The curious case of the physical damage to it:
TIGTA’s testimony states that the laptop as a whole appeared undamaged. When Lerner’s laptop was first inspected by both an assigned IT specialist and Hewlett Packard contractor they both stated that “they did not note any visible damage to the laptop computer itself.”
The testimony does not speculate how the hard drive was “scored” while the computer itself remained visibly undamaged. However, given these facts it seems logical to question what — or who — caused the damage to the hard drive.
Hey, “accidents” will happen.
Circular scoring on the platter sounds like a head crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash
Back in the day, disk platters showing concentric scrapes from head crashes were often preserved as trophies on the office walls of sysadmins.
No need to disassemble the laptop to damage it – just a few hard impacts while the disk was spining.
Yeah, that’s not a smoking gun. The read-write head of the hard drive is floating just a hair above that disk while it spins at 5400+ RPM; one good whack at the wrong time or just a mechanical failure and it plows into that spinning platter like a phonograph needle with a finger pushing down (probably possible to recover much of the data with specialist tools but a real PITA). Disk was almost certainly running when it broke.
Except that modern drives are supposed to be able to withstand a certain level of shock without the head plowing into the platter.
FWIW, in my experience hard drives have different failure sensitivities. Most are fairly robust at side-to-side (along the plane of the disk) shock, but much, much less so at vertical (perpendicular to the plane of the disk) shock. I’ve measured commercially available drives that cannot handle much better than 0.3G (point 3 G) of random shock in the vertical before suffering from what I term “soft failures” (ie. drive goes off line but is recoverable by reboot). The testing I was doing was non-destructive so we didn’t drive it all the way to a head crash. But if 0.3G is any indication, a simple drop to a hard surface from say a height of 3 feet or more would not seem implausible to cause a head crash, IMO. But that’s says nothing about intent…
Shaken Baby Syndrome as applied to laptops, it would seem. One would think that there would be tell-tale signs on other components within the system, but the platters are definitely the most susceptible to such damage, and everything else internally should be able to survive.
If all laptops had g-force sensors that automatically parked read heads, it would be much harder to do this without some other sign of damage or intrusion into the case. Alas, most laptops don’t do this anymore. I suppose the manufacturers rely on SSDs to mitigate drop damage these days.
All these ‘my emails are gone because the laptop died’ stories are total BS.
I don’t know of one, single, solitary browser / e-mail system where the ONLY copy is on the users computer. Hell, Hillary is bragging about ‘my server this, my server that, my server something else’, then goes right into saying, the emails are gone because the computer died…
Total BS, and what hacks me off is that not ONE of the idgets in Congress has acted like they knew a Computer Specialist to throw the BS Flag on this stuff.
Here’s the ultimate question IMO.
If a 14 y/o, CAN’T send an email with snapshot of their crotch then delete and kill it, or a coed can’t delete the emails with video of herself drunk at Spring Break in Cabo, THEN how the HELL are Lois and Hillary doing so?!!
I don’t know of one, single, solitary browser / e-mail system where the ONLY copy is on the users computer.
This has been gone over ad nauseam. The IRS’s MS Exchange servers were perennially running out of disk space, so employees were instructed to move mail to their desktop hard drives. The desktop hard drives (unlike the mail server drives) weren’t automatically backed up. This setup was an invitation to data loss.
There still could be multiple copies of any individual message — e.g. one kept by the sender, and one kept by each recipient — and that’s why most of the messages from Lerner’s hard drive were found in other employees’ mailboxes (either on the server or their desktops). But out of tens of thousands of emails over a two year period, it isn’t surprising that some of them weren’t in any IRS mailboxes other than the one on Lerner’s hard drive. Some might have been deleted by all their other IRS employee senders/recipients. Some might have been exclusively to or from non-IRS employees.
It’s easy to find cases of email messages that seemingly can’t be deleted, as much as the sender or recipient might wish they could. But it’s a leap to go from that to believing that every single email message ever sent can be recovered if you try hard enough.
