Slashdot Mirror
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.
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."
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?
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...
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!)
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.
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?