The dog ate the IRS's homework.

[coloradoatheist]

i do work in IT and it's very improbable that all 7 hard drives crashed in a manner that an IT tech could not recover the pst file to move them to a new hard drive. Most of the system crashes aren't of the form, everything is gone, but more of the my computer blue screens as it boots up or my computer keeps locking up and I need to wipe and reload

Those aren't even drive crashes. If you can nuke and pave there was no drive crash. And in such cases you can almost always simply mount the drive as an external and pull the data off. I've done it many times.

The only time it was any problem was when something did a major munch of the partition table on a drive that was part of a RAID array. Most software wouldn't find anything or would even crash. R-Studio's tools did a 100% recovery, though.

i agree. Very few times when the hard drive crashes is it not readable. They mount it, copy the files over to a share and rebuild the machine and move the files back. So here we have a supposed case of 7 machines crashing to a point where they couldn't read it.

Or what happened, she was either told or knew to delete her pst file and remove it and suddenly the file is gone.

 

[prideandfall]

i do work in IT and it's very improbable that all 7 hard drives crashed in a manner that an IT tech could not recover the pst file to move them to a new hard drive.

the statements "i work in IT" and "it's very improbably all 7 drives crashed" are completely contradictory to each other.

Most of the system crashes aren't of the form, everything is gone, but more of the my computer blue screens as it boots up or my computer keeps locking up and I need to wipe and reload

we're not talking about OS crashes, that's a completely different subject and shouldn't even be mentioned here.

i don't know why i have to tell you this since you claim to work in IT, but there are three major ways that a drive can get to a point of some or all data being unrecoverable:
1. physical damage or failure to the internal working parts of the drive - this can, and does, happen all the time because machined parts break, sometimes an HDD just bricks just like sometimes a car just dies.
2. an issue (either physical damage or a software related glitch) causing a read error in the section of the hard drive where the data you're looking for it located - the Windows file partition system does this kind of shit all the time, especially in an Enterprise context where you're pushing a hodge-podge of Microsoft and in-house created system updates all the time.
3. an issue (either physical damage or a software related glitch) causing a read error in the section of the hard drive that contains the decryption key for your Enterprise encryption software - this is the most common, in my experience most major companies will have this happen to approximately 2-8% of their entire userbase in a given month. it won't physically brick the drive, but it will make the data 100% unrecoverable.

 

[dismal]

I don't think anyone actually disputes that a hard drive can crash.

The important thing to note here is we are talking about 7 separate and independent hard drive crashes wiping out emails from the relevant period not long after congress began an inquiry into a matter in which these people just happened to be subpoenaed. Not to mention these people were senior officials (at least the two that have been identified) that just happened to have been exposed in other disclosures to have been actively engaged in pursuing prosecutions of these groups with other branches of the government.

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

 

[coloradoatheist]

I don't think anyone actually disputes that a hard drive can crash.

The important thing to note here is we are talking about 7 separate and independent hard drive crashes wiping out emails from the relevant period not long after congress began an inquiry into a matter in which these people just happened to be subpoenaed. Not to mention these people were senior officials (at least the two that have been identified) that just happened to have been exposed in other disclosures to have been actively engaged in pursuing prosecutions of these groups with other branches of the government.

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

That. Because they would know they would get intro trouble saying, We told our users to delete their pst files and any emails since they aren't being backed up.

 

[Nexus]

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

It should but apparently its not.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

It should but apparently its not.

And would it be the same scrutiny if it was an private company's executive whose hard drive accidentally crashed.

 

[Horatio Parker]

I don't think anyone actually disputes that a hard drive can crash.

The important thing to note here is we are talking about 7 separate and independent hard drive crashes wiping out emails from the relevant period not long after congress began an inquiry into a matter in which these people just happened to be subpoenaed. Not to mention these people were senior officials (at least the two that have been identified) that just happened to have been exposed in other disclosures to have been actively engaged in pursuing prosecutions of these groups with other branches of the government.

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

You keep asserting that the crashes occurred after Congress requested the emails, but you've not documented that assertion.

The sources that I and others have linked to say the opposite: that Lerners crash occurred before the scandal broke.

Also, how many HDs did not fail? Some 25k of Lerners emails have been recovered. Was 7 out of 7? 7 out of 700 or 7000?

 

[dismal]

I don't think anyone actually disputes that a hard drive can crash.

