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posted by janrinok on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the someone-is-wrong dept.

Ars is reporting someone at the DOJ said they have the Lois Lerner emails in off-site backup tapes.

Unnamed Department of Justice attorneys admitted to an attorney from the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch that backups exist of the e-mail messages of former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. In a press release on the organization’s website, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the DOJ official claimed that accessing the specific e-mails in response to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS would be too difficult, as they were retained in an offsite backup for disaster recovery.

Then the Whitehouse promptly denied this.

An unnamed White House official told The Hill that no new backups had been discovered. "The administration official said that the inspector general is examining whether any data can be recovered from the previously recycled back-up tapes and suggested that could be the cause of the confusion between the government and Judicial Watch," The Hill's Bernie Becker reported.

Isn't government corruption theater fun?

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:15PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:15PM (#86967)

    > accessing the specific e-mails (...) would be too difficult, as they were retained in an offsite backup for disaster recovery.

    It's like a millions sysadmins screamed "WTF?" and were suddenly silenced.

    Do they do their "backups" on Write-Only Medium?

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by DECbot on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:38PM

      by DECbot (832) on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:38PM (#86973) Journal

      You see, this is a Windows backup tape.... it won't work in Unix, so there's no way you can grep for that.

      No, not even in Linux...

      Seriously, you don't understand, it's too complex. This is a Windows backup tape. It only works in Windows machines, specifically Windows 2003 with the Exchange server installed and configured correctly, and with a Microsoft Support agent logged in remotely to assist with reading the tape. Even then the tape can't always be read because you might have the wrong updates installed, and you can't know what updates you need to read the tape.

      It just cannot be read cause you know, 'cause the tape is in analog and computers are digital, 'n stuff.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
      • (Score: 1) by E_NOENT on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:43PM

        by E_NOENT (630) on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:43PM (#86975) Journal

        This is a Windows backup tape. It only works in Windows machines, specifically Windows 2003 with the Exchange server installed and configured correctly, and with a Microsoft Support agent logged in remotely to assist with reading the tape. Even then the tape can't always be read because you might have the wrong updates installed, and you can't know what updates you need to read the tape.

        Masterful!

        --
        I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
      • (Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:51PM

        by hemocyanin (186) on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:51PM (#86978) Journal

        It just cannot be read cause you know, 'cause the tape is in analog and computers are digital, 'n stuff.

        When I first got a tape recorder to record programs I wrote for my TRS-80 CoCo back in the early 80s -- the first thing I did was test whether reading the tape also erased -- like the computer would just suck the data off. ;-) Ahhh ... to be a kid again.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @12:40AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @12:40AM (#86997)

          I had a TRS-80 II. it was what 4k memory? Wrote a lottery pick program with it, took up all 4k after trimming it to fit.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @10:03AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @10:03AM (#87113)

            Did you win? The lottery i mean.

      • (Score: 5, Funny) by el_oscuro on Friday August 29 2014, @01:19AM

        by el_oscuro (1711) on Friday August 29 2014, @01:19AM (#87002)

        I always thought that if you needed to restore, you had to install the tape drive above the computer so the data could flow back downhill. And never use those 15k RPM hard disks. They are too fast and sometimes the bits fly off as they spin. You can always tell when this happens as you will see something that looks like dust on the inside of the computer case.

        --
        SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
      • (Score: 2) by tathra on Friday August 29 2014, @04:56PM

        by tathra (3367) on Friday August 29 2014, @04:56PM (#87282)

        You see, this is a Windows backup tape.... it won't work in Unix, so there's no way you can grep for that.

        it seems you're joking, but wouldn't differing filesystems make this actually be true? i don't know much about *nix, but from what i gather it hasn't always natively supported NTFS.

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 29 2014, @06:07PM

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 29 2014, @06:07PM (#87313) Journal

          No, not always. NTFS support was only added towards 2000, and at first it was labeled "experimental, read only". It's been there for quite awhile, though.

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:55PM (#86981)

      > It's like a millions sysadmins screamed "WTF?" and were suddenly silenced.

      You what is a lot more likely?
      Since this has become such a political football, there are a ton of people in the chain and the majority of them simply don't have the technical knowledge to accurately repeat the information and thus it has become lost in translation.

      Outrage over stupidity makes for great news stories. But when have you ever known the press to accurately report the technical details on any topic?

      • (Score: 2) by khallow on Friday August 29 2014, @12:13AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 29 2014, @12:13AM (#86988) Journal

        Since this has become such a political football, there are a ton of people in the chain and the majority of them simply don't have the technical knowledge to accurately repeat the information and thus it has become lost in translation.

