B-Man Posted June 18, 2014 Posted June 18, 2014 MEGAN MCARDLE: Missing Email Is The Least Of The IRS’s Problems. IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Contempt Of Congress: The agency now admits it didn’t fully comply with subpoenas.
DC Tom Posted June 18, 2014 Posted June 18, 2014 IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Contempt Of Congress: The agency now admits it didn’t fully comply with subpoenas. I'm actually good with this. Congress holds all of us in contempt all the time; I enjoy seeing the shoe on the other foot occasionally. Just tell Congress "We had to ignore the subpoena to know what was in it."
OCinBuffalo Posted June 18, 2014 Posted June 18, 2014 MEGAN MCARDLE: Missing Email Is The Least Of The IRS’s Problems. IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Contempt Of Congress: The agency now admits it didn’t fully comply with subpoenas. Can't read the rest of the WSJ article, but....I did read "quiet admisson that it has spent most of the past year willfully defying Congress". Doesn't that mean jail? I thought that was supposed to be turned over to a Federal judge, and the judge throws them in jail?
Koko78 Posted June 18, 2014 Posted June 18, 2014 Can't read the rest of the WSJ article, but....I did read "quiet admisson that it has spent most of the past year willfully defying Congress". Doesn't that mean jail? I thought that was supposed to be turned over to a Federal judge, and the judge throws them in jail? I believe the next step is to refer the matter to the Justice Dept., where our illustrious Attorney General will ensure that the matter is promptly brought before a federal grand jury immediately after his own contempt case is presented, but before the New Black Panthers are presented for voter intimidation... in 2148.
DC Tom Posted June 18, 2014 Posted June 18, 2014 Can't read the rest of the WSJ article, but....I did read "quiet admisson that it has spent most of the past year willfully defying Congress". Shocking. Usually the President just walks up to the podium and defies them openly.
B-Man Posted June 18, 2014 Posted June 18, 2014 Sorry Folks, here's the full article..........................http://online.wsj.com/articles/irs-contempt-of-congress-1403047938
4merper4mer Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/irs-lois-lerner-emails-108044.html I am just a rich dude that has a lot of clients and information on email and I don't know much about computers. Can some of you experts fill in the steps for me on this because it sounds like baloney. The IRS told congressional investigators on Friday that the emails of Lerner, the former head of the tax exempt division that was found to have singled out conservative groups for additional scrutiny, were lost from 2009 to 2011 in a computer hard drive crash in early summer 2011. IRS chief John Koskinen will face angry Republicans at a hearing on Friday “We believe the standard IRS protocol was followed in 2011 for disposing of the broken hard drive. A bad hard drive, like other broken Information Technology equipment, is sent to a recycler as part of our regular process,” an IRS spokesman said in response to a query from POLITICO. OK I get that part. Disk on her PC crashed....it got sent off and destroyed. That’s because before May 2013, the IRS only backed up emails for six months on a tape, then recycled the tapes, so they essentially threw out the data. Many agencies do the same, transparency experts say. Oooh....I get that too. I'm not sure I believe they only keep tapes for 6 months but government can be pretty stupid so I buy it....sort of. But I would bet you money that if they were looking for emails for a taxpayer that owed them a million in 2010, they could find it. OK I really don't buy this 6 month pile of crap they are selling but for the sake of this thread let's say I do. Here's what I don't get.....her hard drive crashed......they threw it away.......then what did they do? Did they put a new hard drive in her PC and make her start from scratch? No e-mails, no spreadsheets, documents, solitaire, browser bookmarks, iTunes, pictures of Harry Reid, Newt Gingrich and a goat? nuthin? If they had the tapes for six months why didn't they restore her files to her shiny new hard drive? And then wouldn't the information be available again on her new hard drive? And this same stuff happened to a bunch more people? I have people and even a Googlebot to worry about my computers which makes it ok for me to resemble the intellect of a Canadian when it comes to technology but wtf am I missing here?
