The IRS and its email backup system
Not only is the loss of the emails of Lois Lerner and the IRS Six not credible, but the failure of the agency to back them up properly in some centralized fashion is a separate outrage.
Here’s the way the IRS system supposedly worked (although “worked” is hardly the applicable term):
Not only is there no automatic permanent storage of all e-mail, the simple act of archiving a message would remove it from the IRS’s system entirely, including the “back-up system” that preserves messages for six months before deleting them. That’s a ridiculously decentralized system for an age when storage is cheaper than it’s ever been. In fact, the former IRS IT expert whom Bryan Preston interviewed claimed that the IRS has plenty of “back-up tapes” that could be used to preserve e-mails for much longer than six months if need be. What you’ve got here, in other words, is an agency stressing record-keeping in its own regulations and then doing everything it can to undermine that redundancy, first by trusting employees to diligently file “federal records” that might incriminate them and then allowing them to remove evidence from the system altogether, which naturally led to a spate of mysterious “computer crashes” in this case. It’s goofy. But it sure came in handy, didn’t it?
So, just to make it clear: this is the equivalent of relying on employees to save all of their emails that might incriminate them in wrongdoing, without any way for the agency or anyone else to independently check on those emails that have been “disappeared” by not being purposely saved by the sender. Nifty! Does anyone believe that anyone engaged in nefarious or even suspicious activity would be saving the evidence if that person had a chance to destroy it instead and leave no trace?
This is separate from the question of whether there really was no trace left in terms of whether the emails were stored on some other server somewhere outside the IRS’ system. I’ll leave that to the computer experts of the world, of which I am most decidedly not one. But it doesn’t take an expert to know that the emails should exist somewhere, if not with the IRS or some outside server, then with the recipients of those emails.
That, of course, is assuming they don’t have the same clever “system” of email record-keeping that the IRS has. And of course the irony of this being the IRS we’re talking about—you know, that agency that requires us to keep everything that passes though our hands for biblical amounts of time or face their terrible swift sword—should not be lost on the American people.
Did I say “lost”? It might as well be lost, for all the coverage the MSM is giving it. That’s another scandal, but the MSM has learned that it’s an effective way to deal with the situation. If a press has lost all integrity, the republic cannot continue. Somehow the press has decided the triumph of the left is more important than the continuation of the republic.
And let’s just say for the sake of argument that Lois Lerner and the Six are all completely innocent of wrongdoing. That’s highly unlikely to be the case, but even if it were true, learning the way the IRS handles its emails is a revelation about how the system itself constitutes an engraved invitation to abuse and coverup. This should send a chill through every single American, although it almost certainly won’t.
And that may be the most important outrage of all in the entire story.
[NOTE: You might want to read this letter send by Cleta Mitchell, attorney for the plaintiffs in lawsuits against the IRS, sent to attorneys for the defendants.]
[ADDENDUM: On the changing MSM treament of the IRS story.]
[ADDENDUM II: More on the tech details of the IRS system, from Andy at Ace’s.]
Any company that kept its records that way would be in trouble, deeply and seriously, with the IRS and a number of other federal agencies. The CEO would go to prison; the media would crucify him.
The below says a great deal about the contemporary Obama media:
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/pat-caddell-says-media-have-become-enemy-of-the-american-people/
The leftist commentariat see this as a struggle for the right to have its own Watergate.
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/17/gops_sad_quest_for_an_obama_scandal_no_the_irs_flap_is_not_like_watergate/
This was by award-winning columnist Digby Parton. (She might have taken the prize for the use of the most scare quotes.) It is the most deftly constructed assembly of argumentum ad hominem I’ve seen in a long time.
One of the most hilarious assertions is that the IRS used terms like “Tea Party” “progressive” and “occupy” to trigger a second look at an application, and the only group denied tax-exempt status was progressive.
Progressives willfully ignore the truth because a progressive administration is its own objective.
Is not keeping “accurate records” a crime for a government employee? Especially one at the IRS which is dealing with taxpayers communication?
If so, then I want to see heads roll and see them go to jail.
Such action may not get those truly responsible for the IRS nonsense; but, maybe, just maybe it will make underlings think twice before they break the law against innocent folks because the higher ups told them to.