The important thing to note here is we are talking about 7 separate and independent hard drive crashes wiping out emails from the relevant period not long after congress began an inquiry into a matter in which these people just happened to be subpoenaed. Not to mention these people were senior officials (at least the two that have been identified) that just happened to have been exposed in other disclosures to have been actively engaged in pursuing prosecutions of these groups with other branches of the government.

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

You keep asserting that the crashes occurred after Congress requested the emails, but you've not documented that assertion.

The sources that I and others have linked to say the opposite: that Lerners crash occurred before the scandal broke.

Also, how many HDs did not fail? Some 25k of Lerners emails have been recovered. Was 7 out of 7? 7 out of 700 or 7000?

June 3, 2011:
Congressional Inquiries Begin: Chairman Camp sends letter to Commissioner Shulman inquiring about IRS targeting of taxpayers who donated money to conservative groups, as well as information regarding audits of 501(c)(4) organizations.

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=375999

June 13, 2011: Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the investigation, reports her computer's hard drive has crashed, according to an email from another member of the Exempt Organizations Division, which Lerner led.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/key-dates-missing-irs-emails-mystery-24225812

 

[Loren Pechtel]

i do work in IT and it's very improbable that all 7 hard drives crashed in a manner that an IT tech could not recover the pst file to move them to a new hard drive. Most of the system crashes aren't of the form, everything is gone, but more of the my computer blue screens as it boots up or my computer keeps locking up and I need to wipe and reload

Those aren't even drive crashes. If you can nuke and pave there was no drive crash. And in such cases you can almost always simply mount the drive as an external and pull the data off. I've done it many times.

The only time it was any problem was when something did a major munch of the partition table on a drive that was part of a RAID array. Most software wouldn't find anything or would even crash. R-Studio's tools did a 100% recovery, though.

i agree. Very few times when the hard drive crashes is it not readable. They mount it, copy the files over to a share and rebuild the machine and move the files back. So here we have a supposed case of 7 machines crashing to a point where they couldn't read it.

Or what happened, she was either told or knew to delete her pst file and remove it and suddenly the file is gone.

Why do you persist in calling these hard drive crashes???

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Also, how many HDs did not fail? Some 25k of Lerners emails have been recovered. Was 7 out of 7? 7 out of 700 or 7000?

Exactly. Look at the reliability data that BlackBlaze has captured. (While Google probably has better numbers on drive reliability they're not talking. BlackBlaze is.) The best drives run in the 1% range. (I forget over what time interval.)

I'm sure the IRS has a lot more than 700 PCs. There are probably more crashes that aren't relevant.

 

[maxparrish]

Despite the best efforts of IRS's mostly Democratic nomenklatura and Obama's dismissive commissioner, and the many months relentless Democratic Congresses attempts to prevent discovery of the truth, the sordid revelations keep coming.

For those old enough to remember, this is not the first time "missing" information has spawned outrage. After unsuccessfully claiming 'executive privilege', Nixon was forced to turnover thousands of hours of tapes (recording years of Oval Office conversation) to investigators. However a 18½ minute gap in a single tape spawned major anger and frustration in the House committee investigating possible wrong-doing by Nixon's administration. The White House lawyers first heard the gap after the subpoenas, but delayed ONE WHOLE WEEK before telling Sirica of the gap and their conclusion that their was no innocent explanation they could offer.

Nixon launched his own investigation, claiming it was intensive and that nothing had been found.

For some odd reason (sarcasm), Sirica did not rely on the honesty of those he investigated. He appointed a panel of experts jointly appointed by the White House and Special Prosecution force. Six months later, after intensive investigation and technical tests the task force concluded that the gap could not have been solely erased accidentally as Rosemary Woods claimed. How, what, and who erased the tape segment remains unknown.

That "controversy" pales compared to the IRS. After delaying for a year on turning over all of Ms. Lerner's (and others) emails, in May of this year the IRS promises full provision her emails, two months AFTER they "discovered" Lerner had lost her emails. Then, a few days ago, they confess that there is not only a two year gap in emails by Lois Lerner (the Director), as well as reputedly similar crashes and gaps for six other employees targeted for investigation (several agents, their supervisor, Chief of Staff, and acting Commissioner). The hard drives have all been disposed of so now partisan bot defenders are yelling "move along, nothing to investigate here".

LOL...to bad today's Democrats don't remember the era when there was a bit of bi-partisan integrity when attacking corruption in government. If they did, they too would be pushing for a panel of experts and investigators to examine IRS archives and backups, trace HD serial numbers, and to discover who did the work and interrogate them for the reasons behind their actions.