Oxrock Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 (edited) Whenever someone that high up gets a new Desktop or Hardrive, Outlook populates the new hardrive with old emails from the server. Period. Just like if she remotes in from home to a new server and she clicks on Outlook, the first thing it does is based on her login name and password sets up outlook for her and then retrieves everything from the server in her profile. Edit: Not just anyone that high up. Everyone. Edited June 19, 2014 by Oxrock
/dev/null Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 Whenever someone that high up gets a new Desktop or Hardrive, Outlook populates the new hardrive with old emails from the server. Period. Just like if she remotes in from home to a new server and she clicks on Outlook, the first thing it does is based on her login name and password sets up outlook for her and then retrieves everything from the server in her profile. Edit: Not just anyone that high up. Everyone. Not exactly, but close enough Outlook (and by Outlook everyone really means Microsoft Exchange) stores email on the server. If your computer crashes and you get a new hard drive, the first time you start Outlook it pulls a copy of your store to the local hard drive. If you walk into the next cubicle and log into your coworkers computer, same deal. If the IRS lost all of Lois Lerner's email during a set period of time, then they lost the email for everybody on the same Exchange store. And even if the Exchange store crashed, an IT Enterprise the size of the IRS is going to have a system in place to backup email and file servers. Another factor to consider in the crashed hard drive, is that an IT Enterprise the size of the IRS is going to have a large IT support team. They won't just call up Geek Squad when they have a problem. Any large IT Enterprise will have a phone Help Desk, field techs, server admins, etc all working off a ticketing system. So where is the documentation that the hard drive crashed?
4merper4mer Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 Not exactly, but close enough Outlook (and by Outlook everyone really means Microsoft Exchange) stores email on the server. If your computer crashes and you get a new hard drive, the first time you start Outlook it pulls a copy of your store to the local hard drive. If you walk into the next cubicle and log into your coworkers computer, same deal. If the IRS lost all of Lois Lerner's email during a set period of time, then they lost the email for everybody on the same Exchange store. And even if the Exchange store crashed, an IT Enterprise the size of the IRS is going to have a system in place to backup email and file servers. Another factor to consider in the crashed hard drive, is that an IT Enterprise the size of the IRS is going to have a large IT support team. They won't just call up Geek Squad when they have a problem. Any large IT Enterprise will have a phone Help Desk, field techs, server admins, etc all working off a ticketing system. So where is the documentation that the hard drive crashed? So basically it is like the old song said: ........There it is.
B-Man Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 Not exactly, but close enough Outlook (and by Outlook everyone really means Microsoft Exchange) stores email on the server. If your computer crashes and you get a new hard drive, the first time you start Outlook it pulls a copy of your store to the local hard drive. If you walk into the next cubicle and log into your coworkers computer, same deal. If the IRS lost all of Lois Lerner's email during a set period of time, then they lost the email for everybody on the same Exchange store. And even if the Exchange store crashed, an IT Enterprise the size of the IRS is going to have a system in place to backup email and file servers. Another factor to consider in the crashed hard drive, is that an IT Enterprise the size of the IRS is going to have a large IT support team. They won't just call up Geek Squad when they have a problem. Any large IT Enterprise will have a phone Help Desk, field techs, server admins, etc all working off a ticketing system. So where is the documentation that the hard drive crashed? and (again) it didn't just crash last week, why did it take over 13 months to respond to Congress and tell them it 'crashed' several years back ? I'll answer myself.......................................they're lying. .
GG Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 But you IT geeks should also address the canard that the IRS said it had had backed up the emails, but because they were 3 years old, that data was overwritten by newer emails.
Nanker Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 Oh, she put those tapes in her washing machine AFTER her hard drive crashed. That's SOP for the government's high level managers. Gotta keep things squeaky clean at the IRS! After all, they're protecting the government from dishonest, reprehensible people who are questioning how it uses the tax money that the department so efficiently collects.
DC Tom Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 But you IT geeks should also address the canard that the IRS said it had had backed up the emails, but because they were 3 years old, that data was overwritten by newer emails. Not surprising. Losing the emails wouldn't be a technical issue, it would be an administrative one. While /dev/null's right about the technical aspects he mentions, the administrative and bureaucratic environment in which that's set up can be utterly ridiculous. Both the email systems I'm on right now have hard limitations on server storage (one deletes everything more than 60 days old, the other locks your email if you exceed half a gigabyte in storage), and both require you to manually archive your own emails - the time-limited one at least provides an archiving tool to move them to, but the storage-limited one requires you to move them off the server and store them locally, so if your drive crashes and you haven't backed up your archive to the network, your emails are gone for good. Doesn't matter how competent the IT staff is, if the people controlling the money won't pay for the proper set-up.
