Lois Lerner's Emails Lost

[Unabogie]

No. You are wrong. There is contemporaneous support for her hard drive crashing. But there is no contemporary support (at least no public) for emails having been lost in that crash. In fact, the records only make mention of "personal files" (Lerner's own words, see the last page of this document), it makes no mention of the loss of any work-related files. Were there work-related files lost in that crash? It's possible. But contrary to your claim, there is no record of that.

Nope. Try again. Here's the Washington Post article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...irs-lost-emails-from-key-witness-lois-lerner/

Read the conclusion where they say the entire hard drive was unrecoverable. Also, please don't start talking computers again. That doesn't work out well for you. By the way, is global warming real? Is the code handling climate models error prone and buggy?

ETA: Here's the entire email chain between Lerner and the IT people.

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/22...llow_share=true&escape=false&view_mode=scroll

It's over.

 

[Unabogie]

Note the dates on those emails, by the way.

 

[Newtons Bit]

No. You are wrong. There is contemporaneous support for her hard drive crashing. But there is no contemporary support (at least no public) for emails having been lost in that crash. In fact, the records only make mention of "personal files" (Lerner's own words, see the last page of this document), it makes no mention of the loss of any work-related files. Were there work-related files lost in that crash? It's possible. But contrary to your claim, there is no record of that.

Zing.

 

[elbe]

Ok, "emails" don't really exist as a concept on hard drives, they are contained in files. So that particular bit of pedantry is bull.

My initial guess would be that the IRS is using exchange (I seem to recall the govt being primarily MS users, but I admit things may have changed since then) which could mean that emails are not primarily located on the local drives but on the exchange server itself (though they might be cached in ost files). So, if they do use exchange, setting up a new drive would be seemingly seamless, as far as email is concerned, since just setting up the exchange account would reacquire all her emails. If, however, she locally saved or archived (pst files) her emails they, then, would have been lost at the time and she may have either not thought about them (having access to the rest of her emails through exchange) or lumped them in with her personal files.
If they were using something else, let's say pop3, the emails should have been downloaded locally but, still, there may not be a reason for her to differentiate between the email archive and the rest of her files if she's facing the entire drive being dead. If my drive died and I asked my IT people to recover my files I may not specify specific files I want but trust they'll do whatever they can to get any of them.

That is not meant to be comprehensive, just an overview of what they may have had to deal with. Personally I would guess they used exchange or something similar where they can easily store all email communications server level, but once the retention period ends... I guess it could be worse, my company has a policy that any and all emails older than x years were automatically deleted and we weren't allowed to archive them (though we did for certain draft we used regularly). The policy is in place for similar legal reasons to the existance of a hard backup retention policy.


ETA: For what it's worth I have to deal with restoring emails at work. A lot. Users really like just deleting emails they think are super important.

 

[Unabogie]

Zing.

Hmm, so I guess you didn't read this either?

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/22...llow_share=true&escape=false&view_mode=scroll

 

[Francesca R]

In the finance industry, every email, chat, and text must be archived for 7 years, and not by the user on his local hard drive (where the user usually has the power to selectively delete any file).

It's between 3 and 6 years depending on the type of record, and this only applies to customer communication, not internal e-mails. P'raps you should take Series 7 again (if you took it in the first place)

However most investment banks and broker-dealers do keep everything and for longer than that.

 

[Ziggurat]

Nope. Try again. Here's the Washington Post article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...irs-lost-emails-from-key-witness-lois-lerner/

Read the conclusion where they say the entire hard drive was unrecoverable. Also, please don't start talking computers again. That doesn't work out well for you. By the way, is global warming real? Is the code handling climate models error prone and buggy?

ETA: Here's the entire email chain between Lerner and the IT people.

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/22...llow_share=true&escape=false&view_mode=scroll

It's over.

Your link provides the same information as my link (less, actually), and it does not contradict what I said. Yes, there was a hard drive crash, and yes, it was unrecoverable (I didn't explicitly state that, but I never claimed it wasn't either). But note what it DOES NOT say: that chain never says that there were any emails lost in the crash. Again, maybe there were. But there is no record that they were.

