the applications of groups applying for tax-exempt status. They thought it would save time to, rather than investigate, just assume that groups with certain key words in their name - among them "tea party" and "occupy" - were engaged in political activity which should deny them that status. Amazing how Fox never reports on any groups OTHER than their chosen ones having had problems due to this, isn't it? Well, it's much easier to change the facts to match your preconceived notions than to change your notions to match the facts. And yelling about impeaching Obama is just so durned much fun!

In any case, the whole issue is about two things - 1. It's bad to profile people, anyone, anywhere, and 2. There is a strong group in Washington that doesn't want the IRS to be doing ANY kind of job, let alone stopping people from improperly receiving tax breaks for influencing elections. The ability to pretend it's some type of political cover-up is just gravy.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[stenvar]

Another ignorant fox watcher. We've covered many times how the IRS enforcing Tax Law and ensuring that nonprofits file for nonprofit status under the proper section of law is NOT ILLEGAL and NOT A SCANDAL.

It's illegal if they do it selectively based on the political preferences of the current administration. That is, it's not the "enforcing the law" that is illegal, it's the failure to enforce it consistently.

Furthermore, the law itself is a scandal. The IRS simply shouldn't be in a position to make these kinds of decisions. Non-profits should be allowed to engage in political activities freely.

Another ignorant fox watcher.

Amazingly enough, many conservatives and independents don't watch Fox at all. Personally, I read the Huffington Post, the WP, and Mother Jones, just to keep up with the idiotic ideas "Liberals" and Obama fans get in their heads.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[Megol]

So you like to ignore that nothing indicates that this was "selective enforcement" in any relevant way? That there seems to be _no_ political bias involved (given the equal focus on liberal groups)?

BTW selective enforcement is used all over the world, the selection is mostly random though.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Great, so that's why the IRS Commissioner apologized. Why he said what happened was wrong. Because they were just doing their job, nothing really was wrong, and nothing happened worth apologizing for...

Look, the IRS ITSELF (via the Commissioner) and the Inspector General BOTH are on-record as claiming these actions happened, they should not of happened, and they are, at the very least, the result of gross incompetence. Your trying to spin it as "nothing was wrong" simply goes against the statements of all the actual players in the game. Even President Obama states that "the misconduct ... is inexcusable".

But I'm glad to know you are much more knowledgeable about the IRS Scandal than the commissioner, the Senators, the Inspector General, the President, and all the other Government and political participants who have come out and plainly stated what happened was wrong.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[sjames]

Apparently it wasn't selective, it's just that nobody is shouting about the non Tea Party groups that the IRS questioned.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[LDAPMAN]

Equal focus? Over 190 conservative groups were being stonewalled. By the most favorable reports, 7 liberal groups were somehow involved. How is that equal?

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[AK Marc]

Neither looks to be "disagreeing" but have issued knee-jerk political responses. At least the OP's post had cites and the cites had specific names and actions. Not the generic "conservative orgs were treated worse, so we blame the Dems" statements.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[AK Marc]

It wasn't about the numbers being investigated, but the numbers being registered. Why are there 190 new conservative groups? When there are spikes that high in new registrations, doesn't that signal alerts? The "normal" rate is quite low. The fact that there were enough to get all "OMFG OVER 190!!!!!1!!!" about is proof enough to those that investigate fraud that something "interesting" was happening.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[AK Marc]

Idiot assholes like you are the reason nobody apologizes anymore in the USA. An apology isn't a confession. He apologized for "bad service" not for "targeting conservatives" as he still holds that didn't happen.

Re:How deep is the rot in Washington?

[Vitriol Angst]

From your link:

“I do not believe that partisanship motivated the practices of the people described in the IG report,” Miller said. “I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people who were trying to be efficient in their work.”

This seems to corroborate what the GP is saying - some IRS folks were looking for organizations abusing the tax-exempt policy and felt that looking for keywords would be an efficient way to do that.

You know, like INTELLIGENT people might assume that "Liberty" and "freedom" have been co-opted by crooks, so it might be a good place to start a search. They exactly caught a bunch of charlatans, and since those people are funded by powerful deep pockets, their sponsors complained, and then the media being owned by these same billionaires pretended any of this made sense.

The world is exactly as corrupt as we think it is, and what we saw was the natural result of a Kleptocracy in power. Then they penalized people doing the right thing -- as we can expect from a banana republic.

whistling

[rmdingler]

I am sitting here trying to imagine the look on a judges face as I explain the same type of personal misconduct....

yeah, that's right, the Do you think I'm stupid? look.

