Computer crash loses 2 years of Lois Lerner emails

[slash2k]

@Sam_Stone

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.

That is certainly not my experience, and based on conversations with my colleagues over the last several times, not theirs either. We typically don’t even hear about hard-drive problems until the machine doesn’t boot, and over the past several years we’re running about 3-5% per year. The whining bearings aren’t part of this figure.

@Sam_Stone

Because Lerner is an executive, and the policy for executive computers almost always involves a refresh cycle of 2 or 3 years … But every permanent employee knowledge worker gets a machine refresh every two or three years. .

I think there’s a great deal more variation in that than you think. When I worked in state government, the executives got hand-me-downs; they used primarily word processors and email, so the newest and best machines went to staff doing the heavy lifting with big data sets, statistical packages, GIS, etc. By the time the senior staff even got their hands on the computer, it was already usually two to three years old, and they could expect to have it for another two to three years. As a senior member of the IT staff, I could not expect a machine refresh every two years. We had an formal 3-year refresh policy too–it was “aspirational.”

A few agencies always had bright shiny new machines, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Texas state government, e.g., reported that the average age of computers sent for disposal there was six years; Iowa now aspires to a four year cycle for mainstream users. In the private sector, it doesn’t seem to be much different, which Gartner has repeatedly cited in their forecasts of declining PC sales. In the 1990s, e.g., each new generation of computers was so much faster than its predecessor that you received a big productivity boost from replacing them, but that’s not really the case anymore. For your average user doing word processing, email, and maybe a custom app, the speed difference between the latest and greatest and a five-year-old machine is nigh negligible.

@Sam_Stone

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.

Times three, as a minimum, since this has stretched over three years. (And as noted, I’m seeing much closer to a three percent completely dead, must-be-sent-to-a-specialist rate.

@Sam_Stone

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?

No, but if you read the emails, it sure sounds more like “let’s go all out for the executive.” When somebody with some clout in the agency has problems, you spend more time and resources trying to make them happy than when it’s somebody who has less influence. Nothing in the email thread indicates it was sent to the CI division’s criminal lab because it was seen as a criminal matter; it seems to have been more that the agency’s experts worked there, and if you are pulling out all stops, you go to the experts.

@Sam_Stone

Common sense? If the drive went to a criminal forensics lab, would you destroy it afterwards?

See above. In the absence of a criminal referral, sure. You hang on to broken equipment if and only if you’ve got a good reason, such as a subpoena, an active criminal investigation, a warranty claim, something. Nobody’s got space and time to store every broken piece of equipment forever.

[yoyodyne]

IT professionals know hard drives fail. That’s why IT professionals do not permit the only copies of documents an agency is legally required to keep to exist on a single hard drive.

[magellan01]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

There’s a factual answer to the question, and the answer to your question is, no: it does not hurt the group or the individuals within it. Until the IRS rules, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO ACT AS THOUGH YOUR APPLICATION HAS BEEN APPROVED.

Nope. It hurts both the individuals and the group. Because it introduces uncertainty into group planning and fund-raising.

[magellan01]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Seriously? I mean, seriously? Your point was that there’d be a thread on the topic with many thousands of posts. And now you’re acting like the nonexistence of the thread is a point against me. Duuuuuude.

Ah, looks like you’re finally getting it. It is a point against you. The thread was a hypothetical one, which was clear from my very first post. I mused what would the difference in participation on the SDMB would be if the current IRS scandal had happened under a republican administration, opining that there be tons of posts. Again, the thread I alluded to was a hypothetical one—one that does not, and cannot exist. Yet you wanted me to substantiate my post as it were a claim. Then you wanted me to research on a thread that was not one I even mentioned. Then you realized that the thread you imagined would exist did not exist. So, this has been you trying to give cover to your guy and misdirecting, as usual.

Reread the exchange. You may want to get that dictionary handy first. Start with the word “if”. Then flip back a few pages to “hypothetical”. And then back to the "A"s for “apologist”. As in, “LHOD shouldn’t be taken seriously. He’s just an apologist for Obama and liberal-brand stupidity.”

[BobLibDem]

The Teabaggers don’t have a right to be free of uncertainty. Perhaps if the IRS had more funding, it could process applications from groups that want to abolish it more efficiently.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Richard_Parker

A fuller technical explanation here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/06/16/heres-how-the-irs-lost-emails-from-key-witness-lois-lerner/

So a crash that occurred back in 2011 before this became news but contemporaneously with when this 501c4 stuff was going on erases a bunch of emails because the IRS has shitty IT?

Republicans must believe that this might be hiding some sort of smoking gun. I don’t know that there would be anything relevant before 2010 and Lois Lerner doesn’t learn of the problem until June of 2011 and the crash occurred in August. So we are talking about a couple of months of email that might include something damning?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Damuri_Ajashi

So a crash that occurred back in 2011 before this became news but contemporaneously with when this 501c4 stuff was going on erases a bunch of emails because the IRS has shitty IT?

