Posted on 06/19/2014 7:08:51 PM PDT by Innovative
Republicans are still pressing the Obama administration to find missing emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and six other IRS personnel, but the White House insists they are not recoverable.
"As the IRS said, I.T. professionals worked to restore Lerner's hard drive and were unable to do so," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Yep, get their own pros in there with unlimited access to retrieve them. Then indict the officials who are stonewalling for obstruction of Congress.
Why didn't they tell Congress months ago? My guess is that they have been feverishly erasing them from the backup servers.
BTW...did any press person ask Carney about backups?
None of the IRS workers would have 86’d any of the computer systems of the IRS. They would be aware of the criminal penalties for doing this.
No. This would have been a job that was farmed out to a contracting firm from say, Pakistan or China even...
We keep everything , forever. Storage is cheap, particularly with high compression. Lawsuits are expensive when you cannot reasonably refute allegations. Companies keep everything, it costs a couple of bucks per employee per year.
I am an I.T. professional and have been for 30 years. I will GUARANTEE those emails are recoverable.
The IRS uses what is called an Exchange server. EVERYTHING that uses Outlook is stored in an .OST file on a SERVER. In the case of the IRS it is almost with certainty that server is located within a data center. That server and probably hundreds of others are backed up with multiple backups AND in other locations.
If the hard drive in a users PC crashes, burns, stolen or whatever, you simply plug in a new one, reconfigure Outlook to grab the .OST file from the server and magically all of your email, folders, contact list, calendar, etc,etc,etc, come back to life on the PC.
Now, these servers are configured with RAID drives that mirror each other. If one goes bad the others keep running. All you do is plug in a new drive and it mirrors again. Plus the servers are mirrored as well. It’s called FAULT TOLERANT.
Even if somebody destroyed the actual .OST files and the backups from the servers. The RECIPIENTS still have those emails and...they are on servers as well.
I would have EVERY computer, tablet, smart phone and any other devices seized from Lerner and EVERYBODY in her contact list as a start. Then I would seize the servers and subpoena EVERY person involved in the administration of those servers. Answers would come swiftly if facing jail time.
The IRS is a criminal organization so you have to think like a criminal. Thing is, they always screw up somewhere.
Check with the NSA they have copies.
Maybe they should jail Lois Lerner until they show up.
Does anyone one know what company the IRS uses for their email gateway?
The only way that this story works is if none of those emails can be found. Anywhere. Ever.
This would have been an incredible undertaking. The political apparatus in DC could not have managed this technical of an undertaking.
Just deleting all copies of emails would not be enough. Log files would have to be edited or deleted. Of course, just about every app on a server writes to a logfile of some sort. To have cleaned everything up would have been monstrous.
I am betting that something was missed.
I think it's possibly not an untrue statement, but not the whole story. Daily backups are only part of a proper backup scheme.
I could see them doing incremental daily backups and keeping 6 month's worth of those daily tapes, and then doing a full backup at 6 months. The full backup tape would be archived offsite and not overwritten. Then repeat the cycle in the second half of the year (re-using the 6 months of daily backup tapes) and sending a year-end full system backup to the archive.
How long would something like that take?
I believe it’s possible that the emails in question aren’t recoverable, but that very fact would be proof positive of a massive criminal conspiracy. Of course the work of deleting the emails would have been farmed out to foreign contractors.
The guys who took care of this weren’t the incompetent college buddies of Michelle who created Healthcare.gov, more likely they were the same IT wizards who worked on Obama’s campaigns.
I also expect that with a little digging we would find that those involved in the IRS targeting of conservative groups used multiple pseudonym email accounts to cover their tracks. This is also illegal, but that is merely academic in a lawless government with no effective opposition.
Thanks for the info! I’ve been looking for someone with clear knowledge of what it takes and what is involved with servers and backup systems
As a former IT guy I’ve been around a good number of crashed hard drives, especially in the old days. “Parking the heads” was incorporated in drives a long time ago so the read head would physically hit the spinning disks. So missing sectors is always possible, but a cataclysmic crash that destroys all the disk surfaces would be to my mind near inconceivable.
Data is also spread over the entire disks, especially one that’s been in service a while and not defragged.
My point is, they certainly could have lost some data off Lerner’s drive. But to lose all of 2 years of data given current forensic techniques on modern drives would pull my leg out of its socket.
That data is archived off-site.
It is very unlikely that a data forensics pro would not be able to retrieve a majority of what was on the original “damaged” HDD.
Further, the law requires those emails to be printed and stored.
This damn government is as corrupt and evil as they come.
Jay CarniVal??? He's soooo yesterday. What'd they do? Dredge him up? Where's Earnestly Joshing?
I'm not judging but this is not a good thing.
I'm involved in IT for a public company, and there is often litigation involving customers.
Your email retention policy determines how far back e-discovery can go. If your email retention policy is to keep everything forever, then e-discovery can go back as far as possible.
If your policy is to keep email archives for, say, 3 years, then e-discovery can only go back 3 years.
At least that is my understanding, and is why we do not keep everything forever.
But 6 months is absurd. And when this scandal erupted, a "legal hold" should have been placed on all of Lerner's emails, which suspends the retention policy for the litigated records.
In the IT dept I work in at a casino. We back-up daily, weekly and monthly. The monthly tapes have to be held for five years in compliance with IRS regulations.
Most use grandfather,father, son schemes which decreases the size of the backups and allows for fill recovery at any point. The tapes are reused, but the records are archived off site. The retention of all government records is governed by Federal law and I don’t know any IT pro who would be willing to destroy ANY data under their control.
Hard drives and hardware is regularly destroyed—complete physical destruction is required for all secure systems. However, the data always backed up.
Hardware is not really considered an issue anymore. The inherent redundancy makes it impossible for any one component to cause a major loss of data. The largest possible loss would be one day’s data, but I would find it hard to believe that they are not running log backups every hour.
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