Why Darrell Issa just asked the IRS to hand over a hard drive

Washington Examiner ^ | Jun 17, 2014 | Susan Ferrechio

[Ray76]

Here are the items Issa is asking the IRS to produce:

+ All back-up tapes, external drives, thumb drives, or other storage media the IRS used to capture, archive, back up, or otherwise record e-mails sent or received by Lerner from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept. 23, 2013.

+ All hard drives, external drives, thumb drives, and computers Lerner used from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept.23, 2013.

+ All electronic communication devices the IRS issued to Lerner from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept. 23, 2013.

+ All electronic files, including, but not limited to, .pst files, relating to the IRS e-mail account Lerner used from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept. 23, 2013.

+ All documents and communications that Lerner printed and/or stored for Federal Records Act compliance purposes from Jan. 1, 2009 to Sept. 23, 2013.

+ All documents and communications referring or relating to the production to any congressional committee or member of Congress of e-mail communications sent or received by Lerner from Jan. 1, 2009, to Aug. 2, 2013.

+ All documents and communications referring or relating to the creation of “Enclosure 3” from the June 13 letter from Leonard Oursler to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch, titled “Description of IRS Email Collection and Production."

+ All documents and communications between or among IRS employees and employees of any Executive Branch entity referring or relating to the IRS’ production of documents to Congress from May 10, 2013, to the present.

+ All documents and communications referring or relating to the subpoena issued by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Aug. 2, 2013.

+ All documents and communications referring or relating to the subpoena issued by House Oversight to Koskinen on Feb. 14.

[Seattle Conservative]

If you haven’t seen it, check out this thread. Cleta Mitchell, attorney for True the Vote and others, requested various data and questions be answered. IMHO great letter.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3169079/posts

[Cringing Negativism Network]

Bump to this thread.

[antidisestablishment]

I don’t see Issa doing anything, but at some point, even the most ignorant public may demand some answers.

This is beyond belief, and the IRS is an equal opportunity bogey man. Only government officials and their cronies like them and, while they are powerful, they are outnumbered.

[kevkrom]

It’s even better. The IRS’ interpretation of the record-keeping rules also required Lerner to make and retain hardcopy printouts, including all address/routing info, of any email used to conduct government business.

[kevkrom]

If every single sector on the drive gets forcibly written over, then data will be gone from that disk.

Negative. It still leaves a magnetic resonance than can be detected. Military standard (at leafs from 20 years ago, when I knew the current standards) require every sector of the disk to be overwritten three times, using three different data patterns. Even then I bet it's not a complete wipe but just "good enough" for operational purposes. The only true way to make a drive unrecoverable is to physically destroy it.

[unixfox]

The IRS uses Outlook from what I understand. If so they are probably using an Exchange server to process emails. If that is the case the Exchange server also needs to be seized, along with ALL backups.

To go even further I would go after everyone in her contact list. Subpoena EVERYBODY she has ever sent or received an email from. Then seize those computers as well.

Make these friggin assholes life as miserable as possible.

[unixfox]

This is the cover of Newsweek October 13th 1997

NOTHING HAS CHANGED!

[coon2000]

Negative. It still leaves a magnetic resonance than can be detected. Military standard (at leafs from 20 years ago, when I knew the current standards) require every sector of the disk to be overwritten three times, using three different data patterns. Even then I bet it's not a complete wipe but just "good enough" for operational purposes. The only true way to make a drive unrecoverable is to physically destroy it.

Peter Gutmann theorized that using scanning tunneling microscopy you might be able to pull some data from a hdd, like a letter out of the entire encyclopedia. On top of that, that was from 20 years ago when drives stored far lass data, stored the data horizontally and the heads were far less precise. Todays far denser drives with vertical storage, extremely precise heads is a different matter. A single pass of writing over every sector, as long as it is truly random, is more than enough to delete all data on the drive.

Gutmann's old method for data deletion was 35 passes of random sector writes, which is 28 eight more than US govt top secret wipes. Today, he states that one pass of his method is all that is required.

Produce one instance where anyone has recovered data from a disk that has random 0's and 1's written to every sector, you will not find one.

[coon2000]

Follow up discussion on Gutmann's paper with comments from Gutmann concerning data deletion here:

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/Jul/464

[MV=PY]

Here is an interesting blog post on the subject. While Wright is attempting to make the case that, for all practical purposes, overwriting data once is sufficient to obfuscate older data on magnetic media, it all begins with an analog signal of variations in magnetic flux strength from which "bits" are extracted. This is very different from truly discrete "bits" as found in solid state memory.

Old "signals" (writes) remain on the magnetic media. This has nothing to do with logical organizations of binary data such as sectors. It's at a lower level. It's all about residual magnetic flux.

Many of the comments at the bottom of the post are informative. I believe the last comment to be correct: given a strong enough reason, forensics can be effective.

The company I mentioned has many levels of recovery services, including the very low level analog stuff.

I hope this helps explain where I was coming from. ;-)

[coon2000]

Your link agrees with my position, even the last comment. I briefly touched this in the two posts above yours.

[MV=PY]

You’ve made your opinion clear. Thanks.