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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.
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.
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?
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.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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....
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.
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?
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??
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."
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...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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.
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Stop spouting facts, they have no place in this lynching! Next you'll be pointing out that the IRS targeted OWS groups too...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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
"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?
. 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.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
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.
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."
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.
If it's from CNN, they'll probably claim the emails were on the Malaysia Airlines flight...
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.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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????
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!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
They used to have a secret forum but it was exposed. (Not that they reported on it!)
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.
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.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...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.
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.
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.
+1 that's awesome. "Breaking news: no signals from MH370 for 67 days. Story developing."
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.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Also
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!