Anyone watching the Lerner email congressional hearing?

[mojo84]

It is astounding what is being said. If private citizens and private companies managed our records like the government, we'd be thrown under the jail.


They are claiming they can't afford to set up an electronic record retention system for emails and documents in spite of having a $1.8 Billion IT budget. You IT folks on here would find this stuff done great comic relief if it wasn't so scary.

[mojo84]

The progressives on the committee keeps bringing up, Bush administration had similar instances of lost emails.

Wouldn't it make sense to electronically backup all emails if this has been an ongoing issue? I guess since it happened to Bush admin it's OK for it to happen under Obama.

[RoyGBiv]

Wouldn't it make sense to electronically backup all emails if this has been an ongoing issue? .

I thought that's what the NSA was doing?

[mojo84]

It's interesting the NSA can do that for the entire population but the government cannot do it for their internal computers and email users. This is the biggest bunch of malarkey I've ever seen. Third graders can come up with better stories and excuses than these clowns.

[cb1000rider]

They are claiming they can't afford to set up an electronic record retention system for emails and documents in spite of having a $1.8 Billion IT budget. You IT folks on here would find this stuff done great comic relief if it wasn't so scary.

Email retention is expensive. And it's big business. Even as cheap as storage is getting, on the email-as-a-service side, it's typically expensive to have a retention policy of years...

And yea, I know that Gmail does it... Gmail also owns the storage hardware and can do it for single digit fractions of what it costs a business per MB.

The more "email" that is retained, the overall lower performance of things like searches. It complicates email recovery and backup. Basically the complication doesn't just grow with the total size of email, it's a non-linear complication.

As an "IT person" I push our business all the time to trim data. If it doesn't have business value, I want it purged from the database.. That way I don't have to pay to store it, back it up, and it make recovery in the event of a disaster, I can recover the business that much faster.

Typical implementation of email that I've seen is a finite mailbox size and/or a specific retention period typically of a year or less for private businesses. It's more typical than unusual.

That being said, parts of the government that are typically subject to open records requests and/or subpoena should have a different policy... But it's going to cost us taxpayers.


Think the NSA isn't watching internally? Maybe someone who works for the Fed can detail the agreement in regard to email privacy. I'm sure the NSA watches internal emails. However, not even the NSA has the storage capacity or computing power to go back and index emails that were sent years ago... Do they watch in real time? I buy that... Can they look at an email that I sent years ago (unless I saved it), I doubt it.

[mojo84]

They are claiming they can't afford to set up an electronic record retention system for emails and documents in spite of having a $1.8 Billion IT budget. You IT folks on here would find this stuff done great comic relief if it wasn't so scary.

Email retention is expensive. And it's big business. Even as cheap as storage is getting, on the email-as-a-service side, it's typically expensive to have a retention policy of years...

And yea, I know that Gmail does it... Gmail also owns the storage hardware and can do it for single digit fractions of what it costs a business per MB.

The more "email" that is retained, the overall lower performance of things like searches. It complicates email recovery and backup. Basically the complication doesn't just grow with the total size of email, it's a non-linear complication.

As an "IT person" I push our business all the time to trim data. If it doesn't have business value, I want it purged from the database.. That way I don't have to pay to store it, back it up, and it make recovery in the event of a disaster, I can recover the business that much faster.

Typical implementation of email that I've seen is a finite mailbox size and/or a specific retention period typically of a year or less for private businesses. It's more typical than unusual.

That being said, parts of the government that are typically subject to open records requests and/or subpoena should have a different policy... But it's going to cost us taxpayers.


Think the NSA isn't watching internally? Maybe someone who works for the Fed can detail the agreement in regard to email privacy. I'm sure the NSA watches internal emails. However, not even the NSA has the storage capacity or computing power to go back and index emails that were sent years ago... Do they watch in real time? I buy that... Can they look at an email that I sent years ago (unless I saved it), I doubt it.

They discussed in the hearing the CBO scored it at a total cost of $15 million for the Entire government even though one of the people testified last night it would be $10-$30 million for just the IRS. Either way, it is well within their $1.8 Billion budget, especially when you consider what they spent on conferences and the cost for the employees to physically print and store hard copies of the employees consider necessary and qualifying pertinent documents. The "it's too expensive" excuse doesn't hold water.

Did you listen to the hearings or are you just talking off the top of your head? Each IRS employee has an email capacity of about 6000 emails in their exchange inbox. Then they have to archive the older emails to their hard drive. There is no reason those archives cannot also be stored on a mirror drive located on a backup server. Many companies find it very affordable and practical to do. When I worked for a company that had over 20,000 employees worldwide, they kept mirror copies of every computer in the field. My laptop crashed and within a day, my new computer was restored to exactly the way it was right before the crash.

