Computer experts call Lerner email explanation 'very suspicious'

Quote:Computer experts and Republican lawmakers are poking holes in IRS claims that the agency did all it could to retrieve embattled ex-official Lois Lerner's allegedly "lost" emails, which the agency blames on a 2011 hard-drive crash.

The email revelation already has prompted three congressional hearings -- with more likely to come -- as lawmakers grow more skeptical of the explanation and look for inconsistencies in the story. Among them, they point to a flurry of emails from mid-2011 between Lerner and the agency's information technology team about the alleged computer failure which was attached to the agency's mea culpa delivered to Congress earlier this month.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, in testimony on Capitol Hill this week, cited those emails as proof of the hard drive crash.

But Lerner's communications with the agency's IT team referred to her desire to retrieve "lost personal files" -- not lost emails.

And that detail is "very suspicious," according to David Kennedy, chief executive of information security firm TrustedSec. Kennedy said that when government computers crash, email recovery should be a priority. But in Lerner's communication with the IT team, "There is no talk about the recovery of the emails," Kennedy said, adding, "It didn't seem like they really wanted to recover the data."

It's possible that the emails shared with lawmakers and attached to a June 13, 2014, letter to leaders of the Senate Finance Committee are just a snapshot of Lerner's communications with the IT team. But they indicate Lerner's acute level of concern for what she referred to as her personal files.

The first email, from June 13, 2011, is a brief notification from one of Lerner's colleagues in the Exempt Organizations division to other IRS staff that Lerner's hard drive had crashed, with information on how to reach her. The next set of emails starts on July 19, 2011, and shows Lerner reaching out to IT staffers for their help in retrieving "lost personal files."

"There were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable," she wrote.

Subsequent emails show technicians failed to recover the data, despite exhausting "all avenues." Ultimately, Lerner was told the sectors on her hard drive were "bad," rendering her data unrecoverable.

"Thanks for trying," Lerner wrote back. "Sometimes stuff just happens."

Koskinen cited these discussions during a hearing Monday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, saying the agency's IT division "tried using multiple processes at Ms. Lerner's request to recover the information stored on her computer's hard drive."

To preempt commietom...


Commietom - CSNBBS Secretary Of 'Splaining Stuff

Bad sectors? Well sure, I can understand it now. I mean bad sectors...c'mon just give it up.

Norton Disk Doctor fixes bad hard drive sectors. That program came out in the 1990's.

Bad sectors get marked as bad. Not to be written to any more. Some if not all of that data can be recovered. The rest of the drive is fine.

Still doesn't matter. It's all archived somewhere.

Time to audit the auditors

(06-26-2014 05:01 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Norton Disk Doctor fixes bad hard drive sectors. That program came out in the 1990's.

Well if you get enough bad sectors a hard drive might be unrecoverable. Getting that volume of bad sectors would point to a catastrophic event, like cutting multiple groves across the hard drive with a knife, or subjecting the drive to extremely high temperatures.

(06-26-2014 07:57 PM)THE NC Herd Fan Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 05:01 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Norton Disk Doctor fixes bad hard drive sectors. That program came out in the 1990's.

Well if you get enough bad sectors a hard drive might be unrecoverable. Getting that volume of bad sectors would point to a catastrophic event, like cutting multiple groves across the hard drive with a knife, or subjecting the drive to extremely high temperatures.

Something a novice might do if they thought there was electronic information on their hard drive that they could get in trouble for and were trying to make it un readable and unretrievable.

(06-26-2014 08:04 PM)mptnstr@44 Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 07:57 PM)THE NC Herd Fan Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 05:01 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Norton Disk Doctor fixes bad hard drive sectors. That program came out in the 1990's.

Well if you get enough bad sectors a hard drive might be unrecoverable. Getting that volume of bad sectors would point to a catastrophic event, like cutting multiple groves across the hard drive with a knife, or subjecting the drive to extremely high temperatures.

Something a novice might do if they thought there was electronic information on their hard drive that they could get in trouble for and were trying to make it un readable and unretrievable.

Exactly, it is impossible for the physical drive to become unreadable unless someone deliberately damages it. There are ways to recover the data even if the mechanical part of the drive fails.

(06-26-2014 08:11 PM)THE NC Herd Fan Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 08:04 PM)mptnstr@44 Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 07:57 PM)THE NC Herd Fan Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 05:01 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Norton Disk Doctor fixes bad hard drive sectors. That program came out in the 1990's.

Well if you get enough bad sectors a hard drive might be unrecoverable. Getting that volume of bad sectors would point to a catastrophic event, like cutting multiple groves across the hard drive with a knife, or subjecting the drive to extremely high temperatures.

Something a novice might do if they thought there was electronic information on their hard drive that they could get in trouble for and were trying to make it un readable and unretrievable.

Exactly, it is impossible for the physical drive to become unreadable unless someone deliberately damages it. There are ways to recover the data even if the mechanical part of the drive fails.

You know this, I know this, we all know this, but we keep getting suckered into the hard drive crash when the emails should have remained stored on the server, backed up, and hard copies printed. Obama has us debating something irrelevant - the individual hard drive of Lois Lerner.

(06-26-2014 08:35 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 08:11 PM)THE NC Herd Fan Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 08:04 PM)mptnstr@44 Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 07:57 PM)THE NC Herd Fan Wrote:  

(06-26-2014 05:01 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Norton Disk Doctor fixes bad hard drive sectors. That program came out in the 1990's.

Well if you get enough bad sectors a hard drive might be unrecoverable. Getting that volume of bad sectors would point to a catastrophic event, like cutting multiple groves across the hard drive with a knife, or subjecting the drive to extremely high temperatures.

Something a novice might do if they thought there was electronic information on their hard drive that they could get in trouble for and were trying to make it un readable and unretrievable.

Exactly, it is impossible for the physical drive to become unreadable unless someone deliberately damages it. There are ways to recover the data even if the mechanical part of the drive fails.

You know this, I know this, we all know this, but we keep getting suckered into the hard drive crash when the emails should have remained stored on the server, backed up, and hard copies printed. Obama has us debating something irrelevant - the individual hard drive of Lois Lerner.

It's all a distraction while he allows tens of thousands of illegals to flood into the US. Obama surrendered to an invisible enemy and the terms of his surrender is the elimination of US sovereign borders.