The latest tale of Lois Lerner’s hard drive
Makes no more sense than the previous tales:
In either case, a scratched HD platter wouldn’t result in a complete loss of data. This would be nearly impossible, given the simple physics of the device. You don’t change the orientation of all the ones & zeroes on a thin sheet of ferromagnetic material by scratching one part of it, any more than you could change the orientation of a magnet by nicking it with your snuff spoon.
A good lie is not that easy to come up with. Truth may sometimes be stranger than fiction. But still, if often makes more sense than fiction.
It would if you ran a super magnet over a magnetized surface and scrambled its data containment.
Things only make sense for the US Regime if you assume a priori that they are here to engineer demolition and destruction of anything good.
Thermite does a pretty good job of making the data unrecoverable too.
The emails were not on her hard drive! They were never on her hard drive. I simply do not understand how this is permitted to go on and on.
Neo, your remark about truth and fiction brings to mind a maxim by which a screenwriter friend lives: “The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.”
The problem with this administration is that their fictions are inept. Fortunately for them, they can count on a press and commentariat that willingly suspends disbelief.
I am thus reminded of Michael Goodwin’s observation: “A purpose of a free press is to hold government accountable, but there is no fallback when the watchdog voluntarily chooses to be a lapdog.” (NY Post 4/27/14)
The devil is ingenious in his devices and planning. The devil never tires, never sleeps. Its energy is a thing of marvel, a wonder to behold.
Every now and then they make a small mistake; and this compounds and compounds and compounds.
Then they lose. Temporarily.
This may be one of those cases.
A good lie is not that easy to come up with.
not true
but when your a moron and have no clue coming up with something that works with anyone else but another moron is hard.
If a Republican committee chairman finds the following email, what MSM news outlet will cover it and what lobotomized low information voter will recognize it as significant?
“The emails were not on her hard drive! They were never on her hard drive. I simply do not understand how this is permitted to go on and on.”
Exactly! I’m beginning to wonder why the congress critters from the GOP side keep going on about the HDs also. As Lisa points out, EVERYONE knows the emails were never on the PC hard drive. Is the GOP playing some sort of funky game with this that is actually trying to obscure the investigation??
The GOP may simply be living up to the “stupid” moniker, taking the IRS words at face value. They can’t be bothered to keep up with tech, or *actually* look for the truth. There’s theater to maintain.
The problem Congress is having is by going through the conspirators as intermediaries. They need to subpoena the IT staff directly; about 3 layers of them.
Get 100 IRS IT personnel to testify under oath, and in separate closed hearings to see if their stories match up.
These hearings should have expert IT personnel acting as counsel for the Congressmen.
Then, make the findings public.
As far as the possibly re-discovered backup tapes go, I’m getting the feeling that the IRS is just jerking us around. Either to waste time, or to rub our noses in it.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Koskinen showed up with the physical tapes in front of a committee and burned them in real time.
Of course, there’s been enough elapsed time for someone to have made fake copies, too.
Any evidence produced should be authenticated by independent experts.
What if Matthew M’s hypothetical email goes more like this:
From: The President
To: Lois Lerner
Lois, since we’ve been scrupulous about trying to maintain the highest ethical standards in this administration, I need not tell you how disturbing I’ve found all these accusations hurled at me by the Tea Party. I’m losing sleep over it, and may be developing an ulcer…which is prohibiting me from carrying out my important duties as president of this great nation.
I will not tolerate even the appearance of impropriety, and so I urge you to handle your duties in the highest ethical manner that you can, as a selfless civil servant.
Now I’m off to work in a soup kitchen that serves orphans, so I have to sign off.
God Bless America,
Barack Obama.
For those that think that’s not where the mails are, where are they?
“For those that think that’s not where the mails are, where are they?”
Let me turn that around a bit: where are YOUR emails? I don’t know about you, but mine certainly are NOT on any HD. They reside on the email servers; in my case with 2 accounts, with charter and gmail. With the feds, they have their own internal servers, and that’s where those emails are (were?). The whole bit about HD crashes is a total distraction and deadend. If the GOP can’t see that then they are even more stupid than I thought, or they are part of the coverup to distract the populace.
I understand where you’re coming from PGuy, but my emails are on my laptop harddrive. I fly a lot and like to be able to access my emails via outlook.
Juli: ask where did those emails that now ended up on your h.d. showing themselves to you through Outlook come from? they came from someone else’s computer and traveled through her receiving server to your sending server to you. Those servers are ISP (internet server provider) servers, such as, oh, Google, or TW, or AOL, or ATT, or some other giant provider. Those “big guys” are all “backed up” or they would not be “big guys”. Even if you have set your own personal version of “things” to delete emails from the server once your Outlook captures them to show to you, this does not mean that they are *really* deleted from the servers. They are just deleted from your access to the server. Everything is captured … otherwise, you would not know Snowden’s name.
IT pros -correct me if this description of the fundament is wrong.
I am no tech expert by any means. However, my understanding is that the IRS claims that it had limited space available on its servers (or, as I’ve also heard it, on “tapes”) for archived emails and therefore did not save any such emails for long. Instead, it regularly cleared its servers and directed employees to do their own archiving by saving emails to their hard drives. It is these emails that supposedly were on Lerner’s hard drive and were “accidentally” lost in the purported crash.
Now, I actually worked for a company that had a similar policy with regard to employee emails — believe it or not, a very large company in the business of electronic legal data storage, publishing and research — so I know that such policies did exist in some private businesses (my experience was in the early 2000’s.) Don’t misunderstand, I’m not defending the IRS on any level — just explaining my understanding of why Congress is so focused on Lerner’s hard drive and all the other coincidentally crashed hard drives rather than on the IRS servers where archived emails would ordinarily reside.
physicsguy, et.al.:
I am not a computer tech sort of person, but it’s my understanding that the entire email system at the IRS works (or rather, doesn’t work) differently from either regular private email or most businesses. It is more antiquated, and the servers (at least, as reported) do not store email in the normal way. It’s only stored on the servers for 6 months or so. Any other emails that people want to preserve beyond that, they have to keep their own copies of.
Whether that is true or an IRS lie is by no means clear. But that’s the reason given why Lerner’s hard drive became important.
And that’s why independent IT verification is essential. Congress needs to empower experts to delve into the IRS system and determine their structure over time.
If independent IT expert confirm that the IRS’ story about how things were structured is true, then we actually know something instead of just speculating.
If the IT guys find out that’s not true…
I’m with Mrs Whatsit and Neo. Now, the question is, what is the IRS policy on central backup of the User Data directory on worker’s PCs? If Lerner was in fact storing old email on her PC, and if it was properly backed up, then, when her drive failed, the techs would simply install a new drive with a cloned copy of Windows and the applications she used, and restore her User Data from the cental backup. That would include all the old email she had moved to her PC.
There are two IRS backup policies: one for her User Data and one for the email server. They should not be conflated. They should be required to tell the precise truth.
Let me turn that around a bit: where are YOUR emails? I don’t know about you, but mine certainly are NOT on any HD.
I don’t work for the IRS and neither do you. Unless you’re hiding something. So what difference does it make where our emails are?
Anyone that goes to the trouble of destroying their own hard drives, would also go to the trouble of ensuring the backups are erased, by any means. Since without erasing the backups or offsite storage, there’s no point in indicting oneself in destruction of evidence linkable to themselves. Congress can just confiscate the information elsewhere.
The fact that Congress Has Not confiscated said emails, means they either don’t exist or were destroyed. As such, the hard drive destruction is step 1, and not a smoke screen.