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June 27, 2014

That's How You Do It

The FBI has 80,000 emails taken from company email servers
Rupert Murdoch faces trouble on both sides of the Atlantic today following claims the FBI has 80,000 News Corp emails in their possession while a corporate probe into the company continues to gather pace.

According to reports, the FBI has copies of at least 80,000 emails - all of which are said to have been taken from the servers at News Corp, Mr Murdoch's parent company, in New York.

The messages were not included in evidence submitted during the British phone hacking trial - and so could not be reported until the jury reached its verdicts, it is claimed.
Yet the IRS insists that months of email messages were"accidentally" destroyed when Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed. I don't know of  any corporate email system that stores or archives emails on the users' PC. It is just unworkable.  These files are maintained on servers and if the server crashes then there is backup software that is used to restore it. The IRS has an IT budget of over $1.2 billion a year and they can't do this?

IT professionals must be having a major fit over this ridiculous claim, and they are:
Were Lois Lerner’s allegedly lost emails actually destroyed? An Ohio-based trade association, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM), isn’t so sure, and they don’t find IRS commissioner Koskinen’s explanation of their loss very plausible.

IAITAM administers internationally accepted certifications for information technology professionals. According to the group’s standards, if Lerner’s supposedly malfunctioning hardware was properly destroyed, there would be records of it.
Anytime I dispose of IT equipment in my office I need to complete a disposition sheet indicating the make, model and serial number of the item, it's location and whether or not it is still functioning. Granted, I only manage a little over 100 users in my office but our county domain covers about 4,000 users and the same standards apply to all office managers.

Having been trained in digital forensics (I set up the county crime lab's computer forensics section years ago) I also know there are ways to obtain information from a malfunctioning hard drive. There is highly specialized equipment  and software (i.e., EnCase is where I received my certification) available. To believe that all the resources of the federal government were inadequate for his task as the IRS maintains is beyond the pale. There must be hundreds, if not thousands of certified federal computer forensic examiners who would be able to retrieve this information.

If the IRS wanted to get into the storage media of a company that was accused of  tax evasion, you can bet your bottom dollar that this conversation would not be taking place.

3 comments:

Fredd said...

This administration is jam packed with lying sacks of shit, and will lie about the White House involvement in IRS targeting of enemies until the cows come home.

Take that to the bank, Sig.

LL said...

They destroyed the e-mail so that the president wouldn't be impeached. And yes there are forensic methods available to the executive branch of government. And no, they won't employ them.

The best way to deal with the IRS is to institute a flat tax and make them generally unnecessary. Turn the bloated bureaucrats out and make them find a real job.

sig94 said...


Fredd - there's no one and basically nothing to make them behave. They will push and push until we push back.

LL - while working on one of my certifications there was discussion by the instructor regarding some of the techniques available for retrieving data. This was at a company that did a lot of work for federal agencies with only three initials (specific to steganography). From my understanding even a DoD wipe will not remove everything. That's why the drives were completely destroyed.