Posted on 07/23/2014 11:37:46 AM PDT by McGruff
The IRS has “no excuses” for the latest twist in the saga of its missing emails, says an expert in electronic discovery.
“Whether it’s incompetence or deliberate obstruction, the IRS has no excuses for having handled this so poorly,” said Bruce Webster, partner at Provo, Utah-based IT consulting and expert witness firm Ironwood Experts.
House investigators said Tuesday that a hard drive belonging to Lois Lerner, the former agency official at the center of the department’s targeting scandal, was just “scratched,” not irreparably damaged. The IRS had described the hard drive’s data as “unrecoverable.”
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Very interesting, thanks for the information.
I thought the IRS did have the legal responsibility to preserve their official emails (and they were only supposed to do those on their government supplied computers or phones) and also to turn correspondence over to the National Archivist at some point or at least let him know why they couldn’t do so. Not that the law matters to the folks at the IRS.
in the time frame they are talking about a 500MB quota is a large quota on an Exchange 2003 server and was considered a best practice in Corporate Land. Now if you are expected to retain documents for a long time, you had to buy an add-on to Exchange to save the emails on another server. With the advent of Exchange 2010 and 2013 plus Office 365, that no longer applies. Also, if the heads crash on a hard drive, recovery is going to cost around $2K and you are going to have a hard time recovering complete files off of it.
Yes it does.
They’re ‘cleaning.’ Everything related to the WH.
Of course you’re right. The odds on a hard drive failing in the manner described is VERY low. The odds of a hard drive being the EXACT one needed to prove the Administration’s wrongdoing failing? Unbelievably small. Like getting struck by lightning small.
Once is coincidence. Twice is enemy action.
Also - wasn’t it seven different people whose hard drives all “failed” in the same manner?
My bad. I just read that their quota was 150mb. I agree with what they should have done to preserve their email. They didn’t. I also agree with the $2000 for offsite recovery. However I’ve gone that route and probably got back 90+% of our files.
They get future worthless voters and keep the IRS scandal somewhat on the back pages.
In my opinion, OBummer and the boys (Jarret and Holder) fear the IRS scandal more than anything else.
Why not obstruct?
There's NO PENALTY whether professional, organizational or personal.
And you can destroy anyone who asks the wrong question.
NO PENALTY.
A $5mil cash reward would flush that guy out.
And what about all the people that she sent emails to? Does this mean that everyone she contacted at the FEC, DOJ, WH, etc etc, all have destroyed hard drives and servers?
Why even worry about her stuff anymore? Go find what you’re looking for somewhere else, like the recipients of some of her emails.
The IRS should be required to keep all correspondence as far back as taxpayers have to keep their tax returns.
They do. The requirements are very clear, and it appears that they were ignored. The IRS's position is "oops, well, we'll do better next time." No taxpayer could ever get away with that one but they have so far.
So here is the take away from all of this. If the IRS is messing with you for “back taxes”, tell them you want to see EVERYTHING the investigating “official” and their colleagues have e-mailed about you. EVERYTHING. Because given what we know now? Chances are the IRS will lose a discovery phase of a counter lawsuit regardless of your tax standing. It’s an ambulance chasers’ dream come true at taxpayers expense. Maybe this is how “we” cloward-piven the IRS. They want to play games? What if a million of us played and started demanding the full correspondence to our “cases” when the IRS comes a knocking?
He was an enjoyable read in Byte magazine, along with conservative writer Jerry Pournelle.
I miss those days.
E-mail’s do not reside on the desktop or laptop computer. They reside on the e-mail server, which may be a cluster of servers for fault-tolerance. The several hard drives arranged in an array that spreads the data out among all the drives with a “parity” bit to rebuild the drive in case of failure. If a drive fails, a spare drive takes over and the data is “rebuilt” from that “parity” bit and recovery algorithm. The probability of complete loss of data is next to zero unless the server and drive is incinerated.
On top of all that, the e-mail data is incrementally backed-up to tape most likely on a daily basis. And, a full back-up every week. Common criminals.
The SOB knows he’s untouchable...he’s black dontcha know!
Next we’ll discover that the IRS employs Statisticians.....
Actually with Exchange Server, local files are stored in an .OST format. This is so people can work off-line while traveling (assumes Learner had a laptop with all of her sensitive IRS info on it). You can't view the contents of .OST files in Outlook without Exchange Server and an account. There are some kludgy utilities developed in someone's basement that purport to convert .OST files to the more open .PST format. If Learner used Outlook to "export" all of the data while everything was still available on the server, she could have saved it in a .PST file, but it would no longer communicate with her Exchange Server account.
Introduction to Outlook data files
Offline Folder files (.ost)Typically when you use Microsoft Exchange Server, your e-mail messages, calendar, and other items are delivered to and stored on the server. You can configure Outlook to keep a local copy of your items on your computer in an Outlook data file called an Offline Folder file (.ost). This allows you to use Cached Exchange Mode or to work offline when a connection to the Exchange Server computer may not be possible or wanted. The .ost file is synchronized with the Exchange Server computer when a connection is available.
The last sentence from Microsoft tells us the emails are still on the server. If a size limit is reached, the user must export some emails to a .PST file, then delete, or they can delete large attachments, etc. All of these actions create a log entry on the Exchange Server(s). An sysadmin could easily determine who did what and when. Everything is logged and logs are backed up so there's an appropriate disaster recovery window (logs are used for delta-backup recoveries [recovery from incremental backups]).
Whatever Learner (or whoever) did, it should be in a log file that's saved somewhere. It would have to be a totally pathetic disaster recovery operation, violating all federal laws and industry data standards, not to save log files capturing mass delete operations.
I've always had this silly image of them being on 1970s dumb terminals still. I just don't know...
BTW fantastic sleuthing.
As long as the data is there - even in OST, which probably includes compression and possibly encryption - it can be accessed. All that's needed is a flat file and a stock text editor (once the OST is decompressed and decrypted).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.