        It's too bad the bosses don't have any conceivable way [wikipedia.org] to clear that up.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @02:03AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @02:03AM (#87009)

          I can't tell if you are making a clever joke or just ignorant of the telephone game. [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by khallow on Friday August 29 2014, @02:12AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 29 2014, @02:12AM (#87012) Journal

            You do realize that they can just call the people who know, completely bypassing the "telephone game"? The telephone doesn't just call the last person in some long chain of communication. Personally, I think a little jail time for contempt of Congress would go a long way to resolving these unfortunate, but very convenient communication problems.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @02:19AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @02:19AM (#87017)

              > You do realize that they can just call the people who know

              Just who do you think should be calling who?
              Perhaps you are ignorant of the telephone game because you have no experience with bureaucracy.

              • (Score: 2) by khallow on Friday August 29 2014, @03:53AM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 29 2014, @03:53AM (#87041) Journal

                Just who do you think should be calling who?
                Perhaps you are ignorant of the telephone game because you have no experience with bureaucracy.

                Still making excuses, I see. Jail time would fix these bureaucratic problems. But I suppose we could wait until they're using those games to obfuscate something worse than using the IRS to block political opposition.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @03:58AM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @03:58AM (#87043)

                  > Still making excuses,

                  Hhm. I make a post saying that perhaps people shouldn't take news reports at face value and what do you do?
                  You double down on naively taking them at face value.
                  I am not making any excuses, but you are definitely living up to your name.

                  • (Score: 2) by khallow on Friday August 29 2014, @12:02PM

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 29 2014, @12:02PM (#87155) Journal

                    Hhm. I make a post saying that perhaps people shouldn't take news reports at face value and what do you do?

                    You claim things about me which aren't true. If you do more than just take news reports at face value, you will find a pattern of deceit and obstruction of justice associated with this story and certain parties in the IRS that comes from the very beginning when the primary known instigator, Lois Lerner planted a shill at a news conference in order to release the story in a controlled manner. What we do know is that certain non-profit groups associated with political opposition to the Obama administration experienced a period of two years of limbo where they were neither approved or disapproved by cohorts of Lerner, leading up to the 2012 election. This effect didn't extend to groups more favorable of Obama which usually were accepted or rejected in a timely manner. Further, when Congress requested emails of Lerner and other workers, suddenly those emails were unavailable with the claim being that they were lost in a hard disk crash more than a year prior. We now find that these emails weren't lost, or at least shouldn't have been lost due to hardware error, because there were other backups done of email systems which Lerner used - as expected.

                    Further, we see that another computer system, Lerner's Blackberry was apparently allowed to be wiped despite knowledge of an ongoing congressional investigation. Not only are these alleged accidents and losses of data convenient to hiding what Lerner did and who was involved with her, but they also are illegal by US laws on federal government data retention.

                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @07:06PM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @07:06PM (#87333)

                      If you can't be bothered to provide a single citation, I can't be bothered to take your claims seriously.
                      It isn't my job to prove you right.
                      At this point you'll probably cite a trivial claim like the shill but none of your actually damning accusations, since this story is about to fall off the front page I won't even see that. But you keep right on living in your fantasy world, it gives you something to suckle on.

                      • (Score: 2) by khallow on Friday August 29 2014, @10:45PM

                        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 29 2014, @10:45PM (#87394) Journal

                        Let's start with my first allegation, "Lois Lerner planted a shill at a news conference in order to release the story in a controlled manner". After googling for "Lerner staged", I got this [usnews.com] as the third link.

                        "I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the [American Bar Association] Tax Section's Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks," Roady said in a statement to U.S. News and World Report. "I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question."

                        To continue:

                        Acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted to House lawmakers Friday during an oversight hearing of the controversy that the question was a plant. The IRS was aware of a forthcoming Treasury Department Inspector General Report that would condemn the targeting of groups applying for 501(c)(4) status if they contained the words "tea party," "patriot" or "9/12."

                        So we also have motive for doing so. To control release of the information ahead of an Inspector General report which would have announced that the IRS were doing this illegal practice anyway.

                        Second allegation: "What we do know is that certain non-profit groups associated with political opposition to the Obama administration experienced a period of two years of limbo where they were neither approved or disapproved by cohorts of Lerner, leading up to the 2012 election."

                        Googling for "irs targeting" [google.com] yields the Wikipedia story [google.com] on the IRS targeting scandal high up the list of search results.

