IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the total number of crash victims to “less than 20,” and also said that the agency does not know if the lost emails are still backed up somewhere.
The new round of computer crash victims includes David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens.
At this point, I’m bothered by the insult to my intelligence than by the lying.
Imagine if bushitler did this for a minute.
Think Nixon and the 18 min.(??) gap in the WH tapes and the uproar that caused.
20 computers with hard drive failures and none of them were plugged into a line conditioned with a power surge protector.
These IRS hucksters would have you believe that Iran let off a high altitude nuclear explosion to effect an Electro Magnetic Pulse that only effected catastrophic failure in select IRS computers.
Hey, if you’re going to LIE, LIE BIG or go home!
The avalanche of manure produced by the IRS would be enough to fertilize all the farms serviced by the agricultural industry worldwide.
TRUTH is an ALIEN concept to the IRS subspecies.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
The most likely explanation is not that 20 individual PC hard drives crashed, but that the mail server crashed and at least 20 employees’ email was affected. Seriously: the IRS is not like your crappy $300 Acer laptop. The only people that should be commenting on this story are experts in enterprise IT. That no one has yet asked a forensic information technology specialist to cross-examine the Congressional witnesses is a sign of how unseriously Congress is actually taking this.
Although the IATAM is a useless cert mill with no credibility (I’ve been working in this field for 17 years and I’ve never heard of them until now) they’re at least starting to ask the right questions.
I am not a computer expert by any means, but I have been using them for over twenty years …. even I know that Emails go to an exchange server and who knows how many servers it passes through on it’s way. Records of these Emails exist in cyberspace somewhere … they are retrievable. Only the refusal of the current rogue government in DC stand between truth and a grand scam of epic proportion.
New Media and others …. Please stop saying the hard drive crashed and the Emails were lost that is an obvious lie … copies of the Emails may or may not be on those alleged, crashed hard drives, but they are most certainly available elsewhere on the web. We just need to get the crooks out of the way.
It seems to me that the Ukrainian separatists are standing between the IRS emails and the IRS investigators, No?
There’s a simple statistical test that can be done here – look at the probability of hard drive crashes throughout the IRS and compare that the the probability of hard drive crashes for those who work with Lerner. That should tell you all you need to know.
Here’s the kicker: It might be possible to turn the argument around and ask who’s likely involved in the Lerner coverup based on who’s hard drive is being “recycled”. Using Bayesian statistics, you might be able to formulate a likelihood of someone having incriminating emails, which might be useful in figuring out whom to investigate.
Yeah, where ARE Woodward and Bernstein today?
They seem awkwardly silent.
“I am not a computer expert by any means, but I have been using them for over twenty years […] Records of these Emails exist in cyberspace somewhere … they are retrievable.”
Explain how you would go about retrieving them, please.
The key phrase here would seem to be “statistically improbable”…
As in “billions and billions and billions against”
“Explain how you would go about retrieving them, please.”
You are mocking everybody now…behave yerself….
Even I have several associates and acquaintances who could rip that system of servers apart and find everything….perhaps(probably) remotely….If it’s online it can be hacked….that’s a given.
Probably the IRS has a search and destroy mission, on going for some weeks.
In the very, very, very large institution I work for, the only way to permanently delete an email is to delete your sent copy, your rec’d copies, off your computer (ie off the Microsoft exchange server out of your assigned mailbox) before you shut down for the day. All email is backed up every night. If you didn’t delete it during the day, it will be retrievable. In my org, and likely the IRS too, the chances that the backups are lost is near zero.
I’m thinking that the topic of “crashed” hard files is an irrelevant and diversionary tactic in that Lerner and her cohorts would surely have known that mandated Outlook messaging was archived. But they didn’t get their positions by being compliant with departmental rules.
Interestingly the IRS had an internal instant messaging application that wasn’t audited or archived. Add to that the availability of external ephemeral messaging services.
No one in Washington wants the truth out – they’re all acing the same play on the same stage.
The criminals in charge of this administration have got their asses covered with fellow criminal Eric Holder occupying the AG’s office to ensure no special prosecutor will ever be called upon to actually investigate this cover-up. Congressional committees can’t rely on the House support only to get anywhere other than the politically unpopular move of de-funding agencies. The US is now pretty much a banana republic.