There also services available that will capture the emails contemporaneously as they are sent and received that are available.

It shouldn't cost us taxpayers one more cent. The government wastes enough money that the cost of doing this right is a fraction of what they waste. Bottom line is, they do not want all their emails and documents stored and archived as they will shed light on what they are doing.

In this day and time, not able and not affordable are not acceptable excuses. Do you think the IRS would accept these excuses from you or me?

[cb1000rider]

They discussed in the hearing the CBO scored it at a total cost of $15 million for the Entire government even though one of the people testified last night it would be $10-$30 million for just the IRS. Either way, it is well within their $1.8 Billion budget, especially when you consider what they spent on conferences and the cost for the employees to physically print and store hard copies of the employees consider necessary and qualifying pertinent documents. The "it's too expensive" excuse doesn't hold water.

I don't know that you can qualify that it fits in the budget based on any cost estimate. Like most federal budgets, it's probably 100% utilized. If it's $10M or $30M, you have to take away from something else.

If it's "not required" - I can see skimping on this. And you're only talking about the costs of storing that data. You're not talking about what it does to recovery planning, the costs of researching FOI requests, etc. I think if that if "we" (people) want this sort of thing, we need to require it by legislation.

I've worked in several businesses that have short email retention policies to reduce operating costs.. and I suspect in a few cases, it prevents digging through data related to subpoenas.

Did you listen to the hearings or are you just talking off the top of your head? Each IRS employee has an email capacity of about 6000 emails in their exchange inbox. Then they have to archive the older emails to their hard drive. There is no reason those archives cannot also be stored on a mirror drive located on a backup server.

I listed to some of it. I mean the press has spun this up as deception and an administration lie. I was curious about the reality.
You're technically correct, a local archive can be stored off on a mirror drive. To do that, you'll need an automated process and again, you're paying for the storage.
It's easier (administratively) and perhaps less expensive just to store that data server side... It's certainly easier. A full computer restore requires a complete set of the original data and subsequent deltas from that original... Recorded and sent to storage every single day. That's a lot of data.

There also services available that will capture the emails contemporaneously as they are sent and received that are available.

There are also companies that specialize in searching through massive amounts of email data for purposes like these.
Again, I completely agree that there ARE various technical solutions to this. I'm just saying that each one costs money. And over time, a lot of money...

It shouldn't cost us taxpayers one more cent. The government wastes enough money that the cost of doing this right is a fraction of what they waste.

But you posted it would cost between $10-$30M? This is the old political argument of getting more, but not paying a dime more, and it'll be funded by "finding waste". I'm not after you on this personally, but believing that is what got most of Washington elected... If politicians have proven one thing over and over - they can't pay for more by finding inefficiencies.

Storage and retention policies are not free. If you can find that budget by cutting waste, I'm all for it.. But I'm pretty sure that the bozos in Washington can't do it.

Bottom line is, they do not want all their emails and documents stored and archived as they will shed light on what they are doing.

Yea.. I've seen private businesses behave that way. If that's the real reason - and maybe it is.. or at least it's part of it, I'm not sure that you can say that it's the fault of a particular partisan administration, even if the actions in this case appear to be very politically motivated. If you can show me that the IRS stopped retaining email under Obama, that'd be the smoking gun.

Do you think the IRS would accept these excuses from you or me?

That makes me angry too... Looking at it objectively, you and I know that we have to keep our receipts of X year after we file a return. Is there a such a policy for internal email retention with the IRS? If not, perhaps there should be.

[mojo84]

I didn't say it was a partisan issue. They've been using the archaic system for many many years. There was about $100 million spent on conferences, copying of documents and other waste. I guarantee you, in a $1.8 Billion dollar budget, they can find the money to do it right if they wanted to. I am basing my opinions on testimony given under oath and also what was provided by the CBO.

It is more practical to invest in the technology to do it right than continue with the employees being charged with determining what is important and then making hard copies for the archive.

By the way, I am not going off of press spin. I watched the actual hearings. Did you?

[The Annoyed Man]

That being said, parts of the government that are typically subject to open records requests and/or subpoena should have a different policy... But it's going to cost us taxpayers.

The IRS's annual budget is way out of control. Specifically, it SOARED during the period these emails were allegedly lost: http://www.cato.org/blog/irs-budget-soars


Quoting that link:

The revelations of IRS officials targeting conservative and libertarian groups suggest that now is a good time for lawmakers to review a broad range of the agency’s activities. Since the agency’s last overhaul in the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, its budget has exploded from $33 billion to a proposed $106 billion in 2013.

