SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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?
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:15PM
> 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
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
Masterful!
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:51PM
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
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
Did you win? The lottery i mean.
(Score: 5, Funny) by el_oscuro on Friday August 29 2014, @01:19AM
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
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
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
> 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
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
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
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
> 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
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
> 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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @07:06PM
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
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.
To continue:
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.
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].
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].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @08:19AM
FTFY
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hamsterdan on Friday August 29 2014, @02:57AM
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...