If 18.5 minutes vs. a two year gap for seven employees.

 

[Horatio Parker]

I don't think anyone actually disputes that a hard drive can crash.

The important thing to note here is we are talking about 7 separate and independent hard drive crashes wiping out emails from the relevant period not long after congress began an inquiry into a matter in which these people just happened to be subpoenaed. Not to mention these people were senior officials (at least the two that have been identified) that just happened to have been exposed in other disclosures to have been actively engaged in pursuing prosecutions of these groups with other branches of the government.

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

You keep asserting that the crashes occurred after Congress requested the emails, but you've not documented that assertion.

The sources that I and others have linked to say the opposite: that Lerners crash occurred before the scandal broke.

Also, how many HDs did not fail? Some 25k of Lerners emails have been recovered. Was 7 out of 7? 7 out of 700 or 7000?

June 3, 2011:
Congressional Inquiries Begin: Chairman Camp sends letter to Commissioner Shulman inquiring about IRS targeting of taxpayers who donated money to conservative groups, as well as information regarding audits of 501(c)(4) organizations.

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=375999

June 13, 2011: Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the investigation, reports her computer's hard drive has crashed, according to an email from another member of the Exempt Organizations Division, which Lerner led.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/key-dates-missing-irs-emails-mystery-24225812

Do you bother to read your own sources?

June 29, 2011: Lerner first learns that groups with "Tea Party," ''Patriot" or "9/12 Project" are being targeted for extra scrutiny by members of her staff, according to a report from Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

 

[barbos]

no it isn't, and you clearly have no working knowledge of how IT functions in current large scale enterprise environments - please, for the sake of your own dignity, stop talking like you do.

Well, I know that purpose of having IT is to avoid this kind of shit from happening.

As for the storage, then some people here say it would be pointless because in outlook emails automatically moved to local computer.
Which I too find ridiculous when it comes to government.

again, you clearly don't have the slightest clue as to the actual working mechanics of these IT related concepts, you really need to stop talking about this.

there are no less than three IT professionals in this thread who combined have about 60 years of experience in the field, telling you that the sequences of events as provided by the IRS is both entirely plausible and extremely common.
so, that ship has pretty much sailed.

Right, and they say that losing data is perfectly OK.

 

[barbos]

i would actually agree with that, but that's because the intelligence of the american people is only slightly higher than your average garden vegetable and they'll feel insulted by just about anything.
i think that you have been watching way, way too much NCIS and have a very poor grasp of how drives and data recovery actually works.

Don't watch NCIS. And what I said about recovery is true.

And most data recovery is almost always possible, even during head crashes.

no, it isn't - it's called encryption software, look it up.

Who said anything about these drives being encrypted?
And no, encryption does not prevent you from recovering data. You can ask owner for password and if hash block is not destroyed by the malfunction decrypt everything just fine.
And competent IT person would backup hash block on separate storage and put it in a safe place.
Of course competent person would have a RAID in the first place so problems with one drive would not result in such trouble.
Moreover, government which allows emails to be deleted is asking for troubles.
Every single email of government employee should be saved regardless of what system is used.

But I understand that they can simply says we threw HDs away, that's why recovery is not possible. That's 7 separate episodes which tells me they are lying.

that they are lying in no way can be assumed from the details of the 7 episodes, because the 7 episodes are completely plausible on their own.

The same way 7 unrelated deaths of important witnesses just before court testifying would be plausible.

 

[maxparrish]

I don't think anyone actually disputes that a hard drive can crash.

The important thing to note here is we are talking about 7 separate and independent hard drive crashes wiping out emails from the relevant period not long after congress began an inquiry into a matter in which these people just happened to be subpoenaed. Not to mention these people were senior officials (at least the two that have been identified) that just happened to have been exposed in other disclosures to have been actively engaged in pursuing prosecutions of these groups with other branches of the government.

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

You keep asserting that the crashes occurred after Congress requested the emails, but you've not documented that assertion.

The sources that I and others have linked to say the opposite: that Lerners crash occurred before the scandal broke.

Also, how many HDs did not fail? Some 25k of Lerners emails have been recovered. Was 7 out of 7? 7 out of 700 or 7000?

June 3, 2011:
Congressional Inquiries Begin: Chairman Camp sends letter to Commissioner Shulman inquiring about IRS targeting of taxpayers who donated money to conservative groups, as well as information regarding audits of 501(c)(4) organizations.