Re:whistling

[L4t3r4lu5]

The question to ask is: Did the drive get destroyed prior to a retention order being issued?

If so, then that's SOP; Dead hardware is recycled.

If not, someone goes to jail.

Re:whistling

[Oligonicella]

I would say the question would be where are the computers that were on the receiving end of those emails? Perhaps they were the other half dozen that "failed" as well? If the smell of bullshit is overwhelming, you don't actually need to find it to know it's there.

Re:whistling

[Charliemopps]

The question to ask is: Did the drive get destroyed prior to a retention order being issued?

If so, then that's SOP; Dead hardware is recycled.

If not, someone goes to jail.

The recycling of the hardware isn't a question in my mind. Of course they recycle hardware...
No email archiving? really? Of an IRS director?
All of her emails were really stored in a local PST file, with no backup what-so-ever?
And after that hard drive failed, with no backup, you then destroyed the drive?

Now that is a series of coincidental incompetence that I just cannot accept.
It's fathomable yes, but the Republicans certainly have the right to turn this into a full on circus.
Nothing Bush ever did was this obviously corrupt and he was up to all sorts of evil.
I always thought of Obama as similar to Jimmy Carter. I disagree with his policies, he's failing miserably, but his hearts in the right place.
Now I see him as more of a Nixon.

Re:whistling

[asylumx]

Sure you *can* configure it that way, but I think most of us would not expect the IRS to configure it that way.

Re:whistling

[ScentCone]

All of her emails were really stored in a local PST file, with no backup what-so-ever? And after that hard drive failed, with no backup, you then destroyed the drive?

It's worse than that. The investigators also want to see the correspondence involving six other people whose activity could shed light on the matter. And what a surprise, those six other people also had storage failures, and their records have also been lost. Shocking, huh.

Lost...

[JBMcB]

We lost the backups. Her computer drive was taken apart and recycled into a crib mobile for underprivileged infants. We had printouts but those were shredded into organic compost. The tape backups were overwritten as we only have one backup set of tapes. The people who sent her the email also deleted them from their "sent" boxes as they only have 5MB of quota for that mail box. The people who received her email deleted them from their inboxes as we rigorously practice inbox zero.

So you see, no monkey business here.

Re:Fox News?

[pastafazou]

can you find the story on the Washington Post or the New York Times? If so, maybe you could provide a link, and we can compare the details included or omitted by each source. If, on the other hand, all you want to do is take a cheap shot at Fox news, then maybe you should be modded down as a troll....

Re:Fox News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't necessarily look upon this as a partisan attack or the babbling of conspiracy theorists, although there probably is some of both in the mix. The reality of the situation is that people in public office and certainly people at that level need to have all official e-mails archived. Relying on the un-backed-up hard drive of a computer as the sole repository of official communications is complete insanity. Heads need to roll over this. They wouldn't accept this as an excuse when they're chasing after private citizens for this or for that. And to top it all off, the information probably does exist somewhere on a government server ... controlled by the NSA. It's out of control.

Re:How Convenient

[pastafazou]

You're absolutely correct, and everyone with any idea about IT knows this. Every story about this on the 'net has plenty of comments suggesting it too. So why don't the folks on the committee asking questions know it?

Do you really want to trust a government with

[UnknownSoldier]

your health records when they can't even keep your tax data??

Why the hell aren't these people slapped with an obstruction of justice fine??

Re:Do you really want to trust a government with

[asylumx]

Seriously! One person's emails != my tax data...

Re:Fox News?

[mrbill1234]

I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Star Chamber where all the MSM other than Fox news conspire together.

Re:right-wing spin

[Anonymous Coward]

BULLSHIT!!!!

A bushel of Pinocchios for IRS’s Lois Lerner

In the days since the Internal Revenue Service first disclosed that it had targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, new information has emerged from both the Treasury inspector general’s report and congressional testimony Friday that calls into question key statements made by Lois G. Lerner, the IRS’s director of the exempt organizations division. ...

The Pinocchio Test

In some ways, this is just scratching the surface of Lerner’s misstatements and weasely wording when the revelations about the IRS’s activities first came to light on May 10. But, taken together, it’s certainly enough to earn her four Pinocchios.

FWIW, "four Pinoocchios" is as bad as it get when it comes to lying.

And that was over a year ago, before 12 months of foot-dragging culminating with seven cases of "the dog ate my hard drive."

Re:Fox News?

[Oligonicella]

"We've been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away," - Sen. Orrin Hatch:Finance Committee

What exactly prompted you to attempt that lame non-sequitor to Fox News? How exactly does it support any position that this did not happen, which was your obvious attempt to imply?