Using data from the OMB budget database, I split total IRS outlays into two broad activities: administration and handouts. Administration includes tax return processing, investigations, enforcement, and other bureaucratic functions. Handouts mainly includes spending on “refundable” tax credits such as the EITC.

The chart shows that the IRS has become a huge social welfare agency in recent decades.

Granted, the above article's point is an argument against the EITC, and that's perhaps an argument for another day, but it does make the point that, while the IRS's budget has skyrocketed, it's administrative costs not so much. They remain in the $10-12 Billion/annum range.

Now, look at this treasury department report: http://www.treasury.gov/IRSOB/reports/D ... 202010.pdf

On page 4, paragraph 6, it says:

Turning our attention to the longer-term, strategic perspective, the IRS Oversight Board believes that the tax administration system has two serious systemic weaknesses that require attention: the tax gap and IRS’ archaic information technology systems. Failure to mitigate these weaknesses will cause long-term performance issues for the tax administration system.

I make those two points—A) that the IRS's administrative costs have not really gone up that much, and B) that the IRS is aware of its need to upgrade its IT infrastructure—to point out that it doesn't have to be THAT expensive. In fact, I believe they could do it within their current budget constraints. I pay $65/year/computer owned by my business to back each one up with Carbonite. I also backup to a network drive, and to a paid DropBox account. The IRS has 89,500 employees (2014). If EVERY single one of them has a desktop computer to back up, that's a total of $5,817,500/year paid to Carbonite to back up all 89,500 computers. $5,817,500 is a drop in the IRS's annual budget of ~$11.2 billion. (SOURCE. Please note that this Wiki article only shows the administrative budget, not the overall budget.) If you TRIPLED that number in order to provide triplicate backup capacity, it would STILL be just a drop in the IRS's annual administrative budget. Furthermore, I'll bet that when you backup 89,500 computers, you get a better rate than $59.99+tax per machine. I realize that this is a simplistic solution, and it would be more complex than that to manage, but my point is that it doesn't have to be a big part of the budget to manage. And my next point will prove that it is ALREADY being managed.

I realize this is purely anecdotal, but my wife and I are in a Bible study with three other couples. The wife of one of those other couples is an IRS employee whose job is to audit and investigate the agency's internal processes to make sure that local IRS offices are complying with the department's mandated procedures. When I asked her what her and her coworkers' reactions were to the "lost emails" shenanigans, she said that they found it so preposterous that they had a good laugh over it. She said that the IRS is positively obsessive about backing up its data, and that she and her coworkers ALWAYS backup their emails. To NOT do that is to invite disciplinary actions from one's supervisor. Neither she nor her IRS coworkers find it plausible that the emails were lost, regardless of what might have happened to Lois Lerner's hard drive. In fact, the backup capacity already exists, and they all believe that the law was broken......and that comes from inside the belly of the beast.

[cb1000rider]

Mojo,
I didn't watch them in their entirety.. I watched various clips.

I didn't accuse you of being partisan. For many, this is a huge partisan issue and smacks of huge conspiracy. I don't think that the IRS email retention policy changed during this administration - I don't think it's an Obama cover-up. Losing data on a single computer, that's a little more suspect.

I don't have work emails from 3+ years ago. I'm not hiding anything. I just don't have them and wouldn't elect to keep them myself. If I was a public employee, I might feel differently. I've worked for companies that did government work - and the email retention policy was a *lot* tighter. 6-months. Billion dollar company.

And I agree with you, with a $1.8 Billion dollar budget, with appropriate priority you could solve this problem. You can't solve it for free. And likely I'm not sure that you would chose to solve it unless you had a very good reason to do so (IE - legislation). As I indicated before, it may be a lot easier NOT to have that data around..

Government adopts technology slowly. Government IT (outside of groups like the NSA) runs behind the curve, at least in my experience.

How come I can't vote from my computer yet? The technology exists to prevent fraud. Long term, it'd likely save money... Welcome to the Federal government.

I hope this does spur some legislation, even at the cost of tax dollars. My government should be transparent and accountable.



The Annoyed Man,
You make a great point. You point out how cheap it is to backup to cloud storage. That's how Google does it.. And why I've got years of personal email.
Can you imagine the conspiracy theories that are triggered as soon as they find out that all that IRS data, data on private citizens, is suddenly being pushed to the cloud? Even encrypted... There would be drama.
For sensitive data - and IRS email should be considered sensitive, you need secure data-center storage with physical access controls, etc. It can't be done for what it costs to do Carbonite. And again, it CAN be done.. It's technically plausible, but I'm not sure if it scales exactly like you're implying...