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=375999

June 13, 2011: Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the investigation, reports her computer's hard drive has crashed, according to an email from another member of the Exempt Organizations Division, which Lerner led.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/key-dates-missing-irs-emails-mystery-24225812

Do you bother to read your own sources?

June 29, 2011: Lerner first learns that groups with "Tea Party," ''Patriot" or "9/12 Project" are being targeted for extra scrutiny by members of her staff, according to a report from Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

As should be expected of leaning MSM journalism, the timeline is dissembling by omission and it was left out what has been discovered in the last year. Prior to the supposed "first time" Lerner knew of Cinncy office targeting with keywords she was already deeply engaged in her own political targeting, involved with sequestering Cinncy Tea Party applications for "special" attention.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the IRS faced pressure from voices on the left to heighten scrutiny of applicants for tax-exempt status. IRS EO employees in Cincinnati identified the first Tea Party applicants and promptly forwarded these applications to IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C. for further guidance. Officials in Washington, D.C. directed IRS employees in Cincinnati to isolate Tea Party applicants even though the IRS had not developed a process for approving their applications.

While IRS employees were screening applications, documents show that Lerner and other senior officials contemplated concerns about the “hugely influential Koch brothers,” and that Lerner advised her IRS colleagues that her unit should “do a c4 project next year” focusing on existing organizations.8 Lerner even showed her recognition that such an effort would approach dangerous ground and would have to be engineered as not a “per se political project.”9

Underscoring a political bias against the lawful activity of such groups, Lerner referenced the political pressure on the IRS to “fix the problem” of 501(c)(4) groups engaging in political speech at an event sponsored by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.10"

Lerner not only proposed ways for the IRS to scrutinize groups with 501(c)(4) status, but also helped implement and manage hurdles that hindered and delayed the approval of groups applying for 501(c)(4) status. In early 2011, Lerner directed the manager of the IRS’s EO Technical Unit to subject Tea Party cases to a “multi-tier review” system.11 She characterized these Tea Party cases as “very dangerous,” and believed that the Chief Counsel’s office should
“be in on” the review process.12 Lerner was extensively involved in handling the Tea Party cases—from directing the review process to receiving periodic status updates.13 Other IRS employees would later testify that the level of scrutiny Lerner ordered for the Tea Party cases was unprecedented.14 (PG 4 http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Lerner-Report.pdf)

All citied in the footnotes, this was before June 29. 2011, and before her hard disk crash. SHE ALREADY had plenty of reason to have a "hard drive crash" after Congress started its investigation.

 

[barbos]

More about disk crashes and recoveries. I have seen only one somewhat older (20 GB era) drive where surface looked somewhat suspicious.
I don't know what happened but it looked like beginning of the disk was peeled off by heads.
But I can't be sure, it could have been normal.
Most of the hard drive failures do not end up in any measurable surface destruction, so recovery is 100% possible.
You can kick you hard drive while it's spinning and few sectors get killed, but other than that surface is usually fine.
Also if hard drive survived first few months then it will last for a very long time, especially with light load of office computer.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Of course competent person would have a RAID in the first place so problems with one drive would not result in such trouble.

Ever see RAID in an ordinary network-connected workstation? I haven't.

While I personally run RAID for everything but my SSD most workstations don't.

 

[barbos]

Of course competent person would have a RAID in the first place so problems with one drive would not result in such trouble.

Ever see RAID in an ordinary network-connected workstation? I haven't.

While I personally run RAID for everything but my SSD most workstations don't.

I saw it, you can have RAID with just 2 hard drives.
In any case I don't believe in their 7 crashes theory at all.

 

[Horatio Parker]

I don't think anyone actually disputes that a hard drive can crash.

The important thing to note here is we are talking about 7 separate and independent hard drive crashes wiping out emails from the relevant period not long after congress began an inquiry into a matter in which these people just happened to be subpoenaed. Not to mention these people were senior officials (at least the two that have been identified) that just happened to have been exposed in other disclosures to have been actively engaged in pursuing prosecutions of these groups with other branches of the government.

Given the context, the level of coincidence should strain the credulity of even the most dedicated Obama apologist.

You keep asserting that the crashes occurred after Congress requested the emails, but you've not documented that assertion.

The sources that I and others have linked to say the opposite: that Lerners crash occurred before the scandal broke.

Also, how many HDs did not fail? Some 25k of Lerners emails have been recovered. Was 7 out of 7? 7 out of 700 or 7000?