                        Over the two years between April 2010 and April 2012, the IRS essentially placed on hold the processing of applications for 501(c)(4) tax-exemption status received from organizations with "Tea Party", "patriots", or "9/12" in their names. While apparently none of these organizations' applications were denied during this period,[Note 2] only 4 were approved.[53] During the same general period, the agency approved applications from several dozen presumably liberal-leaning organizations whose names included terms such as "progressive", "progress", "liberal", or "equality".[53][54] However, the IRS also selected several progressive- or Democratic-leaning organizations for increased scrutiny. An affiliate of the liberal group Emerge America had its request for tax-exempt status denied, leading to a review (and the eventual revocation) of the larger Emerge America organization's tax-exempt status.[52] The conservative National Review states that a November 2010 version of the IRS's BOLO list indicates that liberal and conservative groups were in fact treated differently because liberal groups could be approved for tax-exempt status by line agents, while tea party groups could not.[6]

                        Those bracketed numbers refer to original sources such as the source [nytimes.com] for the allegation that "only 4 were approved".

                        And notice that last sentence. That backs my assertion that "his effect didn't extend to groups more favorable of Obama which usually were accepted or rejected in a timely manner."

                        The Wikipedia article goes on to describe a variety of incriminating activities such as Lerner pleading the Fifth (a US amendment that prohibits people from being forced to testify against themselves), lying about the extent of the activity (Lerner originally claimed it was just restricted to some rogue agents in the Cincinnati office, which was later determined to be incorrect), and that Lerner knew of the activities in 2011 long before she issued her staged apology for the affair which kicked off public scrutiny.

                        And of course, we have the statements: "Further, when Congress requested emails of Lerner and other workers, suddenly those emails were unavailable with the claim being that they were lost in a hard disk crash more than a year prior. We now find that these emails weren't lost, or at least shouldn't have been lost due to hardware error, because there were other backups done of email systems which Lerner used - as expected."

                        These are cited by the links of the current story.

                        The Blackberry allegation: "Further, we see that another computer system, Lerner's Blackberry was apparently allowed to be wiped despite knowledge of an ongoing congressional investigation."

                        Googling for "lerner blackberry" [google.com] yields this Ars Technica story [arstechnica.com].

                        While controversy still swirls over whether the Internal Revenue Service has backup tapes with the “lost” e-mails of former IRS executive Lois Lerner, an IRS attorney confirmed that the agency had disposed of Lerner’s government-issued BlackBerry in June of 2012.

                        That would mean that the destruction of the data on the phone—including e-mails that may have been part of the missing messages both Congress and the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch have sought from the agency—happened after congressional staffers had begun asking her about the alleged targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. But it was over a year after the loss of e-mails on Lerner’s personal computer due to a reported hard drive crash.

                        Incidentally, this is all illegal not just because it's destruction of evidence in an ongoing investigation of an actual crime, but because it violates the Federal Records Act [dailycaller.com].

                        “The [Federal Records Act] requires agencies to make and preserve records of agency decisions, policies, and essential transactions, and to take steps to safeguard against the loss of agency records,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, who subpoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Monday.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @08:19AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @08:19AM (#87091)

                Just who do you think should be calling whom?

                FTFY

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by hamsterdan on Friday August 29 2014, @02:57AM

      by hamsterdan (2829) on Friday August 29 2014, @02:57AM (#87025)

      It's not like data recovery companies can, you know, recover data?

      EpicDataRecovery lists the IRS as one of their customers, and Ontrack recovered data from Columbia's Hard Drives. But most people will sadly believe the government on this one...

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:41PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:41PM (#86974) Journal

    It seems a bad idea for the Whitehouse to immediately deny this. That implies either the WH is willing to lie (or guess), or that it knows a whole heck of a lot about the internal nitty gritty day to day operation of the IRS. Either is bad and it seems a horrendous tactical blunder.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by TheB on Friday August 29 2014, @02:07AM

      by TheB (1538) on Friday August 29 2014, @02:07AM (#87011)

      They didn't deny it. They found no "NEW" backups. ie they have known about these backups for a while, or the backups are now considered old.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:53PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:53PM (#86980) Journal

    If the people covering this up are allowed to get away with it, then someone will try to get away with more next time. Eventually, there won't be a semblance of democracy at all.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @12:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @12:00AM (#86984)

      The Bush Administration already got away with deleting thousands of emails; in fact, they redesigned the White House's email system specifically to be able to "lose" emails.

      There's been little semblance of democracy since 2002.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday August 29 2014, @12:08AM

        by bob_super (1357) on Friday August 29 2014, @12:08AM (#86986)

        *1788
        (I thought I'd kill the thread right there, rather than have posts with dates creeping back in time)

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @01:56AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @01:56AM (#87007)

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts [wikipedia.org]

          It says 1798.

          Or are we talking about something else?

          • (Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday August 29 2014, @04:20AM

            by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Friday August 29 2014, @04:20AM (#87049) Journal

            In 1788, the US Constitution was ratified by the requisite 9 states and thus went into effect, though there would be no elections until 1789; the last meeting of the Continental Congress with a quorum was also in 1988. It's thus not an unreasonable year to cite as the start of the current U.S. government.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday August 29 2014, @07:04AM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday August 29 2014, @07:04AM (#87075) Journal

      Why would they NOT get away with it?