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[SpzToid]

Conspiracy theory, much? Really? This is the U.S. Federal Government we're discussing and the taxpayer is kind of a legacy concern of theirs. No one was considering preserving anything on that particular hard disk, and presumably another part of the government I.T. dept. was responsible for backing up the emails, (and another part of the government was responsible for a verifiable audit trail, ...and at some point the hard disk did what hard disks due in such circumstances), while yet another department merely wanted to re-use the %$#!@! hard disk.

Because of the gravity of the situation, someone did track all that down and there you have it. ...p.s. This is Slashdot and it is full of admins just doing their job to pay their rent. I'm not saying the situation is Kosher, but just so long as we can all agree on what is exactly Kosher well then, fine; otherwise everything is anyone's guess.

P.S. Whatever happened to G.W. Bush's Exchange server backups and recovery? That was a priority with a budget if I recall correctly.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[UnknowingFool]

Unfortunately there are no details of this recycled drive on Fox News, that's not surprising that they spin it like the IRS suddenly destroyed a HD. Politico has much more detail.

As part of the investigation, the GOP has asked for all media that Lerner may had used like old hard drives, thumb drives, etc. This is fairly normal. The hard drive in question was in Lerner's computer until summer 2011. It had crashed and IT staff replaced it. The GOP wanted the hard drive so that tech experts could try to recover the data. But IT has long recycled that drive as it was no longer functioning. Personally I don't know of many IT staff that keep broken hard drives for 3 years.

Re:Fox News?

[Lumpy]

Or it could be FAKE NEWS and the others refuse to report on made up bullshit? A Lot of news outlets are prone to make shit up. CNN did that over and over, Fox news has, etc...

Until I see at least three separate reported stories on different sources of it with complete information, I treat everything reported on Fox news or ANY other news outlet and 100% bullshit.

Our fucking news sources are 90% entertainment and 10% professional today.

Re:Fox News?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-lost-lois-lerners-emails-in-tea-party-probe/

It is a shame to NBC and ABC when even CBS is doing their job to some degree.

I've seen IRS computers

[slaker]

An acquaintance of mine is a senior guy in Chicago's IRS office. He does large corporate audits, which means he's sitting across from guys in $2000 suits all day. The laptop he was carrying until late 2012 had a Windows 2000 license sticker on it and his "new" government-issued laptop is an HP that was manufactured in 2004. These guys really do make more with less and I have no trouble believing that the equipment Lerner was using was painfully obsolete and used until it died.

Re:I've seen IRS computers

[_Sharp'r_]

A long time ago, when managing some government service contracts, I had someone from the BLM walk in and essentially say, "It's the end of the fiscal year and we need to spend some money left in our budget, what's the most expensive PCs and multiple monitor setups you can find to sell us to replace all our current machines with?"

I doubt Lois Lerner, a Director managing a group with 900 employees, was making due with old obsolete hardware like the guys in the trenches do. She managed a $90M+ budget, so I'm sure they could find some cash to keep her PC up to date.

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[Oligonicella]

"Personally I don't know of many IT staff that keep broken hard drives for 3 years." - Or make the attempt to recover the only copies of governmental correspondence contained within? Nixon's secretary accidentally erased 18 minutes too, you know.

Re:Fox News?

[UnknowingFool]

Because Fox News paints it like this was some sort of sudden nefarious act by the IRS and fails to give relevant facts. Politico gives a much more detailed explanation that makes it less like a grand conspiracy. Lerner's HD crashed in 2011. It was replaced. IT threw away the old drive because it wasn't functioning. When facts are presented, it doesn't seem like it's that big a conspiracy.

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[squiggleslash]

Stop spouting facts, they have no place in this lynching! Next you'll be pointing out that the IRS targeted OWS groups too...

Re:Anti-tax, not conservative, groups

[Oligonicella]

Your post is a blatant lie. "The Internal Revenue Service apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status." - Associated Press

Re:right-wing spin

[msauve]

44 USC Section 3101 et seq, for one:

3101. Records management by agency heads; general duties

The head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency's activities.

Re:Fox News?

[mysidia]

The IRS doesn't archive email? REALLY?

Apparently.... either they are in violation of the law, or we really need a new federal records act, requiring that all electronic documents pertaining to business be preserved in their original electronic form and backed up in at least two places, with yearly verification that the backup is working: with industry standard security controls to ensure that individual employees, regardless of status, are not allowed to omit, alter, or remove items from the record; technical measures are used to enforce the requirement; and, administrator actions to override the technical requirement are logged and audited and admin audit logs are backed up to at least two pieces of write-only media at different geographic locations.