[The Annoyed Man]

The Annoyed Man,
You make a great point. You point out how cheap it is to backup to cloud storage. That's how Google does it.. And why I've got years of personal email.
Can you imagine the conspiracy theories that are triggered as soon as they find out that all that IRS data, data on private citizens, is suddenly being pushed to the cloud? Even encrypted... There would be drama.
For sensitive data - and IRS email should be considered sensitive, you need secure data-center storage with physical access controls, etc. It can't be done for what it costs to do Carbonite. And again, it CAN be done.. It's technically plausible, but I'm not sure if it scales exactly like you're implying...

I agree that data centers are a better answer for this application than cloud storage. But, the U.S. already owns data centers with this capacity. They're just being misused right now because they are under the "ownership" of a different agency......the NSA. But they are really owned by the taxpayers, and all it takes is a president with enough regard for the Constitution to take them away from NSA (because he abolished their unconstitutional activities), and giving them to IRS for the purpose of archiving their communications.

[mojo84]

It would be OK if you did accuse me of being partisan. I know my views are very conservative and I've grown very cynical and skeptical. :)

Keep in mind, the law requires government documents that are deemed "important" are required to be kept indefinitely. The problem is, each employee is to determine what of theirs qualified and they are supposed to print a copy and then it over to the national archive. Pretty much the same way they've been doing it since the founding of the country. They just do it with computers and printers now.

I recommend going to cspan and watching the recordings of the hearings. The crud that is being slung will get your blood to boil.

[ssnstump]

I find this whole "lost email" fiasco a bunch of bull. I have been in IT for 37 years for both private and public entities.
I am currently a DoD IT Specialist. One of my primary duties is data backup.
Regardless if the user creates an archive or PST, the Exchange server information store is backed up every night.
Every message is in that information store. If it was sent or delivered through that Exchange server.
We backup to disk, then an offline backup to tape is secured. This backup also contains data relevant to messages
that have been deleted. Monthly the disk backup is backed up to tape for archive. So every email that passed through
the Exchange server is on the daily disk backup, the tape backup of that disk and the monthly tape backup. Any user mailbox
can be restored from any of these sources. IF the backup software has the correct data agents installed, you can restore an
individual email. The fact that her laptop hard drive "crashed" is irrelevant. Even if she deleted email messages as soon as
she read them, those messages would be retained on the Exchange server and then on the backup and the backup of the backup.
Those same emails would also reside on the sending or receiving email server.
Backup tapes are retained based on a cycle. Monthly tapes are retained for at least one calendar year, then recycled. The backup software
will not allow the overwrite of a tape before it is scheduled to be recycled. The last backup of the year is retained indefinitely.
Some critical DoD and other organizations use mirror sites and ALL data is replicated real time between those sites. Those mirror
sites are also backed up.

Where it is not impossible to have lost data, it would take extraordinary effort and access to make it so.

As for the NSA having copies. They do. They don't take copies from a local computer or server, they capture the data directly from
the internet backbone. Literally every bite of data that is transmitted is copied to a data farm. That includes email and voice.
If it is communication, it is captured and stored. For how long? Only their hairdressers know for sure. What they can do with it?
It would be useless if they didn't have the capability to parse the data and pull out what they wanted...and they have backups also.

[VMI77]

I don't have work emails from 3+ years ago. I'm not hiding anything. I just don't have them and wouldn't elect to keep them myself. If I was a public employee, I might feel differently. I've worked for companies that did government work - and the email retention policy was a *lot* tighter. 6-months. Billion dollar company.

Really? I've got work emails from 20 years ago. I've been with my current company for 14 years and have all my email --the relevant stuff anyway, not SPAM. I have it because sometimes I need to look at what I did 10 years ago and because I might need evidence to show that I did a particular thing, or took a particular position on some element of policy (also we have to keep evidence of everything we've done in order to satisfy regulatory requirements, and there is no time limit). It seems to me that when you're employed at something that may put you in the hot seat, especially if you're in a management position, you'd want to keep evidence that is exculpatory. The reason you wouldn't keep it is because you know it's not. Yeah, if the company got served all of my email would be subject to discovery but then, I don't have anything to hide.

[Abraham]

No, I want to keep what's left of my sanity.

I may even declare a moratorium on ALL news.

I did this for a couple of years once and felt better for it.