The dog ate the IRS's homework.

[ksen]

Who the fuck only keeps six months worth of emails? I think that there are zero businesses in the world who have a standard like that and it's insane that a major government organization doesn't have a minimal standard of retaining information.

Since the IRS will be in charge of doing something something with Obamacare I hope they keep more than six months worth of medical records on hand.

 

[prideandfall]

i bet if i searched through the forum's archives i'd find nexus and max and dismal and all the rest of the right-wingers around here being equally upset and denigrating about the massive loss of emails during the bush administration, right?

... right?

 

[Nexus]

i bet if i searched through the forum's archives i'd find nexus and max and dismal and all the rest of the right-wingers around here being equally upset and denigrating about the massive loss of emails during the bush administration, right?

... right?

Wrong in my case at least you considering me a right winger. The only issue I agree with from the right wing side is less gun control.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Maybe the RNC can help. They know a lot about losing emails...

Not to spoil the party with reality, but....the IRS only kept six months worth of backup tapes. They do have a policy for keeping hard copies of "official" emails, but that can be a vague standard. So when stout hearted congressional investigators asked for Lerner's emails, the IRS tapes only went back to late 2012.

The IRS uses Outlook, and users are only allowed 500MB of server space. So many people therefore save emails on their local drives. But Lerners computer crashed irrecoverably in 2011, and that is documented.

So the only emails they can find are ones that either remained on others computers or exist as hard copies.

Another smoke and mirrors scandal.

Yeah, 6 months worth of tapes are fine for most purposes. About the only reason you would need more is for exactly this sort of thing--recovering archival data.

- - - Updated - - -

Who the fuck only keeps six months worth of emails? I think that there are zero businesses in the world who have a standard like that and it's insane that a major government organization doesn't have a minimal standard of retaining information.

I've actually seen the reverse--a policy forbidding long retention of all e-mail. It can save legal hassles.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Like when they're evidence of a crime and the people investigating the crime now can't find them?

 

[dismal]

i bet if i searched through the forum's archives i'd find nexus and max and dismal and all the rest of the right-wingers around here being equally upset and denigrating about the massive loss of emails during the bush administration, right?

... right?

Wrong in my case at least you considering me a right winger. The only issue I agree with from the right wing side is less gun control.

In this case the facts are bad so apparently the best defense for hack apologists is to attack the people questioning the bullshit story.

And BTW you're a racist.

 

[barbos]

Who the fuck only keeps six months worth of emails? I think that there are zero businesses in the world who have a standard like that and it's insane that a major government organization doesn't have a minimal standard of retaining information.

VA I heard has a computer system from 1985, so they probably don't keep any emails.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Who the fuck only keeps six months worth of emails? I think that there are zero businesses in the world who have a standard like that and it's insane that a major government organization doesn't have a minimal standard of retaining information.

VA I heard has a computer system from 1985, so they probably don't keep any emails.

Ya, because backing them up to an archive server is really hard and might take all of ten minutes.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Like when they're evidence of a crime and the people investigating the crime now can't find them?

No, because with a short e-mail retention you can just automatically say "we don't keep them that long" when asked to dig up old e-mails. Such requests can take up a lot of employee time.

 

[Togo]

Some of the companies I worked for had a policy on not keeping old emails to avoid legal hassles. However, in their case it was very much about getting away with questionable activity.

 

[dismal]

They don't claim they have a 6 month retention policy.

They claim that Lois Lerner (and independently, 6 other people's) local desktop machine crashed wiping out their e-mail.

Ignoring for the moment it's probably been a decade or two since I've had an email system had much of anything stored on a local desktop, and it's not particularly likely that a crash would completely wipe out a local hard drive or seven, if you're going to be a hack apologist you must attempt to contort your defense to follow the official excuses.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Ya, if they're going to make stuff up, they really need to put more effort into it. It's tough to be a partisan hack who vehemently defends the party line when the party line is this dumb.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Ya, if they're going to make stuff up, they really need to put more effort into it. It's tough to be a partisan hack who vehemently defends the party line when the party line is this dumb.

So, in 2009, certain IRS officials knew that certain actions of their underlings would result in a congressional investigation years down the road, and so destroyed their hard drives?

You guys have too much time on your hands...

 

[prideandfall]

i bet if i searched through the forum's archives i'd find nexus and max and dismal and all the rest of the right-wingers around here being equally upset and denigrating about the massive loss of emails during the bush administration, right?

... right?