Re:Fox News?

[UnknowingFool]

Maybe the media doesn't report it because it's not that big a story. Politico did report on it and they presented with many more facts that makes it seem like less a story. Fox News paints it like the IRS suddenly destroyed an old HD. In reality, the HD crashed in 2011 and was replaced. Being broken, IT threw it away. End of story.

Obama could get IMPEACHED over this. This is turning into a Watergate level scandal.

For that to happen, Obama would have to be involved. So far EVERY single detail of this so called "scandal" has uncovered that the President knew about it. Most likely because the actions of every single bureaucrat doesn't involve the President. Basically it's the GOP trying anything they can to oppose the President. Fake scandals like this one are just another tactic. And guess what, you're the sucker the GOP/Fox News is targeting.

It could all be coincidental, but seriously? The IRS doesn't archive email? REALLY?

Well if you read another source other than Fox, you would have known that the IRS keeps 6 months of emails. The GOP is asking for emails that go back 3 years.

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[SecurityGuy]

No, the sensible version of this would be that the drive failed, so they recycled it. That's completely reasonable. Happens all the time. The UNreasonable and unbelievable part is that those emails existed ONLY on that hard drive. If that really happened, there should be lots of documentation including who got fired for it.

Good point, though, in anything I've been involved in that got reported in the news (nothing work related, I'm thinking of a climbing accident that happened while I was in the park) the first details reported in the news were astoundingly wrong.

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[dywolf]

Fox is acting like its big news, but really, anyone whos had to deal with government computer networks shouldnt be surprised by any of this.

Government computers die all the time. Cause they suck. Old peices of trash. Horrible software bloat too, things required to run in background for security. And government IT's solution nearly always the same: Wipe it and reimage it, or "here, have a new(ish) computer. the emails arent even stored on the personal issued computer anyway, they're on the server. And those serves go down a LOT. The backups frequently dont work, or get lost; I cant tell you how many times I've lost stuff on the server drive. Plus employees all the time ignore protocols that get in the way of productivity ("must scan now" "must backup now" "dont turn off" are frequently met by "end task sucker, i got work to do"). Much like any large business.

All in all: non-scandal

Re:Fox News?

[jeffmeden]

"We've been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away," - Sen. Orrin Hatch:Finance Committee

What exactly prompted you to attempt that lame non-sequitor to Fox News? How exactly does it support any position that this did not happen, which was your obvious attempt to imply?

OK, here you go: The hard drive containing her emails "crashed" (it was unusable and could not be recovered by the IRS IT staff) and as a result, it was recycled/destroyed and replaced with a new one. The actual source was a Politico story which, besides conjecture, contained only this brief line of concrete information:

“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.

So, unless there is some compelling reason to think that the drive was corrupted purposefully, or the recovery was disingenuous, then all you have here is SOP for any IT department (fix what's broke). Yet the only thing we see on Foxnews.com is a story painted to look exactly like the uncovering of a conspiracy (see all the other rants about impeachment for an example of how severely people are overreacting to this.)

Anything else I can help with?

Re:Fox News?

[Charliemopps]

Or it could be FAKE NEWS and the others refuse to report on made up bullshit? A Lot of news outlets are prone to make shit up. CNN did that over and over, Fox news has, etc...

Until I see at least three separate reported stories on different sources of it with complete information, I treat everything reported on Fox news or ANY other news outlet and 100% bullshit.

Our fucking news sources are 90% entertainment and 10% professional today.

How about directly from the lips of Orrin Hatch?

“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.

http://www.politico.com/story/...

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[Capt James McCarthy]

. Whatever happened to G.W. Bush's Exchange server backups and recovery? That was a priority with a budget if I recall correctly.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

It truly baffles me to no end when people use the wrongs of the past to somehow justify the wrongs of today.

So I guess we just say F' it and let our elected officials get away with whatever they want. Justice was overrated anyways.

Re:Fox News?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm just baffled as to how IT managed to avoid being lynched by the cube drones if their standards for data retention and redundancy are in fact that low.

People hate losing data, and storing it the employee's HDD (except as an expendable cache purely for speed and bandwidth purposes) is roughly equivalent, once you have a decent number of people in the office, to just randomly deleting some sucker's email every week or two. Even in complete absence of any legal requirements, the users would either switch to unofficially using some shit webmail service or rise up with pitchforks in short order.

I am less than convinced by the alleged nonprofit status of some of the poor, wounded, groups whining about their treatment by the IRS; but the IRS sure is doing an excellent job of looking guilty as hell right about now.

Re:Fox News?