You think you refuted me, but you did not. Furthermore, you have tried to personalize the argument with off-topic ad hominems. It's kind of sad, really.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

I posted something on Facebook yesterday about the beat down Dr Oz got from Claire McCaskill, and someone started blathering on about Lois Lerner. So at least now I know who she is, but I still have no idea about how she relates to Dr Oz.

 

[sunmaster14]

It's between 3 and 6 years depending on the type of record, and this only applies to customer communication, not internal e-mails. P'raps you should take Series 7 again (if you took it in the first place)

However most investment banks and broker-dealers do keep everything and for longer than that.

How do you know so much? Of course the strategy to pass the Series 7 is to give the most conservative answer to any question (all of which are multiple choice). In any case, I see that FINRA requires six years as a default, and that storage must be on WORM drives which I didn't know (crap - just ordered one from Amazon). Every compliance officer I've ever dealt with at a big institution has told me seven years. Perhaps that's a requirement for members of certain SROs, or perhaps it's the length of time which is safe no matter what.

In any case, I would have thought a government agency like the IRS would have a longer retention period. This is the agency whose mission it is to shakedown law-abiding citizens for money. At the very least, all records should be retained for as long as US citizens are required to retain their financial records for tax purposes. This is three years from the time of filing, which means slightly over 4.25 years for certain items.

 

[elbe]

In any case, I would have thought a government agency like the IRS would have a longer retention period. This is the agency whose mission it is to shakedown law-abiding citizens for money. At the very least, all records should be retained for as long as US citizens are required to retain their financial records for tax purposes. This is three years from the time of filing, which means slightly over 4.25 years for certain items.

How do you know they aren't? All we know is what the internal IT retention policy is, which is usually considered far less important, data security wise, than "customer" data. Heck, it could be possible that the IRS has a policy of never retiring old data, which could get pricey after a while.

 

[sunmaster14]

Nope. Try again. Here's the Washington Post article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...irs-lost-emails-from-key-witness-lois-lerner/

Read the conclusion where they say the entire hard drive was unrecoverable. Also, please don't start talking computers again. That doesn't work out well for you. By the way, is global warming real? Is the code handling climate models error prone and buggy?

ETA: Here's the entire email chain between Lerner and the IT people.

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/22...llow_share=true&escape=false&view_mode=scroll

It's over.

I had seen all of that correspondence before I even wrote the OP. All it means is that she had a non-recoverable hard drive crash. As Ziggurat notes, she actually refers to personal files being lost, not anything work-related. And just because the entire hard drive was lost (probably), it doesn't mean that all files stored locally were lost. Many computers have more than one hard drive. The computer I'm using right now has two internal drives, one external drive, and a network drive attached to it (also a thumb drive at the moment). I also store files in the Google cloud and use Carbonite backup.

ETA: I decided against mentioning this earlier because it might have made me look like a conspiracy loon, but I find the phrasing of her last email to be quite odd:

Thanks for trying. I really do appreciate the effort. Sometimes stuff just happens.
Lois G. Lerner

Not sure what to make of the bolded part. It almost makes me think that she deliberately crashed her drive to destroy certain files, and wanted an email trail to show that it was accidental.

 

[sunmaster14]

How do you know they aren't? All we know is what the internal IT retention policy is, which is usually considered far less important, data security wise, than "customer" data. Heck, it could be possible that the IRS has a policy of never retiring old data, which could get pricey after a while.

I'm talking about internal emails, which could involve discussing a particular taxpayer. Litigation with the IRS is quite common - in regular Federal court if the IRS wants money from you, in tax court if you want money back from the IRS. They should be prepared for discovery of all records relating to a taxpayer.

 

[elbe]

I'm talking about internal emails, which could involve discussing a particular taxpayer. Litigation with the IRS is quite common - in regular Federal court if the IRS wants money from you, in tax court if you want money back from the IRS. They should be prepared for discovery of all records relating to a taxpayer.