OCinBuffalo Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 But you IT geeks should also address the canard that the IRS said it had had backed up the emails, but because they were 3 years old, that data was overwritten by newer emails. That's crap. It's not like hard disk space is at a premium now, or was in 2009, and emails use so litte of it that it's preposterous to suggest that overwriting emails is necessary. You're looking at 10 years to fill up a standard 6TB server with email alone, for 10k people, and that includes attachments, because email servers rountinely compress old email. Morever, tape archiving, or just filling up an old hard disk with archived data, and sending it to a backup sever farm, is standard practice. First thing on google when one searches for "archive farm", and its pricing == https://www.archivefarm.com/index-3.html Which... Not surprising. Losing the emails wouldn't be a technical issue, it would be an administrative one. While /dev/null's right about the technical aspects he mentions, the administrative and bureaucratic environment in which that's set up can be utterly ridiculous. Both the email systems I'm on right now have hard limitations on server storage (one deletes everything more than 60 days old, the other locks your email if you exceed half a gigabyte in storage), and both require you to manually archive your own emails - the time-limited one at least provides an archiving tool to move them to, but the storage-limited one requires you to move them off the server and store them locally, so if your drive crashes and you haven't backed up your archive to the network, your emails are gone for good. Doesn't matter how competent the IT staff is, if the people controlling the money won't pay for the proper set-up. ....is why I don't buy this $ excuse at all. You are looking at fractions of pennies with that pricing when considering the entire IRS IT budget. I will prepare a plan using those prices, if necessary. But I can tell you now that we're going to end up in the same place: $ is not the concern. $ due to hard disk space? Ludicrous. Besides, these clowns almost certainly already have their own dedicated FIPS-standard data center, complete with all bells and whistles. Um...FIPS stands for Federal Information Processing Standard. Are you really suggesting that the IRS isn't following FIPS? Because: now that would be a real scandal, wouldn't it? Bureaucrat on Bureaucrat crime! Somebody might actually get fired! Here's how that goes: "Holy hell! Immediately schedule 10, 50-people meetings this week! We need them so we can hire consultants to study this, before it gets out that some employees might lose the 40 jobs created here at the IRS...just for FIPS compliance! Quick: leak it to the media that it's not that we're incompetent, or that we didn't hire 40 people just to do this: No! We don't have enough $! They'll be howling for Congress to spend $ by the end of the week!" Don't forget: I've worked in government too. That, and "backup" is the first thing that client-side IT people obsess about, because it's the first thing they can point to for job security. Hell, in my experience, client-side IT clowns routinely use "backup" as their "something to say" at meetings, largely because its the ONLY thing they can say! The policies you are talking about have to do with laziness/incompetence, not $. If the policy makers are involved at all, it's to support the laziness/incompetence. So, again, either the IRS IT owns incompetence, or, they own insubordination. Pick one. No way in hell they don't have the $.
DC Tom Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 That's crap. It's not like hard disk space is at a premium now, or was in 2009, and emails use so litte of it that it's preposterous to suggest that overwriting emails is necessary. You're looking at 10 years to fill up a standard 6TB server with email alone, for 10k people, and that includes attachments, because email servers rountinely compress old email. Morever, tape archiving, or just filling up an old hard disk with archived data, and sending it to a backup sever farm, is standard practice. First thing on google when one searches for "archive farm", and its pricing == https://www.archivef...om/index-3.html Which... ....is why I don't buy this $ excuse at all. You are looking at fractions of pennies with that pricing when considering the entire IRS IT budget. I will prepare a plan using those prices, if necessary. But I can tell you now that we're going to end up in the same place: $ is not the concern. $ due to hard disk space? Ludicrous. Besides, these clowns almost certainly already have their own dedicated FIPS-standard data center, complete with all bells and whistles. Um...FIPS stands for Federal Information Processing Standard. Are you really suggesting that the IRS isn't following FIPS? Because: now that would be a real scandal, wouldn't it? Bureaucrat on Bureaucrat crime! Somebody might actually get fired! Here's how that goes: "Holy hell! Immediately schedule 10, 50-people meetings this week! We need them so we can hire consultants to study this, before it gets out that some employees might lose the 40 jobs created here at the IRS...just for FIPS compliance! Quick: leak it to the media that it's not that we're incompetent, or that we didn't hire 40 people just to do this: No! We don't have enough $! They'll be howling for Congress to spend $ by the end of the week!" Don't forget: I've worked in government too. That, and "backup" is the first thing that client-side IT people obsess about, because it's the first thing they can point to for job security. Hell, in my experience, client-side IT clowns routinely use "backup" as their "something to say" at meetings, largely because its the ONLY thing they can say! The policies you are talking about have to do with laziness/incompetence, not $. If the policy makers are involved at all, it's to support the laziness/incompetence. So, again, either the IRS IT owns incompetence, or, they own insubordination. Pick one. No way in hell they don't have the $. HAVING the money and ALLOCATING the money are two different things. Particularly when you're talking about an allocation that is effectively risk mitigation, not operational funding. I'm dealing with this right now, trying to get a server approved that no one wants to spend money on, because the server's a COOP server, hence "not necessary." And the cost we're talking about is petty cash - it's standing up a VM, hardware is a non-issue. I've still spent a month arguing about it. The people in charge would rather take the risk of a significant interruption in service than the risk of having to justify a minimal outlay of money and resources, because while they are responsible for the money, they're not responsible for a server failure. It's all about being able to point the finger at someone else. It has ****-all to do with doing what's right.
