IRS Email Jeopardy: The agency had a legal obligation to retain the records it lost

The Wall Street Journal ^ | June 24, 2014 | Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

[JOHN ADAMS]

The IRS is spinning a tale of bureaucratic incompetence to explain the vanishing emails from former Tax Exempt Organizations doyenne Lois Lerner and six other IRS employees. We have less faith by the minute that there is an innocent explanation for this failure to cooperate with Congress, but even if true it doesn't matter. The IRS was under a legal obligation to retain the information because of a litigation hold.

[USCG SimTech]

Waterboard Lois and I’ll bet she surrenders her secret trove of backed up data. Not that I’d advocate anything illegal to discover something else illegal. The end does not justify the means. But just sayin’

[The_Media_never_lie]

Another big lie: it is extremely complicated to extract LL’s emails from the backups. Show me an IT guy who says retrieving backup emails is extremely complicated. Bet one cannot be found.

[kevkrom]

There is no evidence, that the L. Lerner e-mail messages are lost.

Absolutely correct. The only "evidence" that any emails are even missing are the assertions of the IRS. They have never provided any correspondence, logs, work orders, etc., related to "hard drive crashes" or "lost email".

Not only does their story not pass the smell test, their cover story for that story stinks worse.

[ncfool]

Glad this was in the WSJ...
Nothing to see here or it would have been reported in the NYT (owned by the OMG). We need to focus more on American Idol or reality TV. You guys are too serious about real news. Take a chill pill and relax.

[zeugma]

When the government does something like this, it’s always just “Ooops, our bad.” When a citizen does the exact same thing, it’s swat teams, arrests, and worse. That’s what happens when you have a feral regime for a government.

[MrB]

“the agency” had a legal obligation?

“the agency” can’t be held accountable.

PERSONS must be held legally/criminally accountable.

[zeugma]

Tape is cheap, though these days hard disks are cheaper in a relative sense.

Back when I was a tape monkey in a data center, here's the system I used.

• Daily incrementals. Backs up everything that changed since the last full backup. Have 2 rotations of a full weeks worth. i.e., you have 2 separate sets for Monday, 2 sets for Tuesday, etc)
• Weekly backup - 5 sets of tapes on a weekly rotation. Every 5th time they were used, (not every 5 weeks because of monthlies - see below) you they were  overwritten. This is a full system backup
• Monthy. Full backups kept for 5 years.

The most data you could lose was the intra-day work that happened since the end of one backup and  the end of another. We could go back 5 years for stuff that was not even financial/legal stuff, but just data that it was possible we might want for research purposes.

I do essentially the same thing at home now with an external drive, except it uses Rsync to limit the amount of data required to maintain the different rotations. I occasionally swap out the external drive, though probably not as often as I should. If I were smart, I'd do that right after the monthly is done.

None of this is rocket science, and all of the above was using 9-track tape, stored offsite until the week it was being returned to be used. 

When they say they've "lost" the emails, they are blatantly lying. They may have actively searched out and destroyed the evidence of thier crimes, but it wasn't simply 'lost' in a hardware failure.

 

[privatedrive]

EVERYBODY knows they’re lying.

These hearings are just for show.

Wake me up when someone gets arrested for breaking the law.

[The_Media_never_lie]

If you get to the “lowly” IT guys, you will probably find them not to be political. Most I have known to were not political.

[kiryandil]

They have never provided any correspondence, logs, work orders, etc., related to "hard drive crashes" or "lost email".

Talk to The Hand of the IRS, you sniveling peasant.

[kiryandil]

When the government does something like this, it’s always just “Ooops, our bad.” When a citizen does the exact same thing, it’s swat teams, arrests, and worse. That’s what happens when you have a feral regime for a government.

"In a tyranny, everyone is a criminal, except for the government, and those who work for the government."

[FunkyZero]

If I remember right, they said the emails were “lost” about 2 years ago. I’ve been in IT for 25 years and I’ve never seen anyone with a backup rotation that long. Typically, it’s only 3 months, then the media is overwritten... be it tape or disk, it’s simply not feasible to keep backups that long, especially data in the massive volumes we are talking in this case. In the case of magnetic tape, they don’t even have a stable shelf life that long

[FredZarguna]

All I can say is that you must have worked for some very rinky-dink outfits. In university and corporate locations where I was a manager or system programmer, our start-of-month backups never went back less than five years.

[dirtboy]

Here's the problem. We were told back in March by the head of the IRS that they were actively trying to recover the emails. If their account is correctly, they would have know long before then that the emails could not be retrieved.

All they had to do was pull out a full backup set from their sequence and replace it with new, blank tapes, and let the rotations continue. They did not. IMO, that was deliberate. They took multiple steps to ensure the emails would age off the back end of the backup cycle with no archive and no local copy.

[dirtboy]

but not the archive system.

They fired the company providing the archive system a couple of months into this process. The entire situation was engineered to have the emails age off with no archive, local or server or tape. This was deliberate and directed from above.

[FunkyZero]

There is absolutely no doubt about it. You can’t just accidentally lose this data, it’s actually difficult to get rid of and we all know it