Republicans must believe that this might be hiding some sort of smoking gun. I don’t know that there would be anything relevant before 2010 and Lois Lerner doesn’t learn of the problem until June of 2011 and the crash occurred in August. So we are talking about a couple of months of email that might include something damning?

Oops. I didn’t scroll down. It looks like the emails were lost July 19th. About a month after Lois Lerner first learned of the 501(c)(4) issue.

[TimeWinder]

@yoyodyne

IT professionals know hard drives fail. That’s why IT professionals do not permit the only copies of documents an agency is legally required to keep to exist on a single hard drive.

An awful lot of these messages talk about “IT Professionals” like they’re something the IRS would have. It’s an unpopular government agency with a budget far lower than it needs to do its job, hiring from the lowest bidder and competing with a private industry that pays maybe three times as much for even mediocre talent. We’re lucky their IT department can even identify a hard drive.

[yoyodyne]

@TimeWinder

An awful lot of these messages talk about “IT Professionals” like they’re something the IRS would have. It’s an unpopular government agency with a budget far lower than it needs to do its job, hiring from the lowest bidder and competing with a private industry that pays maybe three times as much for even mediocre talent. We’re lucky their IT department can even identify a hard drive.

Maybe they should spend less on bonuses and SWAT teams and more on IT then.

[slash2k]

@TimeWinder

An awful lot of these messages talk about “IT Professionals” like they’re something the IRS would have. It’s an unpopular government agency with a budget far lower than it needs to do its job, hiring from the lowest bidder and competing with a private industry that pays maybe three times as much for even mediocre talent. We’re lucky their IT department can even identify a hard drive.

I think you may be unfairly maligning the IT folks at the IRS. There are still a lot of people in this country who believe in public service, and are willing to work at below-market rates for something they believe in.

That said, knowing something is a bad idea doesn’t magically make the money pop into the budget to do something else. A lot of government IT work is band-aids: what is the best (or the least worst) we can do with the staff and money and resources we’ve got? How can we hold this system together until we can get the legislature/Congress/TPTB to give us resources to do it right?

Look at the Windows XP business. Nobody in the IRS IT staff thinks running an outdated operating system is a good idea, and they’ve been working on upgrades for years. They’ve been telling Congress for years that they need more money to finish the job. After five years of work, they’re not even half-way through, and the IRS budget keeps getting cut.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@magellan01

Ah, looks like you’re finally getting it.

This is clinically insane, and I can’t respond to you further out of the Pit, and don’t really have the energy for that right now.

[jonesj2205]

@Sam_Stone

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.

NY’s policy is three year refresh too. I contracted there for 9 years and got a new desktop once - in year 7. And this was in the (then) Office for Technology. Oh and executives had the same hardware as everyone else.
I will say that it was extremely variable from agency to agency how often equipment was refreshed and even within an agency certain departments might use grant money to refresh their own equipment.

[adaher]

@BobLibDem

The Teabaggers don’t have a right to be free of uncertainty. Perhaps if the IRS had more funding, it could process applications from groups that want to abolish it more efficiently.

The IRS misspends the money it has. When it shows that it can spend money wisely, it can get a fair hearing when it requests more.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@adaher

The IRS misspends the money it has. When it shows that it can spend money wisely, it can get a fair hearing when it requests more.

So they can get the money they need to keep prevent hard drives from crashing and losing data when they can demonstrate that their hard drives no longer crash and lose data? Gotcha.

[adaher]

No, when they demonstrate that they’ll spend money on things they need, rather than expensive conferences.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@adaher

No, when they demonstrate that they’ll spend money on things they need, rather than expensive conferences.

I genuinely love this rule and would like to apply it pretty much across the board–are you good with that?

[adaher]

Yes. Agencies that waste money cannot credibly claim they are underfunded.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@adaher

No, when they demonstrate that they’ll spend money on things they need, rather than expensive conferences.

@adaher

Yes. Agencies that waste money cannot credibly claim they are underfunded.

What waste of money are you talking about? What expensive conferences?

[Iggy]

@Damuri_Ajashi

What waste of money are you talking about? What expensive conferences?

I’m guessing he is referring to reports such as:
IRS Investigation By House Panel Finds $50 Million Spent On Conferences

@linked article

A government watchdog has found that the Internal Revenue Service spent about $50 million to hold at least 220 conferences for employees between 2010 and 2012, a House committee said Sunday.

and

Top Democrat Shows Outrage Over IRS Wasteful Spending

Both links refer to the same time period. It’s not hard to find criticism of the IRS coming from both sides of the political aisle. A Star Trek themed training video garnered particular derision for costing about $60,000 to produce.

[adaher]

When you can do things like that, funding isn’t a problem. Secondly, when you do things like that, how can we be sure that raising your funding will result in buying better equipment, rather than just hiring more bureaucrats?