[Oligonicella]

Or Leahy, Democrat from Vermont (since Hatch is a Repub):
"You can't erase e-mails, not today, They've gone through too many servers. They can't say they've been lost. That's like saying, 'The dog ate my homework.' They're there, They know they're there, and we'll subpoena them, if necessary, and we'll have them."

Re: left-wing spin

[Anonymous Coward]

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/14/read-the-inspector-general-report-on-the-irs-scandal/

The IRS inspector General disagrees with you.

Re:Fox News?

[NatasRevol]

Maybe their data retention is 3 months. And higher ups didn't understand what that meant and called it a crash/purge/accident/whatever.

I don't believe there are any actual regulations on how long you have to keep data, other than to have a stated length of time. I know that's how it worked where I was an email admin. We decided on 6 months. And legal okayed it. 6months & 1 day, it's all gone.

Re:Fox News?

[asylumx]

If it's from CNN, they'll probably claim the emails were on the Malaysia Airlines flight...

Re:Fox News?

[Nutria]

but the IRS sure is doing an excellent job of looking guilty as hell right about now.

Purdy much... "What can we do to inflame Glenn Beck's foam horde even more? I know!!! Let's shred all the evidence proving our innocence!"

And these are the type of people They want running nationalized health care?

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[msauve]

"Personally I don't know of many IT staff that keep broken hard drives for 3 years."

How many do you know who are required by law to preserve the records stored on those hard drives?

Re: Fox News?

[Anonymous Coward]

In unrelated news, the IRS has released a new tax form for 2015: Form 1040-Soylent

Re:Fox News?

[LaughingVulcan]

Or Leahy, Democrat from Vermont (since Hatch is a Repub): "You can't erase e-mails, not today, They've gone through too many servers. They can't say they've been lost. That's like saying, 'The dog ate my homework.' They're there, They know they're there, and we'll subpoena them, if necessary, and we'll have them."

Which proves exactly how out of touch our legislators are in technical understanding, and once again makes it rather obvious that we have the government we deserve. (Also, how normative the surveillance culture has become that *anyone* should think data should be stored forever, for all time, no matter what it is.)

Re:Fox News?

[Archangel Michael]

For those of us in IT, the excuses as to the failure to secure documentation, in the midst of a controversy is key. The fact that they are just NOW trotting this out as an excuse, rather than when the request was made, is highly suspicious. "Computer Crash" happens, but as we say in IT, if it doesn't exist in three places, it doesn't exist.

THAT being said, if they are claiming, again, that it was incompetence and not nefariousness, all I can say is, this is exactly WHY government cannot run anything competently. Further, because we cannot expect reasonable competency in government, the role of government needs to be severely limited.

And yet, we have people who think that government run healthcare is going to be a godsend. I wonder how many people dying from Government "ooops we made a mistake" people will take. Oh wait, that just happened with the VA.

Any sufficient level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. The problem is, they should be treated the same, but aren't.

Why where the emails only on the desktop drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for local government (why I'm posting as an AC) in a state with strong Sunshine Laws. ALL of our incoming and outgoing emails are archived as they are part of the public record! Even if I deleted all of my emails, they can still be searched and produced if requested. Why isn't this the case at the Federal level????

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[mrchaotica]

Conspiracy theory, much? Really?

When it's the user's hard drive and the contents of the mail server and the backups of the hard drive and the backups of the mail server and the user seems reluctant to tell the truth about what the emails actually say and there are allegations of misconduct involving said emails and (as far as we know) the IRS isn't also missing a whole bunch of non-related emails, only "coincidentally" the potentially-damaging ones... then maybe it really is a fucking conspiracy!

Re:Fox News?

[Anonymous Coward]

They used to have a secret forum but it was exposed. (Not that they reported on it!)

Re:Fox News?

[mrjimorg]

It wasn't just her emails and hard drive, but also "6 other employees" who happen to have been corresponding with her. In fact, the only people at the IRS that is having hard drive crashes are the people who's email would provide evidence in this case. They seem to have pretty consistent hard drive issues among those with damning evidence, but no issues outside of those people.
Additionally, when her drive crashed, IT would have restored those emails from backup at that point, so even a loss of the backup isn't justification.

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[jeffmeden]

It truly baffles me to no end when people use the wrongs of the past to somehow justify the wrongs of today.

So I guess we just say F' it and let our elected officials get away with whatever they want. Justice was overrated anyways.

No need to be baffled. You are seeing his statement backward. He is not saying this case is excusable because it happened before, he is asking why this case is being treated with such fervor while the previous one wasn't. After all, this thread is metanews about the reaction to the scandal, not any reflection on the actual happenings at the IRS/Treasury.

