All it takes is one IT person to have a look at the HD and to conclude it is not recoverable. And that that IT person may have been personally chosen for the job. That is not to discount the possibility that the HD was intentionally “crashed” though I have no idea if that is in fact possible. I assume thats harder to tell without the data and the HD. Im sure larger conspiracies have happened. And we know that at least one of those accused of the “conspiracy” is taking the 5th. So, if one person isn’t talking then its possible another person isn’t talking either. If a few individuals have taken part in some sort of criminal activity(wiping government data) then I can understand that they dont wish to implicate themselves.
Im not saying the above is in fact what happened. Only that its not so far fetched. The Watergate culprits only began openly “co-operating” over Watergate when judge John Circa started handing out stiff prison sentences. Until then the main perps had mostly remained quiet.
I’m not going to read too much into Lerner taking the fifth, even though she almost certainly put teabag groups under increased scrutiny. What on earth would she have to gain answering to a partisan lynch mob?
The hard drive crash was in 2011 (as evidenced by the post-crash emails from the IT department saying “we can’t get your stuff back”). Who in 2011 CARED enough to personally select an IT staffer? Who in 2011 had any reason to know, suspect, or believe that a huge scandal was going to erupt two years later, such that they would take active steps to involve more people to cover up something that at that point had nobody looking at it?
(And the first Watergate cooperating started well before Judge Sirica started his threats. The famous letter to the court came in March of '73, but Deep Throat, e.g., was cooperating in 1972, and Woodward/Bernstein had well-sourced stories about the break-in and its links to the Nixon campaign prior to the election that November.)
I think your first paragraph is a bit naieve. If people were involved in illegally targetting certain groups then these people in all likelihood knew what they were doing was illegal. If so, you do not then wait until the shit hits the fan to cover your tracks. If its illegal in 2010 then its still illegal 4 years later. It is an ongoing process. If I were accused of insider trading I would not wait until the authorities were on my back to rid myself of incriminating information. I would not wait until I was served a search warrant. If I robbed a bank with an identifiable gun I’d likely get rid of that gun afterwards, not wait until the police were at my door.
With regards to Watergate I did say openly co-operating. And I did mean the perpetrators, not those uninvolved with the break in and cover up. I realise contacts such as Deep Throat were leaking information.
This just doesn’t comport with my own experience. Those communications from IRS that have been characterized as “questionnaires” aren’t, exactly. They contain subtle and not so subtle hints and suggestions to help steer the application off of shoals and toward the deep water of approval.
The IRS may ask “How do you plan to handle Scenario A? Because if you handle it like this, we will approve but if you plan to handle it another way instead we will take a dim view.”
I got a lot of these during the approval processes I was involved with. Of course we always answered “Sure, we plan to do it like this!” And if necessary make a suitable change to the ByLaws reflecting the policy. So by this process (scrutiny, questionnaires, replies) even “borderline cases” may be eventually approved. This does not mean that those cases deserved approval on their original application, nor does it demonstrate that the IRS is operating in a vengeful or duplicitous manner. Instead it indicates that IRS was doing its job, enforcing the regulations while being (slightly; moderately; highly ??) helpful to applicants in allowing them to modify their applications to become approvable rather than rejecting them outright.
Again, I’d only condemn the IRS actions if such were applied differently based on the political persuasion of the applicants. And so far I’ve seen conflicting cites regarding targeted organizations. Clearly some were Tea Party wanna - be’s. But it appears others were liberal/progressive.
In the context of the time, where 'Tea Party’s and Tea Party-affiliated groups were springing up like toadstools (no offense intended to the groups or to fungi in general) it made sense for IRS to look carefully to be sure “social welfare” and not “political action” was being served. It was though stupid and lazy to use mere key words to attempt to winnow down the huge numbers into “seems safe” and “needs a close look” piles. A smart and professional approach required actual careful examination of each application. So yeah, the IRS fucked up. But was it a partisan plot? Sure doesn’t look like it to me.
So, they were savvy enough to predict the scandal two years in advance, but were so incompetent about covering their tracks that THIS is the best they could come up with?
Three other track-covering methods that are easier and more effective:
Use your damn cell phone to coordinate.
Create anonymous email accounts to use.
Stonewall applications via apparent administrative incompetence instead of by setting up a special protocol to ask Tea Party and Occupy groups additional questions.
The conspiracy theory of active malice at the IRS requires an extremely specific blend of cleverness and idiocy on the part of the perps. It’s far more reasonable to suppose that incompetence is the cause of what we’ve seen.
On June 3, 2011, IRS Commission Shulman received a letter from the House Ways and Means Committee “inquiring about IRS targeting of taxpayers who donated money to conservative groups, as well as information regarding audits of 501(c)(4) organizations.”
