Comments on: The latest tale of Lois Lerner’s hard drive

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:34:37 +0000

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.

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:32:01 +0000

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?

By: KBK

KBK — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 22:30:20 +0000

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.

By: Matt_SE

Matt_SE — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 17:48:48 +0000

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…

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 16:04:27 +0000

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.

By: Mrs Whatsit

Mrs Whatsit — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 15:18:09 +0000

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.

By: M of Hollywood

M of Hollywood — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 14:55:35 +0000

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.

By: Juli

Juli — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 13:46:03 +0000

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.

By: physicsguy

physicsguy — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 12:26:28 +0000

“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.

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 04:21:34 +0000

For those that think that’s not where the mails are, where are they?