Litigation is actually one of the reasons for hard retention periods, the length of time they are obligated to provide if requested by a court. In some cases even trying to go outside that period is questionable as it could open the door to questions of why they didn't provide older for a different situation. I have picked up a few things in my years of IT. In case you're curious my company is involved in litigation sometimes once or twice a year (I'm not in legal, I just know about what data requests come through my department) and we have to tell them what we can and cannot provide. If it's over 6 months they're basically hosed, if the data they want is on a corrupted backup that's a problem for us (though I imagine we have some legal loophole to allow for that sort of thing). Generally we are only data providers in court cases but sometimes we are included as defendants, but that's a whole different can of worms.

Internal data will almost always be considered less important than customer data, even when the internal data is about customers (you don't think my company's employees send emails about our customers?). There's "customer data" and then there's everything else; everything else tends not to be worried about quite as much and, depending on the IT situation, may suffer because of it.

If you want to think this is all a grand conspiracy, whatever floats your boat, I'm just trying to tell you that the situation presented does not sound particularly abnormal by itself.

 

[sunmaster14]

Litigation is actually one of the reasons for hard retention periods, the length of time they are obligated to provide if requested by a court. In some cases even trying to go outside that period is questionable as it could open the door to questions of why they didn't provide older for a different situation. I have picked up a few things in my years of IT. In case you're curious my company is involved in litigation sometimes once or twice a year (I'm not in legal, I just know about what data requests come through my department) and we have to tell them what we can and cannot provide. If it's over 6 months they're basically hosed, if the data they want is on a corrupted backup that's a problem for us (though I imagine we have some legal loophole to allow for that sort of thing). Generally we are only data providers in court cases but sometimes we are included as defendants, but that's a whole different can of worms.

Internal data will almost always be considered less important than customer data, even when the internal data is about customers (you don't think my company's employees send emails about our customers?). There's "customer data" and then there's everything else; everything else tends not to be worried about quite as much and, depending on the IT situation, may suffer because of it.

If you want to think this is all a grand conspiracy, whatever floats your boat, I'm just trying to tell you that the situation presented does not sound particularly abnormal by itself.

Oh, I agree with almost everything you've written. Having a policy to throw away stuff earlier rather than later is a good defense against litigation. I'm just saying that in the interest of fairness and transparency, the IRS shouldn't have such a defensive policy. A private company will do what it can, within the law, to defend itself. A government agency should not be trying to protect itself. It should be concerned with fairness and openness, and especially so in the case of the IRS.

I'm not saying the records retention policy was a conspiracy in the truther sense. It was probably not a secret, although it probably was not advertised and was not well-known (certainly not by me). But it is something of a scandal. It should be corrected at once, and I think it already has been.

 

[elbe]

Oh, I agree with almost everything you've written. Having a policy to throw away stuff earlier rather than later is a good defense against litigation. I'm just saying that in the interest of fairness and transparency, the IRS shouldn't have such a defensive policy. A private company will do what it can, within the law, to defend itself. A government agency should not be trying to protect itself. It should be concerned with fairness and openness, and especially so in the case of the IRS.

The actual retention period is not always set because of fear of litigation (though that may be part of the decision making) but other factors may take more priority.
How much data can you store in your backup solution (tapes can be pricy and take up physical space, disk storage has practical limits in size)?
How much money can you spend on your backup solution (remember that you have to both backup all your data regularly and store them offsite, both cost money)?
How quickly does your IT solution evolve (If you migrate to newer solutions at a somewhat regular pace you may, essentially, antiquate your older backups then you'd have to retain extra hardware in case you need to access them)?
Even something like the complexity of the backup solution may mean you don't want to keep backups older than a certain date (we used to use a solution that would take a full backup monthly and then incremental backups weekly in between so we would have to "build" an up to date backup, and that was only half of that particular solution; we had an overly complicated solution at the time and found that the amount of time techs spent trying to do one restore because a client accidentally deleted their data was a serious budgetary concern).

IT really is a lot more complicated than many people like to think (probably far simpler in many ways too).

 

[catsmate]

Oh, I'm sure the hard disk failure happened. What I'm not sure about is whether it was used as a convenient excuse to not produce incriminating emails. For example, suppose incriminating emails from, say, early 2011 were found, and higher-ups fretted about turning these over to evil Republicans in Congress. Then fortuitously they happened upon emails describing a hard disk failure. What do you think they would do?