Thanks for this information. I assume the letter did not come out of thin air either. That there was in all likelihood grumblings elsewhere of what was happening at the IRS. Its therefore not impossible that the IRS had been given warnings beforehand of some sort of criticism coming their way. Simply because it became big news in 2013 does not mean it wasn’t causing concern in the political/bureaucratic grapevine long before then.
I’d also like to make a point about any sort of equivalency between liberal and Tea Party groups receiving increased scrutiny. During the period in question 20 groups with the word Progress or Progressive in their name applied for tax exempt status, only 6 were chosen for more srcutiny. All 292 groups with the words Tea Party were chosen for greater scrutiny.
I note with wry amusement the subject line in the email chain started by Lois Lerner that is duplicated in Attachment F in the above link: Careful What You Ask For
Further in that email chain was an exchange between Lerner and Lillie Wiliburn. Wilburn advised Lerner that a technician had been unable to recover the files but Wilburn still has “one other possibility that I am looking into.” Lerner replied, “Thanks for the update–I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
I’d like to make the point that “Progressive” and “Progress” were in the section of the Be-On-the-LookOut (BOLO) lists labeled “Historical,” whereas “Tea Party” was in the “Emerging Issues” section. By 2010, progressive wasn’t a newfangled term anymore; the IRS staff already had some sense of how to deal with them, and only marginal or uncertain cases needed to be referred on. “Tea Party,” however, was very much a new term, very obviously with political overtones but one for which there was no history and no developed guidance to distinguish the solid from the marginal. (“Occupy” fell into the same category: that word first appeared on the BOLO list in February 2012, with instructions for forward every application indicating affiliation with Occupy Wall Street for further scrutiny.)
If the IRS or Lerner was really worried in 2011 about a congressional investigation, then why would they continue the same practices and use the same lists until the scandal actually blew up in 2013? If your intent is to conceal evidence, you don’t keep generating new evidence.
If Lerner was trying to recover her emails, why is there a five-week gap between the “crash” email and the email reflecting a meeting with a tech?
If Lerner was storing her official emails on her hard drive, why does her email to the tech refer only to “personal files”?
If Lerner actually wanted to recover information from her hard drive, why are her emails to the tech so flip about “the hard drive cemetery” and “sometimes stuff just happens”?
If Congress had asked for information reflected by emails on Lerner’s hard drive on June 3, why was the hard drive destroyed in July?
If Lerner acted appropriately, why did she take the Fifth?
There’s not. There’s a five-week gap between the crash email and the email reflecting an attempt to get some additional expertise. The tech (who is not part of the conversation) “still” has the drive at that point, meaning he’d been working on it for some undisclosed amount of time.
I refer to the stuff on my hard drive and server space as my personal files, too, although they are all work-related. It is the stuff I’m working on personally, and am personally responsible for. The papers in my filing cabinet are my personal files too, as opposed to that in the general filing system. My personal correspondence is that which goes out over my name, rather than just the employer’s name.
Lerner could have meant something more, but as a turn of phrase I don’t see this as at all suspicious.
Because what else can you say? The old adage says there are two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data, and those who are going to. I’m an IT professional: I’ve lost data, as has every IT pro I know. It goes with the territory. Sometimes it’s hardware failure, sometimes it’s user error; sometimes you can get it back, and sometimes you can’t (or it would be so expensive to get it back that the boss says no, just live with it).
If the hard drive was unreadable (and the email chain says the criminal investigation forensic lab was unable to retrieve anything), then the information cannot be read, and the hard drive is no longer responsive evidence. (That’s leaving aside whether the tech doing the work knew or should have known about the request, and it is not even clear that the request directly related to subjects that anybody had any reason to believe existed solely on that nonfunctioning drive, nor was it a formal subpoena.)
I don’t know. Perhaps she did act inappropriately, or perhaps she didn’t want to face a hyper-partisan inquisition.
I do know its been reported she was using her personal email account for IRS business not just her IRS email. It may have something to do with this that she used the term “personal files” or it may as you say simply be a poor choice of words on her part.
Yeah? Me too. In your experience, how many desktop drives fail in such a way as to make forensic recovery of data impossible?
The industry average failure rate for a machine 1-3 years old is about 3% per year. But the large majority of those failures leave the data at least partially recoverable. The drives develop sector errors, or the motor goes bad, or the controller board fails, or whatever. Most of those 3% of ‘failures’ involve drives that are replaced before they totally fail - the SMART monitor reports errors, or the drive doesn’t spin up sometimes, or sector errors start to occur.
Of the small percentage of that 3% that totally fail, stats from the data recovery industry show that about 90% of the time, most or all of the data can be recovered.
