Republicans keep pressing IRS over lost emails from Lerner, six others (Calling IT Professionals!!!)

CBS News ^ | June 18, 2014 | Stephanie Condon/

[Innovative]

Republicans are still pressing the Obama administration to find missing emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and six other IRS personnel, but the White House insists they are not recoverable.

"As the IRS said, I.T. professionals worked to restore Lerner's hard drive and were unable to do so," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

[kiryandil]

The life of an administrator in any bureaucracy REVOLVES TOTALLY around email.

[ladyjane]

Their claim is that the backup tapes were recycled every 6 months

Sounds like the tapes of the apartment building where Chandra Levy lived. Although, in her case, fter a couple of weeks the tapes were recycled.

[Fledermaus]

I think she sould be charged with treason.

[Red Steel]

Yes that by squeezing them, and seizing the drives and data for inspection, but Congress appears to not have that ability and they know it.

[Mark17]

Thank you. So would I be going out on a limb, if I said those rat bastards are lying sacks of BS? When asked over a year ago, to get the e mails, they should have had them in hand after the lunch break.

[Fledermaus]

They have the power to call them all to testify UNDER OATH with threat of prosecution for perjury.

But yes, the GOPe are cowards and Darryl Issa is a pussy (shove it feminist).

[kiryandil]

Right. A true IT professional can't sleep at night unless there's two copies, in addition to the live data set.

Not only that, the entire focus of an administrative type's life is their email.

The regular IT people at my wife's employer weren't trusted to clone her old machine to a new machine.

I had to do it.

And there were two copies. And they're still hanging around here somewhere, eating Gigs on my backup machines.

[Steven Tyler]

And the fact Lerner would have archived “Cover her A$$” mails if everything fell apart and she faced Jail time, or worse.

Find Lerner’s CYA insurance e-mails

[Red Steel]

Issa has subpenaed the IRS Director next week for testimony and hopefully under oath. If it was up to me, I would have subpenaed the IRS IT people first, and then later subpenaed the IRS Director on the same day as the IT people.

[Deek]

I agree

I have managed an Exchange System, and It is quite possible that the email is gone; but if it is gone, it is because several intentional steps were taken to delete the email. I don't think it is in the realm of possibility that it was an accident. The steps required:

1) Delete the email from the Exchange Server. In most cases a user can delete data from the Exchange server where the email is stored; in other cases, administrative privileges are required. Either way, this step must be done intentionally by someone. If this step is not done, the email is still there.

2) Copies of the email that are stored on the user's computer must be deleted. I have indirect experience with forensic recovery, as we used it when employees attempted to damage a disk beyond recovery, or when we had a disk hardware failure. I have never seen a disk hardware failure that was unrecoverable. It takes both knowledge and still to render a disk unrecoverable. Someone should get a copy of the forensics analysis report. They can tell how the disk was deleted, and likely what tools were used.

3) The backups of the Exchange Server must be overwritten or destroyed. What I know of Federal Data retention policy is very limited; but IT practices in even the smallest of businesses required that some daily backups (monthly or quarterly) be kept for an extended period of time.

There are a lot of other details that may apply as well, depending on how the system was managed; but at a minimum, the three intentional steps above must occur. There is one or more IT person that knows exactly what happened to those emails.

[mmichaels1970]

I’m on a smartphone. Check my posting history. I have several posts describing my views on it.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Republicans keep pressing IRS over lost emails from Lerner, six others (Calling IT Professionals!!!)...well one thing's for sure - even if the emails are gone, their pathway from computers to servers to storage back through servers to other computers is established - it will be possible to trace who had access to various sectors of that pathway and who would have been able to make the data disappear - eventually someone will be held accountable and maybe will spill the beans - Jay Sukulow said tonight that one of the IRS employees whose emails supposedly are gone is already the object of one of his suits - that means probably a court somewhere can order discovery of information in the suit and if it isn't produced, can require investigation to what happened to it - someone will take the fall.....

[kiryandil]

The only way that this story works is if none of those emails can be found. Anywhere. Ever. This would have been an incredible undertaking. The political apparatus in DC could not have managed this technical of an undertaking.

Just deleting all copies of emails would not be enough. Log files would have to be edited or deleted. Of course, just about every app on a server writes to a logfile of some sort. To have cleaned everything up would have been monstrous.

I am betting that something was missed.

It's been mentioned upthread, but there's no way in hell you could suborn a real IT professional to do something along the lines of what you're theorizing.

If some management type proposed that to me, the immediate answer would be "No Fracking Way".

All it takes is "An Inconvenient Backup Tape", to paraphrase Al "ManBearPig" Gore, and we all know it...

[MHGinTN]

Those IT folks will have very shortened lives, regardless of their confession potentials. America is being run by criminals.

[Red Steel]

What I know of Federal Data retention policy is very limited; but IT practices in even the smallest of businesses required that some daily backups (monthly or quarterly) be kept for an extended period of time.

Here.

"The Law Requires Email Archiving (Helloooooo IRS!)"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3168910/posts

[mmichaels1970]

The IRS is claiming that their exchange server had such a small mailbox quota that she was forced to download her emails to a .PST file which is stored on her local drive and removed from the server.

[mmichaels1970]

They use Microsoft Exchange Server.

[WildHighlander57]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3169984/posts?page=25#25

Many thanks, unixfox for this detailed information!

All y’all ping to this post!

Those emails DO exist, and ARE retrieveable!

[Red Steel]

Without the ability to send an inspection team or law enforcement in to find out what’s what, the IRS can claim anything. The IRS are the ‘foxes in the hen house’ as the old saying goes.

[Gideon7]

In fact, all versions of Exchange since the old 2003 release now use MS SQL

No, Exchange does not use MSSQL. It uses an ISAM engine called the Extensible Storage Engine (code named Jet Blue). There is no SQL executing inside of Exchange. It's all raw low-level ISAM.

The same codebase is also used by Microsoft to host Active Directory, the centralized password and security database that is hosted on Windows Server domain controllers. (I happen to know this because I own an patent on using SQL for I&A.)

ESE trades off the flexibility of SQL in favor of speed and robustness. It has excellent data logging and error recovery capability, a good thing in something as mission critical as your organization's central security database.

ESE allows for continuous backup capability, where transactions can be archived in real time without shutting down the mail server or interrupting mail traffic. This is a big feature of Exchange, particularly in today's hyper-litigious where a permanently searchable mail archive for legal discovery is pretty much a necessity for every organization.