      Its the President. He will blanket pardon everyone in advance on his way out the door. Those people are Golden.
      Even when the tapes are found later, there will be nothing anyone can do about it.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by khallow on Friday August 29 2014, @11:55AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 29 2014, @11:55AM (#87150) Journal

        That depends whether his blanket pardon actually works or not. I see two obvious areas of blowback, namely, that he accidentally pardons a lot more people than intended or he actually fails to pardon people and instead draws attention to them by the attempted pardon. The administration has promoted and lost in several court cases unusually delusional views of the US Constitution that's at odds even with their own appointees. If the same people coming up with those crazy legal arguments also end up managing his pardons, that could be a spectacular fail.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Friday August 29 2014, @02:42AM

    by DECbot (832) on Friday August 29 2014, @02:42AM (#87021) Journal

    I feel dumb for not realizing this earlier. Even if the backup tapes aren't salvageable, the NSA would have a copy of missing emails in their database.

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
  • (Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Friday August 29 2014, @07:31AM

    by AnonTechie (2275) on Friday August 29 2014, @07:31AM (#87080) Journal

    IRS wiped Lerner’s BlackBerry after Congress inquiry began, lawyer says.
    While controversy still swirls over whether the Internal Revenue Service has backup tapes with the “lost” e-mails of former IRS executive Lois Lerner, an IRS attorney confirmed that the agency had disposed of Lerner’s government-issued BlackBerry in June of 2012. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/27/lois-lerner-blackberry-deliberately-destroyed-after-start-congressional-probe/ [foxnews.com]

    That would mean that the destruction of the data on the phone—including e-mails that may have been part of the missing messages both Congress and the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch have sought from the agency—happened after congressional staffers had begun asking her about the alleged targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. But it was over a year after the loss of e-mails on Lerner’s personal computer due to a reported hard drive crash.

    In a declaration by the IRS in response to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, IRS Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel Thomas Kane wrote that the BlackBerry phone had been “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.”

    http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/irs-wiped-lerners-blackberry-after-congress-inquiry-began-lawyer-says/ [arstechnica.com]

    --
    Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
  • (Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday August 29 2014, @10:41AM

    by FakeBeldin (3360) on Friday August 29 2014, @10:41AM (#87116) Journal

    Non-USA reader here.

    I'm missing some context: why should anyone (including DoJ, Witehouse) care about missing emails of a civil servant?
    I glanced over the Ars article, but couldn't find a definitive answer to that.

    I *guess* this is related to the affair where the tax office was accused of denying tax exemptions to groups with Republican affiliation. Could anyone confirm this? Thanks!

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @11:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @11:28AM (#87137)

      Yes it is related to that.
      But no they didn't actually deny any applications, they just gave them extra scrutiny.
      The people who believe there is a scandal think proof of that scandal is in these "missing" emails.

      Most people commenting on this story (here and pretty much everywhere on the net) have a "blind men and the elephant" thing going on and the more vitriolic the commentary the more likely they are to have embraced just the partial set of facts that most appeals to their preconceived biases.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @03:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @03:16PM (#87233)

      I'll give it a shot.

      Ok so the IRS was mandated in law by our congress. However, the congress does not really 'run' the show in most cases they just spend the money. The executive branch runs the 'day to day' tasks mandated by law. The executive branch can also be selective in how it applies the laws (it shouldnt be but it is). It can get away with that as the laws 'on the books' are huge and expansive and obtuse.

      So many presidents have used this 'power' to direct their underlings to do things that 'hurt' their opposing party.

      In this specific case. It was directed from fairly high up in the executive branch to stick it to the 'republicans' (speculation, but looking that way). Specifically denying tax exempt status to groups by either omission or just denying it outright. It became fairly obvious when it was nearly 1200 (D groups) to 0 (R groups) that had been allowed this status over a 3 year period. It must go up pretty high into the executive branch if they are deleting records. Nixon tried the same thing with watergate.

      So also in this specific case the emails tell the tail of who emailed whom and who knew what. Its pretty much a huge scandal as 1 laptop eats itself ok. 7? And the backs are unusable? So either it is straight up incompetence or malice. Unfortunately it is hard to tell from the outside.

      You will not see any real traction on the story until December after the elections. As neither party really wants to fight it out before November. The D's will want to paint it as obstructionist. The R's will make it look like the biggest scandal evar!!!1! Both will be jockeying for position for the next presidential elections. Which means around next june/july you will see the story suddenly disappear as both parties desperately try to bury it as it will look bad on both of them.