“Explain how you would go about retrieving them, please.”
,
I do backups for a small shop, we do daily’s, weekly’s, bi-monthly’s and monthly’s, bi-yearly’s and yearly backups on tape. Plus, all backups are archived on a separate server so the auditors can have remote access. In addition, the yearly backups which also include the ‘incoming mail servers’ data and the ‘outgoing mail servers’ data are sent to Iron Mountain Storage Unit somewhere in Texas and held indefinitely. This is a small shop at our local college, I cannot imagine what hoops the IRS has got to jump thru to meet their backup requirements.
,
So, as you can see, it would be quite easy to retrieve the emails.
I refuse to believe the US government employees use POP. It’s beyond stupid if they do.
In addition to Ratt’s comments, which I believe, as that is exactly what the organizations I worked with did JUST FOR DISASTER PREPARATION, hasn’t the NSA been recording all the emails? Can’t Congress just ask them?
And seriously, for disaster prep, the big Cdn banks had off-site systems with separate power generators, diverse telephone and data lines, and redundant computers, all of which were updated daily so that in the event of a major problem – such as the big cable cut in Toronto a few years back – they could move personnel and seamlessly get back to work in a matter of two hours. I can’t believe the IRS doesn’t have similar plans, so I call BS on their claims that these emails are lost forever.
Bob Woodward isn’t being silent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXfIES-h8Lc
This looks like it may be a terrible tragedy.
The IRS has had almost as many crashes as Malaysian Airlines.
/sarcsarcsarc
Meanwhile donations to conservative campaign groups are down which was the whole point of the IRS singling out conservative groups.
The odds of winning the Florida lottery are 1 in 22,957,480.
The odds of winning the Powerball is 1 in 175,223,510.
The odds of winning Mega Millions is 1 in 258,890,850.
The odds of a computer disk failing in any given month are roughly one in 36. The odds of two different drives failing in the same month are roughly one in 36 squared, or 1 in about 1,300. The odds of three drives failing in the same month is 36 cubed or 1 in 46,656.
The odds of seven different drives failing in the same month (like what happened at the IRS when they received a letter asking about emails targeting conservative and pro Israeli groups) is 37 to the 7th power = 1 in 78,664,164,096. (that’s over 78 Billion) In other words, the odds are greater that you will win the Florida Lottery 342 times than having those seven IRS hard drives crashing in the same month.
I have a hard time believing the IRS, of all places, does not have a comprehensive Business Continuity and Recovery plan.
Her hard drive crashed? Okay, so her local archive of MS Exchange is gone. Check the server copy.
Oh, the exchange server crashed and all its data is gone? Okay, so the daily (or weekly, or monthly, or yearly..) backups of the Exchange disk storage pools and their accompanying databases should be able to get recovered, right?
Oh, that’s gone? You do have a redundant design, don’t you? So a failover server? Maybe a virtual machine somewhere? A snapshot, perhaps? Hmm…? No?
What the heck are you spending taxpayer money on?
It sure isn’t being used to do your job.
Just subpoena the entire IT department with an independent forensic auditor to dig through their infrastructure. I’d be willing to bet there’s a virtual machine snapshot/P2V or some vmdk’s kicking around, somewhere, that just need to be discovered.
Think of Chretien, Gomery and golf balls. Then again Stephen Harper is now PM.
What’s more insulting is they expect us to believe this hard drive BS.
Even the nit wits in Ontario do the same crap. Yet where to believe this many liars with a stake in their criminal activity. This is not plausible denial. Its plain crockery.
Haven’t they figured out yet most people have hard drive issues in their lives & know what’s what? To people with 40 aides to do things for them I guess they haven’t caught up yet.
Lies, emails,lies, hard drives, lies….Ontario is Exhibit A. Lies rule in Ontario, the people accept lies, they vote based on unrealistic promises destined to become…. oops,we misjudged when they get their arses into power. It’s the Liberal way, lies and corruption, lies and scandal are accepted as par for the course.
Couldn’t we just ask Edward Snowden for a copy of the emails?
Whenever possible make a drive-by smear against P.M.Harper. Now you will have to come up with a new moniker. Please do not show any Celtic connection. I doubt and true celtic ancestry person is willing to be bought off by being a Librano troll.