House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell
Issa has been heading up an investigation into the IRS targeting of Tea Party
affiliated groups and individuals since in 2013. As the investigation
progressed it became clear that Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS
exempt organizations unit, was at the heart of the scandal. Her electronic
communications have since been subpoenaed including all of her email
communications.
We were then led to believe that
the investigation was proceeding as planned until last Friday when the Internal
Revenue Service conveniently informed Congressional investigators that they
could no longer retrieve any of Lois Lerner's emails. They claim that the
emails were lost due to a hard drive crash that resulting in the recycling of
the hard drive as government IT officials were unable to save any of the
data.
How ironic that all of the sudden
the emails have gone missing after all of the government investigations of the
past year. If these emails went missing why are we first hearing of this now? Why
wasn't anyone notified when the investigation began? If the emails really went
missing as they would like us to believe those involved in the investigation
should have been aware from the very beginning.
It is extremely hard for anyone
to believe that in today's day and age emails just vanish when a hard drive
crashes. Anyone who knows anything about computers and email knows that
emails aren't saved to the hard drive, they are stored on servers and often
times backed up and archived. This is a government agency which has some of the
most powerful servers in the world and you're telling me they lost the emails
of one of their IRS employees due to a hard drive crash? C'mon a good portion
of the American people may be idiots but just how dumb do they think we are?
We have the NSA listening to
everything we do, monitoring our social media sites like Twitter and Facebook,
checking in on our text messages, and recording and filing away our emails and
web searches, and you expect us to believe that they somehow lost the emails of
an IRS official. With programs like PRISM and MYSTIC and countless other
programs we have never even heard of, the government has the means to see and
hear everything we do and they have been brought to their knees due to a single
hard drive crash.
According to an IT professional
interviewed by The Blaze, there are six reasons why the emails aren't lost and
are currently residing on a server somewhere.
1. The government uses Microsoft Exchange for their email
servers. They have built-in exchange mail database redundancy. So, unless they
did not follow Microsoft’s recommendations they are telling a falsehood. You
can see by the diagram below that if you have three servers in a DAG you have
three copies of the database.
2. Every IT organization that I know of has hotswappable
disk drives. Every server built since 2000 has them. Meaning that if a single
disk goes bad it’s easy to replace.
3. ALL Servers use some form of RAID technology. The only
way that data can be totally lost (Meaning difficult to bring back) is if more
than a single disk goes before the first bad disk is replaced. In the diagram
below you can see that its possible to lose a single disk and still keep the
data.
4. If the server crashed (Hardware failure other than
disks), then the disks that contain the DATA for the Exchange database is still
available because the server hardware and disks are exchangeable. Meaning that
if I have another server with the same hardware in it, I can put the disks in
and everything should boot right up.
5. All email servers in a professional organization use
TAPE backup. Meaning if all the above fails, you can restore the server using
the TAPE backups.
6. If they are talking
about her local PC, then it’s a simple matter of going to the servers which
have the email and getting them from the servers. If the servers have removed
the data you can still get them by using the backups of the servers to recover
the emails.
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