Any actual evidence to support your conspiracy theorising?

In any case, the idea of relying on a user's local hard disk as archival storage is so ridiculous as to be prima facie evidence of corruption.

You really don't understand IT do you?

Who? What? An agency on government-funding didn't have the resources available to a commercial company?

Exactly.

 

[Unabogie]

Your link provides the same information as my link (less, actually), and it does not contradict what I said. Yes, there was a hard drive crash, and yes, it was unrecoverable (I didn't explicitly state that, but I never claimed it wasn't either). But note what it DOES NOT say: that chain never says that there were any emails lost in the crash. Again, maybe there were. But there is no record that they were.

Wow, you really don't understand these things, do you? Let's go step by step, and please read slowly. I know this is complicated.

Lois Lerner contacted her IT people, who put their best person on it. She failed to recover any data, and so they sent the drive to "CI Forensics". Do you understand what those people do? They run data recovery software against a hard drive to retrieve any files at all that are not corrupted. Do you know what form those files come back in? You don't get back a complete operating system. First, the software attempts to preserve folder names, but if that doesn't work, it merely dumps out any file it can find that isn't corrupted. The files are then transferred to another storage format and that format is returned to the user. Then it's up to the user to wade through the files to try and find the really important ones.

They reported back that NONE of the files, and NONE of the disk was recoverable. They disposed of the hard drive and gave nothing to Lerner. That is as dispositive as you can get here. There were no files -- email or otherwise -- recoverable, so Lerner got nothing back, just an email telling her that her entire drive was gone.

You think you refuted me, but you did not. Furthermore, you have tried to personalize the argument with off-topic ad hominems. It's kind of sad, really.

The reason I bring up your previous ignorant assertion that all climate modeling software was "buggy and error prone" was because you did the same thing then as you're doing now. In that case, I posted a link to the actual source code and challenged you to find the "bug" that you claimed was there. It was apparent you were just repeating what someone else told you to say. So here we are again and in the face of obvious and completely dispositive evidence (THE ENTIRE HARD DRIVE WAS UNRECOVERABLE) you insist that just because it didn't reference emails (which were backed up on tape, remember?) that a completely corrupted hard drive that was sent to the "hard drive cemetery", and most importantly, WAS NEVER RETURNED TO LERNER, is somehow still suspicious in regards to a phony scandal that was trumped up a year later?

That's what's really sad.

 

[Newtons Bit]

Exactly.

I know, right? How on earth can a government industry keep up with best IT practices of private businesses when it only gets four times the IT budget that the average corporation spends?

 

[sunmaster14]

<snip>

IT really is a lot more complicated than many people like to think (probably far simpler in many ways too).

Well, I think it's complicated enough that you need IT professionals to do the job properly. But I also don't think it's too much to expect a large organization to do a proper job of archiving data.

In your organization, what are the limits for each user on the email server? I remember in the late '90s that I was running into my storage limits all the time at my firm. A few years later, the problem completely disappeared and for all intents and purposes there was no limit. I figured this meant that storage had become so cheap that IT people just decided to let everybody store whatever they wanted.

 

[The Don]

Backups are destroyed after six months? Only 500MB allocated for each user's account? This archival procedure is nothing short of willfully negligent. In the finance industry, every email, chat, and text must be archived for 7 years, and not by the user on his local hard drive (where the user usually has the power to selectively delete any file).

I'd love to have 500MB space for my user account. At the moment I get 100MB from the large German software company who is my largest client. I have to actively manage my email files and have archives in other locations to keep those I want.

Having said that, sometimes those other locations disappear without notice and on one occasion I lost my archive. In my case I cannot back up to my hard drive because I work remotely and am forbidden to have local data.

As far as I remember I had limited space at the banks where I worked too. Because I was back office I don't know whether I was subjected to the same scrutiny as the traders (for example I was allowed to use a personal mobile phone in the building but not in the trading rooms) but again it was my responsibility to manage my e-mail folders. No doubt the central email servers kept copies of all messages and I'm sure these were regularly backed up.