Wrong in my case at least you considering me a right winger. The only issue I agree with from the right wing side is less gun control.

In this case the facts are bad so apparently the best defense for hack apologists is to attack the people questioning the bullshit story.

And BTW you're a racist.

"the facts" being that... the government doesn't do a particularly thorough job of maintaining or archiving emails, and if you look at nearly any department or division of the federal government you will find exactly this sort of thing, but in this specific case it relates to a completely bullshit non-story that the right has a boner for drumming up and trying to turn into a conspiracy theory?
yeah, sounds about right.

also, sorry - my mistake - conservolibertarian, or whatever other random BS label that says "i vote republican, agree with every mainstream republican, support the republican party, but OMG I AM NOT A REPUBLICAN" that you people on this forum love getting your panties in a wad about.

and finally, not giving a shit that the bush admin lost some emails and also not giving a shit that the IRS lost some emails doesn't make me a hack apologist - it's your hypocrisy at freaking out about the one and not giving a shit about the other that has raised a flag here, not my simply pointing out that your hypocrisy exists.

 

[dismal]

Ya, if they're going to make stuff up, they really need to put more effort into it. It's tough to be a partisan hack who vehemently defends the party line when the party line is this dumb.

So, in 2009, certain IRS officials knew that certain actions of their underlings would result in a congressional investigation years down the road, and so destroyed their hard drives?

You guys have too much time on your hands...

Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed 10 days after receiving the first congressional inquiry about IRS targeting of conservative groups.

Again, if you don't align the apologetics with the facts it does not come off well.

 

[barbos]

They don't claim they have a 6 month retention policy.

They claim that Lois Lerner (and independently, 6 other people's) local desktop machine crashed wiping out their e-mail.

Ignoring for the moment it's probably been a decade or two since I've had an email system had much of anything stored on a local desktop, and it's not particularly likely that a crash would completely wipe out a local hard drive or seven, if you're going to be a hack apologist you must attempt to contort your defense to follow the official excuses.

You don't understand, it was literally crashed, with a hammer, literally.

 

[prideandfall]

Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed 10 days after receiving the first congressional inquiry about IRS targeting of conservative groups.

in 20 years of working IT, i've seen hard drive's crash 10 hours before a regional manager was going to give a huge shareholder presentation on the company's plans to implement change in their Medicare processing policy.
i've seen 3 years of project work go up in smoke because one of the largest healthcare companies in the country has no network-based system backup architecture whatsoever, and a single dead drive can mean the loss of everything an employee has ever done.
i've had people come to me in tears because years worth of emails suddenly vanished due to Outlook's .ost file technology being an unreliable and flaky piece of crap and people who use laptops not properly synching their client to their account regularly.

not to say that it isn't possible that there's malfeasance possible in this case, but i've observed the exact same set of circumstances dozens of times, and a conspiracy theory isn't required to explain it.

- - - Updated - - -

Ignoring for the moment it's probably been a decade or two since I've had an email system had much of anything stored on a local desktop, and it's not particularly likely that a crash would completely wipe out a local hard drive or seven, if you're going to be a hack apologist you must attempt to contort your defense to follow the official excuses.

1. it's incredibly common to store emails locally - it's called a .pst file. granted, that depends on what email system the government uses... for some reason i have a difficult time buying that they're using lotus notes, so they're running off either Microsoft Exchange, or some kind of patchwork internally run government system that's either POP3 or some kind of federal hack job of an Exchange server architecture.
statistically speaking the odds of this sort of thing being extremely likely to happen by accident are really, really high.
2. it's incredibly common for a crash to wipe out a system - have you seen what SEP or PGP encryption does to a hard drive in any kind of Enterprise environment? it's morally upsetting.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

One thing to note, due to the ridiculous number of investigations the reich-wing has performed against the Obama Admin, it was inevitable that one of them would have emails lost due to technological problems.

Also, if this thing goes all the way to the top, as does every "scandal" with Obama "involved", they should be trying to get access to every email ever sent since '09 within the Obama Administration.

 

[barbos]

If she is telling the truth then she is admitting utter incompetence and should be fired
And person who hired her should be fired too.
And no, I did not expect her to backup that crap herself, I expected her to make sure it was backed out by competent people. We know she can't count, now we know she can't really organize an office.

 

[prideandfall]

And no, I did not expect her to backup that crap herself, I expected her to make sure it was backed out by competent people. We know she can't count, now we know she can't really organize an office.

if that were any sort of actual requirement anywhere that uses email, there would be maybe 500 employed individuals in the US.