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.

[mmichaels1970]

I absolutely agree. And now they’re claiming the same thing happened to SIX other people all involved in the investigation. 7 individual hard drive failures in 2 or so years. All 7 failures have 0% recovery. Impossible. This is a coverup.

[kiryandil]

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.

Right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

click on the pic for the real deal

[Dead Corpse]

Local copy on her workstation would have been lost. Nightly/Weekly back-ups of the mail server itself, not so much...

Their story is full of sh*t.

I’ve built Groupwise, Exchange, and Zimbra servers.

[FreeInWV]

I too work in IT and have worked for several large federal agencies. I believe the emails are fully recoverable. There is a possibility that she had a local .pst file that she was saving the emails to. That would have been a violation of the records retentions policies, but it is possible.

I expect however that it is still saved on the storage array, the DR site, or the onsite or offsite backups. Likely even in Documentum (not sure about the records management policies of the IRS, but it certainly should be there!). There is a good possibility that their enterprise email is run out of the Kearneysville, WV site. Backups would be there too. Offsite backups would likely be in the PA Iron Mountain site or one of the Federal Records Centers.

Most SA contractors I know are a rabidly conservative bunch and take pride in the management of their systems. They would certainly not violate the law by sabotaging their own systems or backups for nefarious purposes. Intentional tampering or Fraud waste and abuse would cost them their clearance and job.

[WildHighlander57]

Good point!

[Red Steel]

Brit humor. ;-)

[unixfox]

You are most welcome!

[Gideon7]

Microsoft Exchange provides a documented backup API that has been around for years. The technical description can be found here. This API is rather old (it dates back to at least Exchange 2000).

More recent editions of Exchange Server have switched to use the Volume Snapshot Server (VSS), which is documented here. The backups are then typically archived to a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) or equivalent.

Now, I don't know which edition of Exchange the IRS happens to be running (a lot of these sites are pretty old). Regardless of which API they are using, the point is that Exchange's backup technology is well established and had been a standard feature of Exchange for well over a decade.

[Dead Corpse]

Yep...

[mmichaels1970]

By the way, why would you call all IT Professionals at 10pm EST. Don’t you know we usually sneak off posts from our desks? Half of us are probably buzzed by now.

[Gene Eric]

Subpoena the integrators/vendors.

[AbnSarge]

Some of us IT folks prefer to call that “enhanced creativity”

[mmichaels1970]

Lol. It CAN be inspirational at times.

[TBP]

Subpoena NSA for their copies.

[Artcore]

Sorry, but this scandal, just like the others, will not touch Obama. Obama knows that nothing is going to happen.

[gura]

Been there and done that same as this guy. Everything he says is true. Weekly backups have to be encrypted and moved off-site for disaster recovery purposes.

[Battle Hymn of the Republic]

Exchange Server is not the gateway, but the email platform. All email goes through an MTA (Message transfer agent) if it's on premise. There is a tech vendor who may have these IRS emails, depending on which MTA.

I am no professional on this, but know a lot.

[98ZJ USMC]

Those emails DO exist, and ARE retrieveable!

Yeah, but you'll have to find Jimmy Hoffa first.

[Yardstick]

The catch is that each IRS user was limited to 500MB of space on the server. Once they hit that limit they had to start archiving their emails locally on their machine. A person at her level and with her volume of email would have hit that limit quickly. As a result the vast majority of her emails were on the hard drive of her computer, and were lost when it crashed and was later recycled. This seems to be what the IRS is asserting in their latest excuses anyways. Do you think this is plausible? I.e. could the 500MB limit have made it possible for her emails NOT to have been backed up on the main server?

[roamer_1]

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".

I can imagine a situation where enough leverage can be applied... But I also know that whoever got levered has a plump DeletedFiles.cya file in case of SHTF. I know I have a few....