The fact that Lois Lerner had a hard drive failure within 10 days of learning that she may be investigated, and that the failure was so complete that government forensics experts could retrieve no data at all, is highly suspicious. The odds of this occurring are vanishingly small.
The IRS also claims that SIX other relevant hard drives also failed, and that none of them had data that could be recovered. Now we go from ‘vanishingly small’ odds, to ‘odds so infinitesimal as to be completely beyond belief’.
Ridiculous. A tech has no idea whether a drive is ‘responsive evidence’ or not. And in any event, it’s not his call. Anyone in their right mind would bag the thing and put it in safekeeping, since it’s the subject of a federal investigation. The fact that they sent it to a criminal investigation forensics lab should indicate that they knew the importance of that drive. In that case someone might request it to examine it for evidence of tampering, degaussing, etc. At the very least, you’d want to make it available in case the investigators want to try to do their own data recovery. That drive could easily have become evidence in a federal case. You do not ‘recycle’ those.
Yeah? When you behave in a partisan fashion by using a federal agency’s power to target your political opponents, you don’t have a right to complain if you become subject to a partisan investigation. Even a ‘hyper-partisan’ one, whatever that is.
What about when you use your gerrymandered “majority” in Congress to target your political enemies? Darrell Issa’s abuses far exceed any alleged behavior by Lois Lerner.
Most of the time, my bosses have absolutely no interest in trying forensic recovery; the cost/benefit ratio simply isn’t worth it. Of the ones we’ve sent, it’s been a very mixed bag; maybe 75% get at least some data, but the percentage that gets anything like complete recovery is much less.
What makes you think the drives in question fit in that age range? They’re still running half of their desktops on XP, and have $300 million in IT upgrades on hold due to budget issues. After three years, the failure rates start going up fast.
Even if you take your numbers at face value, the IRS has 110,000 desktops/laptops. At three percent failure per year, in the three years at issue 10,000 drives would have failed, and a thousand of them (ten percent) would not have been recoverable at all. That means that more than one out of every 100 IRS employees had an unrecoverable crash in that period. Those odds are not anywhere near vanishingly small.
Except the IRS is not claiming anything of the sort. For example, see today’s testimony from Commissioner Koskinen: Nicole Flax had two computers; one crashed, but all of the emails were on the other, so they have no indication that any emails at all were lost. Dave Camp got some publicity claiming that all six were unrecoverable, but the IRS says only that six other people had hard drive failures at some point, and so far have NOT claimed any unrecoverability on any of the six.
First, you’ll need some evidence that anybody would have had any idea that the drive was the subject of a federal investigation. The initial letters from Congress did not ask for “Lois Lerner’s hard drive,” and certainly none of the emails yet released say anything about telling the techs that Congress wanted the info.
They can still be negatively affected, just not negatively affected as it pertains to the elections. THe Tea Party is about more than elections though, so hampering their organizing and community outreach is very much a problem, just as it would be for any such organization. As a community organizer, guess who would understand that better than anyone?
Those are the drives that are completely failed. As you know, most hard drive ‘failures’ are partial. The drive reports bad sectors, or a boot sector gets hit so the machine won’t boot, or the drive bearings go and the thing starts to whine and occasionally won’t spin up. The 3% industry figure is for all failures. Failures that cause complete data loss are a small fraction of that figure, and even then a data recovery expert can recover at least some of the data about 90% of the time. That makes the odds of a failure that is so complete that even forensic data recovery can’t be done drop to maybe .1% per year.
Because Lerner is an executive, and the policy for executive computers almost always involves a refresh cycle of 2 or 3 years. No one at that level is hauling around a 10 year old Thinkbook. I just googled the refresh policies in the U.S. government, and while I couldn’t find the IRS, I found state governments that have a 2-year refresh for laptops and 3-years for desktop machines for office workers.
My company has plenty of ancient machines. Old test machines, servers for little-used applications, old desktop machines sitting in a corner to use as a spare or for a temp contractor. But every permanent employee knowledge worker gets a machine refresh every two or three years. This is pretty standard within government and industry. I would be surprised if someone at Lerner’s level had a machine more than 3 years old.
What’s with the strange math? The calculation is much simpler: For any individual, 3% annual failure rate. Of those, maybe 1/3 involve a completely dead drive. So, 1%. Of those, 90% can be partially or totally recovered. So, .1% chance per year that a hard drive will fail so thoroughly that even outside data recovery specialists cannot recover it. One chance in a thousand.
There’s a lot of conflicting testimony around this. The IRS seems to be obfuscating madly. I’ll have to read more about exactly what the claims are.
Did you not say the drive was sent to a criminal forensics lab for data recovery? In your experience, is that a common thing to do for a routine employee hard drive failure?
Common sense? If the drive went to a criminal forensics lab, would you destroy it afterwards?