Re: left-wing spin

[ScentCone]

It also came out before they realized they targeted progressive groups just as often or more often.

Why are you lying? Hundreds of conservative groups had their applications deliberately delayed (past the election cycle) while progressive groups were pushed right through. Progressive groups were not subjected to illegal inquiries about the books their members read, what they think about, whether or how they pray, and more. The reason the IRS came out (when it was clear this was going to become public) and apologized for mistreating hundreds of conservative groups was because that's what happened. You're trying to wish it away, just like the administration.

If the opposite had happened (a conservative administration was running the IRS, and it was hundreds of progressive groups' applications tied up for years because of the names of the groups, and group organizers were told to respond with lists of all members, what books those members read, etc), you'd be shrieking at the top of your lungs, and you know it.

Just when we think the IRS can't be any more evil

[Applehu Akbar]

...It gets worse. They are now claiming "my dog ate my homework" for precisely, and only, every employee named in this investigation. It would be fitting to apply the IRS' own special rule here, which is that if you can't prove your innocence, you're guilty. Long sentences for each of the accused, unless those hard drives can be made to miraculously reappear.

Re:How about the DOJ? (Thanks, Bush!)

[stenvar]

Yes, and we elected Obama to fix these problems, as he promised over and over again during his campaign, and as he pointed to his credentials as a constitutional scholar for why he was qualified to do it.

We elected Obama to end spying on American citizens, abuse of power, extraterritorial killings, war mongering, and crony capitalism.

Instead, Obama has embraced and expanded all of those and has turned out to be worse than Bush in many ways.

"Bush did it" is not sufficient excuse for Obama to do it; "Bush did it" should be an immediate signal to any decent, honest president not to do it as well.

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[ScentCone]

The UNreasonable and unbelievable part is that those emails existed ONLY on that hard drive.

Sure, that's unreasonable. But the actually unbelievable part is that investigators had six more people whose email they wanted to collect, and - shockingly! - there was also a failure of storage for those same people, and those records were also beyond reaching.

Unbelievable, but sure as hell convenient for the administration. Unbelievable, and completely predictable for "the most transparent administration in history."

Re:Fox News?

[Dishevel]

So then are you stating that the story is a lie? Are you saying that this story is all over the other media outlets?

Maybe you think that most major IT departments using exchange servers can lose a ton of the emails from 6 people being investigated? I am sure that happens all the time. If you do not see how crazy that excuse is you really have no business on /.

Re:Fox News?

[bigpat]

Relying on the un-backed-up hard drive of a computer as the sole repository of official communications is complete insanity. Heads need to roll over this. They wouldn't accept this as an excuse when they're chasing after private citizens for this or for that.

Yes, not having emails backed up on a server in some sort of archive would be absurd. Government requires document retention of just about everything. Unless every email was end to end encrypted, but even then there should be good key management that would allow investigators to decrypt the emails. Just seems absurd that with all the document retention policies the government has that it wouldn't have copies of those emails someplace. Or that other government agencies or the White House wouldn't have copies of inter-agency emails. If the trail dries up it is because people want it to dry up.

The assumption now is that the White House instigated increased IRS scrutiny on groups aligned with the Tea Party which would be a very serious abuse of presidential power to use the tax collecting and police powers of the executive branch to target opposition political groups.

Nixon is rolling over in his grave... the lesson for history is if Nixon had just destroyed all the tapes he could have gotten away with his dirty tricks brigade and abuses of power.

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[msauve]

You say that as if it were true. Cite, please, because there is no "6 month" limitation, and the records required to be kept are

As used in this chapter, "records" includes all books, papers, maps, photographs, machine readable materials, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of data in them.

Which clearly includes the information now being sought. Furthermore, for records kept only on a (now defective) hard drive, the law requires action to recover them:

The head of each Federal agency shall notify the Archivist of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, or destruction of records in the custody of the agency of which he is the head that shall come to his attention and with the assistance of the Archivist shall initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery of records he knows or has reason to believe have been unlawfully removed from his agency, or from another Federal agency whose records have been transferred to his legal custody. In any case in which the head of the agency does not initiate an action for such recovery or other redress within a reasonable period of time after being notified of any such unlawful action, the Archivist shall request the Attorney General to initiate such an action, and shall notify the Congress when such a request has been made.

- both cites from 44 USC Chapter 33.

Re:Fox News?

[Noah Haders]

+1 that's awesome. "Breaking news: no signals from MH370 for 67 days. Story developing."

Re:Fox News?

