IRS has ‘no excuses’ for latest twist in email saga, says IT expert

Fox News ^ | July 23, 2014 | James Rogers

[McGruff]

The IRS has “no excuses” for the latest twist in the saga of its missing emails, says an expert in electronic discovery.

“Whether it’s incompetence or deliberate obstruction, the IRS has no excuses for having handled this so poorly,” said Bruce Webster, partner at Provo, Utah-based IT consulting and expert witness firm Ironwood Experts.

House investigators said Tuesday that a hard drive belonging to Lois Lerner, the former agency official at the center of the department’s targeting scandal, was just “scratched,” not irreparably damaged. The IRS had described the hard drive’s data as “unrecoverable.”

[McGruff]

Better start another war to cover this up.

[rarestia]

I’ve worked with Ironwood. They’re pitbulls.

[Don Corleone]

“Whether it’s incompetence or deliberate obstruction, the IRS has no excuses for having handled this so poorly,”

My $2 is on deliberate obstruction.

[BigEdLB]

THE DAWG ATE MY HARD DRIVE!

[2ndDivisionVet]

Sure they do: “I won.”

[El Cid]

Can’t we bet on both choices?

[airborne]

Why would they need excuses???

They’re all going to get off without so much as a single day in jail.

The Republicans in Congress will see to it.

[RW_Whacko]

If this is an IT “expert” why are they still talking about *A* hardrive instead of servers and backup?

[ButThreeLeftsDo]

Latest twist? They’ve no excuses for ANY of this.

[Hugin]

What ya gonna do about it--impeach me?

[RC one]

who needs excuses when you have a compliant press?

[Lexinom]

I'm guessing because old e-mails are archived into .PST files for local users and saved locally. Servers only keep e-mail going back so far, depending on local IT policy.

Legally, I would think they would be obligated to retain 7 years of information at least in archival form. Those e-mails exist on backup tapes - a reliable and proven mass backup medium.

[mmichaels1970]

Data, however, can be easily retrieved from scratched drives, according to Webster. “This happens all the time,” he told FoxNews.com. “There are little storefront companies in just about every major city that can do this and there are forensic companies that can restore files and even do higher end recovery of data.”

Webster explained that, even when a drive’s file directory is damaged or destroyed, information still can be recovered from the magnetic disk where data is stored, known as a drive platter.

And that's why this is a cover-up. No IT worker can be so stupid and inept to think that a damaged hard drive is unrecoverable. I repeat NO IT WORKER. This means that somebody from outside of IT determined it "unrecoverable"...to me meaning that somebody didn't want the data recovered.

[mmichaels1970]

If this is an IT “expert” why are they still talking about *A* hardrive instead of servers and backup?

Because it is very possible to have employees download emails from the server and remove the original. It is a terrible practice, but the IT "expert" is allowing the benefit of the doubt here.

The IRS uses Microsoft Exchange. They claim to have had a ridiculously low mailbox size quota. IIRC it was something like 500MB. As soon as Lerner gets to about 450MB she gets a warning that her mailbox is almost full and she needs to archive older items to her local hard drive. Once this is done, the original is removed from the server and stored on her local drive in an Outlook PST file. It is no longer accessible to any computer besides the local one.

I don't use mailbox size quotas on my Exchange server, but I do occasionally ask people that are at 10GB or more to clean up useless emails and archive things older than a year or two. Once they do that, the emails disappear from the server.

Because of the emphasis on public record, the IRS should have been storing monthly backups of their servers and not reusing them. Normally, I'd rotate and reuse backup tapes daily and then make a storable backup at the end of the month. This backup would be held for however many years retention period is required. This is the backup tape investigators should be trying to track down.

Even if the IRS has created and held monthly backup tapes, it's possible that Lerner has completely skipped the archive step and just has all of her emails downloaded to her local hard drive. This would be silly since she then couldn't check her email on any other device, but it is possible. If this is the case, no backup tape is going to help them find the email.

Agencies like the IRS where public record is so important should have better policies than this. But they don't.

[rdcbn]

“Whether it’s incompetence or deliberate obstruction, the IRS has no excuses for having handled this so poorly,”
My $2 is on deliberate obstruction.

---

Aside from the multitude of general Government and IRS specific regulations on data preservation, the data was given special status for both collection of potentially responsive information , as well as that informations preservation and secure storage to prevent evidence tampering because of lawsuit filed in 2010 for obstruction of a view point advocacy, tax exempt non profit.

In late 2010, IRS was being sued by an organization called Z- Street, a pro Israel group, and that suit was filed in 2010, well before the momentous crash of 20 or so high level Obama Administration and IRS operatives.

Lerner's computer and her information regarding obstruction and biased treatment of organizations opposed by the Obama Admin was subject to this special handling of litigation responsive information.

Even if her drive (and all the others that “crashed” ) had been considered damaged beyond repair and unrecoverable, they should have been preserved in secure storage pending trial., not destroyed .

Furthermore, there would have been a flurry of reports notifying responsible parties in the court system and the IRS that litigation hold data was compromised and asking for direction on how to proceed with chain of custody, documentation and data preservation procedures.

This should have been reported to the presiding Judge immediately to inform both him and the litigants as well as to get his direction on how to proceed.

The fact that there was no correspondence on this at the very implies that there was no loss of data because full back ups were available and the data storage devices were restored with a verified no loss of information.

At any rate, this whole sequence of events,if they actually happened, should have been reported to the Federal Judge presiding over the Z- Street case as soon the crashes occurred.

This is really serious stuff and the only explanation is that the IRS is stalling in order to give them time to evaluate what is on the back ups and to doctor and sanitize the backed up data to remove any damaging evidence.

Or that one or more of the IRS IT people involved kept their own private clean copies of the back ups as insurance to make sure that they would not go to jail if the IRS scandal heated up.

[dmet]

How did they determine a scratch was the cause of failure? Did they open it up and look? Hard disk platter is not too easily “scratched” at least not to the eye unless something really hard did it. A fingernail will not leave a visible scratch.
Most drives I have seen have multiple platters, and they use both sides. One surface damaged still leaves a lot of data to recover
When they do get to a tech, I hope they ask if the manufacturers seals on the case were still intact.

[9YearLurker]

Yep, no reason to worry about the pussycats who are their GOPe accomplices.

[bergmeid]

Forget about the stupid hard drive. This stuff can be found on backups of the email server. COME ON!

[bergmeid]

Yes it is truly amazing. Many people have indicated that this is not about hard drives but email servers and their backups and for some reason this message isn’t driven home.

[Cubs Fan]

“incompetence or deliberate obstruction”

Sounds like something a jury should decide.

When are they going to charge these people?