OCinBuffalo Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 HAVING the money and ALLOCATING the money are two different things. Particularly when you're talking about an allocation that is effectively risk mitigation, not operational funding. I'm dealing with this right now, trying to get a server approved that no one wants to spend money on, because the server's a COOP server, hence "not necessary." And the cost we're talking about is petty cash - it's standing up a VM, hardware is a non-issue. I've still spent a month arguing about it. The people in charge would rather take the risk of a significant interruption in service than the risk of having to justify a minimal outlay of money and resources, because while they are responsible for the money, they're not responsible for a server failure. It's all about being able to point the finger at someone else. It has ****-all to do with doing what's right. Yes, and I would lump all of that under: incompetence. So, we're back to: either own incompetence, or, own insubordination. What is a an upper manager: who has created the conditions/culture of finger-pointing you describe? Perhaps s/he is devious? Keeping business units fighting, so that they are easier to manage? But then: who needs "easier to manage"? Incompetents. Competent upper management has no problem with "hard to manage". The relish it. They are bored with anything else. I'm not doubting you, or your story. In fact that sounds about government-right to me. However, if I was the boss of the people you are currently arguing with, they'd probably be looking to steal your idea, and take credit for it, because I keep demanding that they think, then produce. "Easiest" way to manage this? If I see no one spending any $ this quarter on hardware....there better be a reason, because deploying new hardware means? We've deployed new software. We better be deploying new software at the DOD, all the time, because it's not like we've even come close to covering our requirements list, "right Bob"? See? I don't even need to know the shot/angle of approach, etc. I don't need to know the project plans. I don't even need to know where we stand on the reqs list. I could merely look at the hardware spending by unit, only, and still be doing the job. Why? Competence.
DC Tom Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 Yes, and I would lump all of that under: incompetence. So, we're back to: either own incompetence, or, own insubordination. What is a an upper manager: who has created the conditions/culture of finger-pointing you describe? Perhaps s/he is devious? Keeping business units fighting, so that they are easier to manage? But then: who needs "easier to manage"? Incompetents. Competent upper management has no problem with "hard to manage". The relish it. They are bored with anything else. I'm not doubting you, or your story. In fact that sounds about government-right to me. However, if I was the boss of the people you are currently arguing with, they'd probably be looking to steal your idea, and take credit for it, because I keep demanding that they think, then produce. "Easiest" way to manage this? If I see no one spending any $ this quarter on hardware....there better be a reason, because deploying new hardware means? We've deployed new software. We better be deploying new software at the DOD, all the time, because it's not like we've even come close to covering our requirements list, "right Bob"? See? I don't even need to know the shot/angle of approach, etc. I don't need to know the project plans. I don't even need to know where we stand on the reqs list. I could merely look at the hardware spending by unit, only, and still be doing the job. Why? Competence. Mostly it's that all lines of responsibility end up in front of a Congressional hearing, and no one wants to be the one holding the bag in THAT forum. You want your incompetence? There it is. Congresscritters who don't even know HOW to hold people accountable.
OCinBuffalo Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 Mostly it's that all lines of responsibility end up in front of a Congressional hearing, and no one wants to be the one holding the bag in THAT forum. You want your incompetence? There it is. Congresscritters who don't even know HOW to hold people accountable. As I said in the other thread....I can teach them how. And, how, in a way that is completely non-threatening politically.
/dev/null Posted June 19, 2014 Posted June 19, 2014 Not surprising. Losing the emails wouldn't be a technical issue, it would be an administrative one. While /dev/null's right about the technical aspects he mentions, the administrative and bureaucratic environment in which that's set up can be utterly ridiculous. Both the email systems I'm on right now have hard limitations on server storage (one deletes everything more than 60 days old, the other locks your email if you exceed half a gigabyte in storage), and both require you to manually archive your own emails - the time-limited one at least provides an archiving tool to move them to, but the storage-limited one requires you to move them off the server and store them locally, so if your drive crashes and you haven't backed up your archive to the network, your emails are gone for good. Doesn't matter how competent the IT staff is, if the people controlling the money won't pay for the proper set-up. Understand the difference between administrative and technical data retention policies. But you would think that an organization like the IRS, who expects taxpayers to keep their documents on file for years: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/How-long-should-I-keep-records Would implement their internal administrative DRP in line with what they enforce on taxpayers
Recommended Posts