Posted on 07/24/2014 8:18:36 AM PDT by raptor22
Scandal: An internationally accredited information-technology asset-management firm says the IRS has some explaining to do as our patience is taxed with tales of even more convenient computer crashes.
Private-sector organizations as vast as the Internal Revenue Service typically have redundancy built into their information technology systems, as secure record keeping is the key to managing their businesses and staying in business. Such records, if nothing else, are often required to be kept by law, and often by the IRS itself.
As we have noted, Lois Lerner's lost emails from the critical period when the IRS was serving as a political arm of the Obama administration and targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups suggest by themselves a conspiracy to obstruct justice as well as being a violation of the Federal Records Act, which requires paper copies of such critical emails to be printed and stored just in case of computer problems.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
That is what I assume when I hit the send button. Investigating what happened to local HD's is still important. Hard drives failures and loss of data should have been reported to the national archives.
You would be surprised. MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) ratings on hard drives have grown to the order of over 1 million operating hours on average. Hard disk drives can withstand up to 300 Gs of impact without affecting the integrity of the spinning disks. Scratching a physical disk is nearly impossible without opening the case, which voids the warranty on every brand of disk, and even with an open disk enclosure, data can be recovered.
The only surefire way to destroy a hard disk drive is with thermite, or an analogous high temperature. This story of hard drives failing all over the place is ludicrous and an insult to the intelligence of not just IT professionals but the American public in general.
Seriously?
This sort of shit couldn't fly without the Republican party being either utterly complacent or complicit; given the kabuki the Republicans put on for each of these outrages (F&F, Benghazi, NSA, etc) we can conclude that they are very, very complicit.
If the federal government is the enemy of the states, and I believe there is evidence of this, then it is not a party issue.
I quite agree, what we are seeing is the culmination of willfully ignoring Art 4, sec 4 of the US Constitution.
However, this IRS scandal is not that; so in order to accuse the IRS of being traitors you have to link that to this… I don't think you can.
(You'd have better luck going about it by showing the US engages in state sponsored terrorism [Fast and Furious] and the federal law barring supporting such financially combine to make paying the IRS an illegal activity.)
This probably doesn’t rise to the level of treason.
But it sure is a clear cut violation of the Hatch Act.
Using the authority of the government to affect elections is inherently corrupt.
I think we’re in complete agreement.
The public just gets bits of second and third hand info. Last I heard there were 7 people related to the investigation had issues with their HD. Now it might be 20. If the numbers are accurate, it is hard to believe they all had hardware equipment failure. Is something like that even possible? I'd say yes, but highly improbable. I've been in IT long enough to see bad equipment batches from vendors. I haven't seen any report or heard any testimony that suggests that is the cause. One thing I haven't heard or seen mentioned is what they were doing about patching systems and virus mitigation during the time period in question. The commissioner has been pleading poverty, so I wonder if those efforts were substandard. That hasn't been used as an excuse either.
Because they are lying to us.
Spinning disk is so solid a technology as to be nearly “solid state.” The likelihood of an entire batch of 2.5” laptop hard disk drives going back is so infinitesimal as to be just assumed zero. I have a background in electronics and can tell you that the factories producing these parts in bulk are so sophisticated that they could catch even a micro-level flaw in a component before it left fabrication.
A few years ago, Samsung had a bad batch of memory make it on to the market. The recall was so effective that it’s being used in business and management textbooks in universities across the world as an example of extreme efficacy in product lifecycle management. Less than 1% of the batch was actually used. Most of it was stopped in transit and sent back before it made it into a consumer’s hands.
Hard disk drive failures, esp. at the controller and/or enclosure level are virtually unheard of. You’ll lose a bearing in the spindle sleeve or a read/write head before you have a catastrophic loss of data, and in those two scenarios, data is 100% recoverable.
I am sure that the IRS stores the majority of their information on recycled AOL 7.5 inch floppy disks that people got in the mail. Seems legit.
7.5” Floppies? Holy crap, those would never have fit in my mailbox.
I remember the Deskstar, aka "Deathstar drives from early 2000's. There was the bad capacitor problem of the mid 2000's Are all these processes worked out so it never happens again? I am not arguing that is what happened, but it could be the remotest of possibilities.
At this point I haven't seen any reports about what happened to those 20 computers that may have crashed. The first 7 were close associates of Lerner. If they were all in the same building and I was their IT guy, I'd be like WTF. If they were spread around DC and Ohio you might know there was a major problem or coverup going on.
Even if they were all in the same building, nothing short of someone running around with a ball peen hammer physically destroying the drives would explain this.
The Deskstart hard drive failures were controller board faults. The data written to the disk would still be recoverable.
Again, aside from physically opening the drive enclosure and hammering the disks, there’s no way the data was lost.
I haven't seen any information yet on what happened to the other 20 computers that crashed or exactly when they crashed. Until more info is provided, we can only speculate. Some or all the crashes might have been do to viruses. I would expect more info to be forthcoming.
Regardless of data recovery methods, most people like myself find it unconceivable that senior staff wouldn't be backed up or at least have a file server directory that is...
Lois Lerner approved tax exempt status for foundation
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Obama’s Brother Joins Hamas, Wears Scarf Saying ‘Jerusalem Is Ours; We Are Coming’
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