Yea, Obama is the top dog in a lot of this mess; but, those willingly doing his bidding are just as guilty.
The Gang of 8, merely 8 Senators, get to oversee and control US military operations via their specific committee access on the Senate.
This is democracy, where 8 people determine for the entire House and Senate, what’s really going on while keeping secrets?
If democracy is 1% of the people controlling 99% of the people, then that is True Democracy all right.
What’s the point of electing Senators for politics, when most of them have nothing to do with overseeing the Executive branch’s foreign policy and military defense to begin with?
A sane system would partition America’s voting resource into people who select Military Defense as their number 1 priority and everyone else that didn’t, into another partition. And then use only the people who selected MD as their first priority, to vote in or vote out the gang of 8 elite seats in the Senate, without respect to place of residence.
If so, then I want to see heads roll and see them go to jail.
They don’t really care what you want.
Ymarsakar:
I’d amend it to read: “They laugh at what you want.”
Well, Lerner’s emails are not “lost”. Her hard drive was intentionally and “routinely” destroyed in 2011. How freaking coincidental.
The sheer number of emails Lerner sent out which have been retrieved for the Oversight Committee are mind-boggling, some 67,000, IIRC. She must be permanently welded to her keyboard. Oh, wait; as a high-level IRS slug she probably has a dictation system like Siri.
It has allegedly cost the IRS some $10 million to “retrieve” the found/retained emails over the past year. That ought to tell all of us something about the workings of bureaucrats. We need to incinerate them in their offices.
The democrat party’s true believers have so corrupted the system that redress of grievance is no longer possible and if amnesty passes and/or a democrat is elected in 2016, may never again be available.
Democrats don’t care that this is destroying the rule of law because they worship at the altar of ideology. They are willing to use any means necessary to establish a Socialist/Marxist State. They’re not interested in a free contest of ideas because they’re totalitarian ideologues, who have received “the One and Only Truth”.
These quotes equally apply today;
“The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.” George Washington
“”You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the great legislator of the universe.” John Adams
“When Injustice becomes Law, Resistance becomes Duty” – Thomas Jefferson
“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.” James Madison
“It is freedom itself that still hangs in the balance, and freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” – Ronald Reagan
It was on the Malaysia flight…
maybe they should have used the money that was spent on sniper rifles, armor, antipersonel devices, and more…
to get an account with an automatic backup service….
actually, they do ahve those backups, but people who do criminal things dont think nothing of doing one more criminal thing to keep their can out of the fire.
what will be interesting is whether people are prosecuted for violating laws that are on the books that require such backups and come with a criminal sentence…
Did i point out that emails gone missing are assumed to be incriminating under that law? sorry i forgot.
Having worked closely with the federal bureaucracy on three federally funded contracts, I lean toward buying the ineptitude of IRS IT staff as being the cause of the failure to put in place a fail-safe e-mail backup system. I remember that the folks who supervised our contracts demanded much more of us working those contracts than they did of themselves. They frequently screwed up, and often big time. But here’s the thing: none of them ever got fired. If whatever screw-up they caused got too big to ignore, they were moved to another position, often one that meant advancement, or to another department.
Don’t know what the answer to this is. Maybe there is none. Heck, even Al Gore back in the day tried his hand at reining them in — remember his National Performance Review in 1993?
Its all grade A certified BS with a cherry on top. We file electronically and we were audited 2 years ago on our 2006 filing. The IRS goons had all of our data on their system which shows the IRS has no problem backing up the data on their servers and maintaining it indefinitely. They will audit you on tax returns you filed 20+ years ago. So BS with a cherry on top. Like all of the other ‘phony scandals’ this reaches all the way into the inner circle of the oval office.
Before we go charging after a grand conspiracy, maybe we should keep this in mind:
Mentioned in CREWS letters are lost “torture” memos, SEC Madoff memos, and 5 million e-mails doing with the Bush Administration’s dismissal of U.S. attorneys in 2007.
More here.
And here’s a 2008 report from CREW — the summaryof its findings:
The perpetrators intentionally insult us. Their lies are so preposterously thin that the conclusion of intentional insult is inescapable.
They’re daring us, double-daring us: whatcha gonna do about it, big boy? Call your momma?