[rsmoody]

Regardless, the point remains. Those of us at the end of the IRS gun barrel (and yes, if you do not pay your taxes, sooner or later, someone armed with a gun will come to visit you) must keep our records for multiple years. Loosing said records is not an excuse and will find you guilty of all charges levied against you and you will be fined and/or thrown in jail. Why is this not applied to the members of the entity that will surely, swiftly and thoroughly enforce their retention laws? There is no excuse for these "lost" emails, they are on a server somewhere or backed up on tape somewhere. Do I have proof? No. But seriously, do you really believe these emails are not recoverable?

Re:Fox News?

[Dishevel]

Actually I think there was never a real need to communicate directly with the Whitehouse about it. If they did I am sure they did it face to face and not over email.

What I do believe is that she was wielding her power with a purpose. She went out to get those tea party people. We already know that Senator were demanding that the IRS "Investigate" these groups.

Is it really a surprise that people who believe that the ends justify the means would do this? You don't have to go to congress. You can prosecute the laws you want to. You can decide what laws to defend and which ones not to. You can lie. You can omit. You can obfuscate. All of these things are business as usual. We have just come to a conclusion as a people that if you are a politician you can do criminal things and not be a criminal. We should just write it in the statute and accept what we accept.

Re: Fox News?

[sumdumass]

Communism does work. All you need is enough guns and a lot of good boots to stomp on pepple with.

And the people will cherish and enjoy every minute of it whether they like it or not.

Re:Fox News?

[Dishevel]

You are missing the point. None of the tea party groups were denied status. You are correct. They have not been denied because they were doing nothing wrong. There was no basis for a denial. So the IRS just delayed and demanded massive amounts of crazy information. There are still groups waiting years to get approved!

The fact that the IRS is out of control is obvious. The idea that it will swing its crazyness in the preferred direction is a given. If you either believe that the IRS is doing a fine job and does not wield too much power then you either have a vested interest in the system as it stands (Employed by the IRS or a Tax profesional) or you are deluded. If you think that groups that want to see the IRS and many government jobs get deleted or reduced are not targeted specifically by those they want to destroy then you have no idea how humans behave and I call you out as an alien impostor.

Re:Fox News?

[Bartles]

Glenn Beck's foam horde? If you are an American, you should be outraged, because at some point they will come for you.. The NYTimes should be outraged, the Washington Post should be outraged. Nancy Pelosi should be outraged.

Re:Fox News?

[Dishevel]

Fuck the GOP. Who the hell are they? They were not being targeted. The tea party is the enemy of the GOP and the Dems. They have a bit more in common with the conservatives than the liberals but they consider both sides to be wrong. The IRS was targeting the Tea Party. A group of people that wants the IRS to have much less power. If you think that the IRS does not see the Tea Party as an enemy with or without the help of any administration, current, past or future then you are blind.

The Tea Party is on one side. The Libs, Conservatives, IRS, EPA, Dept of Ed, Dept of Energy, BLM, ICE, Fusion Centers, NSA, and quite a few more are on the other side.

Re:Fox News?

[budgenator]

Internal Revenue Manual (IRM)
1.10.3.2.3 (07-08-2011)
Emails as Possible Federal Records
All federal employees and federal contractors are required by law to preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency. Records must be properly stored and preserved, available for retrieval and subject to appropriate approved disposition schedules.
The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media. Emails are records when they are:
Created or received in the transaction of agency business
Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities, or
Valuable because of the information they contain

If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly. The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy. More information on IRS records management requirements is available at http://erc.web.irs.gov/Display... or see the Records Management Handbook, IRM 1.15.1 http://publish.no.irs.gov/IRM/...).
An email determined to be a federal record may eventually be considered as having historical value by the National Archivist prior to disposal. Therefore, ensure that all your communications are professional in tone.
Please note that maintaining a copy of an email or its attachments within the IRS email MS Outlook application does not meet the requirements of maintaining an official record. Therefore, print and file email and its attachments if they are either permanent records or if they relate to a specific case.

1.10.3.2.4 (08-30-2012)
Emails are Subject to FOIA
The public is aware of the role emails play in agency internal operations and emails are included in a growing number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Emails that are responsive to a FOIA request must be released unless the information contained in the email falls into one of nine very specific categories of exemptions. (See IRM 11.3.13 for more on FOIA processing). There is no category of exemption to protect the author or the Service from embarrassment.
Emails provided in response to a FOIA must include the addressee, date and time. The address list, date and time are considered part of the record for both FOIA and record management purposes.
Do not delete a message or attachment that is the subject of a congressional, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), or discovery request or that is needed for litigation.