June 3, 2011:
Congressional Inquiries Begin: Chairman Camp sends letter to Commissioner Shulman inquiring about IRS targeting of taxpayers who donated money to conservative groups, as well as information regarding audits of 501(c)(4) organizations.

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=375999

June 13, 2011: Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the investigation, reports her computer's hard drive has crashed, according to an email from another member of the Exempt Organizations Division, which Lerner led.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/key-dates-missing-irs-emails-mystery-24225812

Do you bother to read your own sources?

June 29, 2011: Lerner first learns that groups with "Tea Party," ''Patriot" or "9/12 Project" are being targeted for extra scrutiny by members of her staff, according to a report from Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

As should be expected of leaning MSM journalism, the timeline is dissembling by omission and it was left out what has been discovered in the last year. Prior to the supposed "first time" Lerner knew of Cinncy office targeting with keywords she was already deeply engaged in her own political targeting, involved with sequestering Cinncy Tea Party applications for "special" attention.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the IRS faced pressure from voices on the left to heighten scrutiny of applicants for tax-exempt status. IRS EO employees in Cincinnati identified the first Tea Party applicants and promptly forwarded these applications to IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C. for further guidance. Officials in Washington, D.C. directed IRS employees in Cincinnati to isolate Tea Party applicants even though the IRS had not developed a process for approving their applications.

While IRS employees were screening applications, documents show that Lerner and other senior officials contemplated concerns about the “hugely influential Koch brothers,” and that Lerner advised her IRS colleagues that her unit should “do a c4 project next year” focusing on existing organizations.8 Lerner even showed her recognition that such an effort would approach dangerous ground and would have to be engineered as not a “per se political project.”9

Underscoring a political bias against the lawful activity of such groups, Lerner referenced the political pressure on the IRS to “fix the problem” of 501(c)(4) groups engaging in political speech at an event sponsored by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.10"

Lerner not only proposed ways for the IRS to scrutinize groups with 501(c)(4) status, but also helped implement and manage hurdles that hindered and delayed the approval of groups applying for 501(c)(4) status. In early 2011, Lerner directed the manager of the IRS’s EO Technical Unit to subject Tea Party cases to a “multi-tier review” system.11 She characterized these Tea Party cases as “very dangerous,” and believed that the Chief Counsel’s office should
“be in on” the review process.12 Lerner was extensively involved in handling the Tea Party cases—from directing the review process to receiving periodic status updates.13 Other IRS employees would later testify that the level of scrutiny Lerner ordered for the Tea Party cases was unprecedented.14 (PG 4 http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Lerner-Report.pdf)

All citied in the footnotes, this was before June 29. 2011, and before her hard disk crash. SHE ALREADY had plenty of reason to have a "hard drive crash" after Congress started its investigation.

I don't see anything in her emails that would suggest something for her to fear. Can you be specific? Something besides hand waving? If you want a bipartisan approach, you need to leave the partisanship aside.

What I learned from scanning the appendices is that the IRS was caught in a tug of war.

First, it needs to be understood that most of the so-called social welfare non-profits formed in the wake of Citizens United were conservative. Most of the money is conservative money. It would be difficult to investigate these new organizations without an appearance of victimizing conservatives. What Issa and others call a smoking gun seems to me nothing more than a recognition of this problem.

Second the IRS was asked by multiple sources to investigate these groups, by Congress and by certain watchdog groups, not the White House. This part was news to me.

Thirdly, can you point to even one such conservative group that was denied tax exempt status?

AFAICT, this is a lot of bloviating and grandstanding, an attempt at governance by innuendo and intimidation. And the attempt to equate this with Nixon is laughable btw.

 

[dismal]

Also, how many HDs did not fail? Some 25k of Lerners emails have been recovered. Was 7 out of 7? 7 out of 700 or 7000?

Exactly. Look at the reliability data that BlackBlaze has captured. (While Google probably has better numbers on drive reliability they're not talking. BlackBlaze is.) The best drives run in the 1% range. (I forget over what time interval.)

I'm sure the IRS has a lot more than 700 PCs. There are probably more crashes that aren't relevant.

You're coming at it from the wrong direction.

Let's say the IRS has thousands of PCs and some small percent of them crash. No biggie there.

But how does that percentage compare to the percent of senior officials who were in a position to have information relevant to this
this investigation? There were probably only a handful of people senior enough in the relevant departments to have relevant information.

And there seems to have been some sort of epidemic of crashes that correlates very well to the likelihood the person would have had relevant information.