Ann,
They are bloated bureaucracies, staffed for the most part by incompetent Quislings, but the ‘lost’ emails of those involved in the IRS witch hunt is a coincidence no creature in the history of the planet could swallow. BS with a cherry on top.
Ann reminds me of my housekeeper, a Democrat because she’s black, who always says about the perps in D.C., “Yes it looks bad, but…” She always has a “but”, looking for an out despite overwhelming evidence of Dem malfeasance.
There is a grand conspiracy, Ann, to rob you of your fortune and your sacred honor, and possibly, in the long term, your life. No buts about it. Seven key IRS people’s emails erased by accident? C’mon!
And what are we to make of the endless pilgrimages from the IRS to the White House?
By definition, every one of those trips was political.
You make the trek because the conversation is so (partisan) toxic that a recording can’t be suffered.
Barry was (and is) running the IRS from the Oval Office.
It’s all Chicago all the time with that man.
So you play your albums, and you smoke your pot
And you meet your girlfriend in the parking lot
Oh but still you’re aching for the things you haven’t got What went wrong?
And if you can’t understand why your world is so dead Why you’ve got to keep in style and feed your head Well you’re 21 and still your mother makes your bed And that’s too long
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xxugNQUtpE
He saw it all, he saw it all.
See the twin towers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO2l7qtyyBw
Did Billly Joel have precognition?
Almost everybody wants to change
It seems the way we govern.
Perhaps the time has come it seems
To roll back the Constitution.
Round and round the arguments go
Without any time given
To make those with a voice
Who claim the past is lived in.
Why do I have the feeling that the “Careful what you ask for email” will be the SOLE response to Sharyl Attkinson’s Eight Questions?
http://sharylattkisson.com/lois-lerners-lost-emails-questions-for-the-irs/
You know, it’s funny. I have all my e-mail going back to about 1998 (then it gets a little spotty). That e-mail has been through numerous changes in software, first Eudora, Outlook Express, Outlook (very briefly), and Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s also been through several computer upgrades, and several harddrive crashes.
I have never worked for an organization with more than a handful of people that didn’t use a centralized mail server (usually Microsoft Exchange), which stores the mail centrally, as well as on the client machine. These mail servers are routinely backed up, and often data retention policies are driven by Sarb-Ox and other regulations.
The idea that a single harddrive failure could be responsible for losing all those e-mails is absurd. I don’t plan in case a harddrive fails, I plan for _when_ a harddrive fails, and at home, I could lose any two harddrives and probably not lose any data, and I could lose all of them at one, and not lose much. Now, if my house burned down, my offsite backups (spindles of optical media at my parents’ house) is a year or two old, but I’m an individual person doing this in my spare time (and the time and effort I expend is pretty minimal).
I’m not some kind of computer genius, although I do know what I’m doing. What bugs me most is not that the IRS can’t do something that any person with half a brain and a modicum of disposable income can do in an hour or two a week, but that I was not surprised it happened. In fact, I expected something would end up being “lost”.
Usually, you should not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Well, no one is that stupid. This is just more stonewalling, period, and the longer Congress lets them get away with it, the closer we inch to a complete loss of the rule of law, if we even still have it.
It’s gotten to the point where not only do we expect them to fail, not only do we expect them to lie, but we can pretty much predict how both will go down.
Can we please get enough people, and the media, to stop pretending this is anything other than complete incompetence and utter corruption?
It is simply unbelievable that nothing could be recovered from Learner’s hard drive. I had a hard drive fail in my home computer and found software that allowed me to recover my files. When the server crashed where I worked, the server was taken to a data recover company and they recovered everything. The IRS is implicitly claiming that they are really stupid.
http://www.krollontrack.com/
I had a hard drive fail in my home computer and found software that allowed me to recover my files.
Was your hard drive recycled using a supermagnet? Dipped in super acid? Pound on, grinded down, and then melted in a steel furnace?
That’s some of the things that happened to IRS HDs.
Just by coincidence, after six months the backups are erased. By coincidence it is.
Before we go charging after a grand conspiracy, maybe we should keep this in mind:
You should keep in mind, Ann, that when you obey authority, refuse to get your hands dirty with job, and rely on the Regime to protect you, you will have no one to complain to when they stab you in the back.
Correction: hands dirty with blood, not job. Unless it’s the job of wetwork.