Also

1.10.3.3.1 (07-08-2011)
Don’t Slow Down the System
To avoid slowing down transmission of information:
Use Arial or another simple font on a plain background.
Do not use animation, fancy background, "wallpapers," bor

Re:Fox News?

[Straif]

According to the IRS's own website all emails that can be considered "Federal Records" (essentially anything having to do with actual work at the IRS) must be maintained and in fact printed and stored. These document are subject to FOIA request and they simply don't have the legal option to have them expire and get deleted.

As a former government IT contractor...

[Junior J. Junior III]

From 2001-2011, I worked for a series of contractors under NASA.

Most users who I supported were administrators and managers of various stripes, and a few users who were skilled with desktop publishing, web development, imagery, video, or 3d modeling/CAD. Most of them didn't understand how computers worked, and didn't care how they worked. They were just magic boxes that they used to do work with.

The idea of deleting email was frightening to most users. Email was a record that proved that you did work, and could be used for Cover Your Ass in the event of an inquiry. It could also prove a conversation happened, that an agreement was made, and so settle many disputes arising out of miscommunication. Most people whom I worked with hardly ever deleted messages, and because their local hard drive had plenty of capacity, they didn't have a real need to.

Until 2007, we used POP3 clients running on the local machine to download mail from a server. Messages were deleted from the server once downloaded, so only existed on the client machine at that point. Some users had decades of email stored in their client on their local hard drive, which typically was not backed up. I'm sure the servers had some redundancy and short backup, but to my knowledge we did not have a system that archived email. The closest thing resembling an archive was the aggregate collection of all mailboxes on the the client machines' hard drives.

Occasionally we did have users lose data due to a failed hard drive. Users who got bit by data loss tended to learn from this and implement safeguard such as backup to server, or to removable media. But incredibly, these lessons, once learned, were not applied at more than the individual level. People might talk to each other and departments might share knowledge for how to back up data, but it was never something that was codified in policy. People were on their own to implement their own backup and to make sure it worked. It was something that if anything, was encouraged, but not required or enforced. But very often it was not thought about until after the fact of a data loss incident.

In 2007, we moved to Outlook/Exchange for email. Many long time users were very put off by the change, and did not want to give up their Eudora, and could not deal with the fact that we were not going to migrate their old email into Exchange. Enough resistance was put up that IT ended up continuing to support the client side of the old email system indefinitely, so that users could still access their local archive of old email, and possibly also use automation features in their old client to continue to run processes that generated automated mail messages.

Exchange uses MAPI, so in the new system our messages were now always left on the server, until deleted. We had 1GB server quotas (around this time I believe Gmail was giving the world ~6GB for free). In theory, the 1GB server quota gave us security from data loss because the Exchange server's storage was backed up. In fact, the low quota size forced much more mail deletion than had ever happened in the old POP3 days of decentralized, distributed ad-hoc archive. But this was by design rather than by defect. And it was a lot easier to restore any retained data if it was lost.

All the same, users did not want to delete email, ever. Once they hit their quota on the server, they'd submit requests asking for an increase to their quota, which only would be granted if the volume of incoming mail that they had to deal with made a larger quota necessary in order to allow them to have a reasonable backlog of mail going back 6 months to a year, or they had a senior enough position that they could get whatever they demanded. Even then, when people hit their new quota, they still didn't want to delete old messages. The IT team supporting the new email refused to support this in any way, but didn't prevent users from creating local .pst files which they could use to store mail, once again on the local hard drive

Re: Fox News?

[Vitriol Angst]

This is insightful? Communism was originally planned to come from an advanced society; think Star Trek rather than bolshevik Russia.

Yes, there are corrupt people and that's a huge flaw in Communism. It's also a huge flaw in capitalism. The golden years everyone points to for the reason why Capitalism should reign supreme are between 1940 and 1980 -- the years when America was blessed by redistribution of wealth and a slightly Socialist form of government. Now we are getting well and truly screwed by Libertarianism.

Re:Recycled Hard Drive?!

[AK Marc]

There is a saying: "once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action."

So a car crash with two full cars head-on killing 8 people must be an enemy action because there were 8 deaths? Every major plane disaster with more than 8 dead was an enemy action, where more than 3 died?

From what I can tell this was a single incident, it just happened to affect multiple systems. The person who said they "crashed" is lying or was misinformed (in politics, I'd guess lying). Every report I've seen (from both sides, aside from the one "crashed" assertion, which has been repeated, but never confirmed) is consistent with the OS upgrades happening at the time, and SOP for OS upgrades is to wipe the drive and clean-install the new image/OS.

As far as I can tell, this was a single "incident" that just happened to affect more than one computer.