“But it’s a leap to go from that to believing that every single email message ever sent ….”
Typical moronic straw-man:
“….every single email message ever sent…”
^^^^^^^^^^
And of course as we have seen, there were backups to be easily had if the administration’s lackeys expended about 30 seconds trying. Or avoided destruction of the devices *after* they were ordered to preserve them.
Not to mention the fact that the email recipients most likely have a copy…….
Jim – you are dismissed.
The IRS’s MS Exchange servers were perennially running out of disk space, so employees were instructed to move mail to their desktop hard drives.
They had plenty of money to spend on Star Trek spoofs. Mismanagement is not an excuse for any business to violate law, and the IRS forces businesses to retain lots of information.
Indeed. If they did not back up their emails, they are in violation of the Federal Records Act.
http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/email-mgmt.html
Jim, are you telling us the IRS broke the law?
The Federal Records Act requires the IRS to archive (not simply “back up”) any documents that qualify as federal records. The IRS (dating back to before Obama’s administration) says that it complies with the law with regard to emails by telling all employees to print out and archive any emails that are federal records. As far as I know other federal offices have similar policies. I don’t know whether anyone has identified specific emails that Lerner should have, but didn’t, print out and archive. I’m not aware of anyone in any part of the federal government ever being prosecuted for failing to print out and archive an email that should have been considered a federal record, before or after Obama took office.
Let’s see if I have this straight.
The IRS can’t afford to keep all of its official records electronically, because hard disks are expensive. So, it tells employees to make printed copies, because paper and ink are cheap.
And only a small fraction of IRS emails are Federal records. The bulk are personal emails, sent and received on government time, using government resources (those very expensive hard disks).
Did I miss anything, Jim?
So are you agreeing with me, or just hair splitting?
Jon, Jim is just rubbing it your face that the Obama administration is getting away with this.
” I don’t know whether anyone has identified specific emails that Lerner should have, but didn’t, print out and archive.”
Pretty hard to do when they were destroyed. Jim likes to say, “show me the emails” when he knows full well they were destroyed. Just like in the above quote where he thinks people without access to the email system, that was destroyed, can produce emails that were left out.
Okay, guys, I think you’re grasping at straws here, because you’re ignoring the most likely (and innocent) explanation;
The hard drive shows impact damage but the laptop does not because the HD wasn’t in the laptop when the impact damage occurred. The innocent explanation as to how that happened is, while nobody was in the room, the hard drive simply managed to fall out and strike the floor several times, and then, as such things are wont to do, fell back in and reattached it’s own cover plate.
See? Nothing suspicious here. Not at all.
This setup was an invitation to data loss.
Wrong again Jim.
One of the purposes of backup is because of limited space. Backups are done before any data is removed to make space. If this SOP is not followed it is because of nefarious intent (not stupidity because the SOP is so ingrained.)
Head crashes do not eliminate hardly any data (because the head is typically not over data when it crashes.) Retrieving the data requires experts, but that’s not a big deal unless you do more intentionally to keep the damaged drive away from those that can recover the data.
One of the purposes of backup is because of limited space
No, the term for that is archiving. The IRS’s server backup system wasn’t designed to save space, it was only designed to allow recovery after disk failures. The IRS had no desktop backup system. The IRS’s only archiving system was a policy that directed employees to print out any emails considered federal records.
Retrieving the data requires experts, but that’s not a big deal unless you do more intentionally to keep the damaged drive away from those that can recover the data.
According to contemporaneous accounts Lerner wanted her data back, so she gave her drive to the IRS’s in-house forensics experts, but they were unable to recover anything. That’s surprising to me, but there’s no reason to think that the forensic techs are lying under oath, and no reason to think Lerner had the expertise required to make the data unrecoverable.
Who cares? The administration repeatedly lied to the courts, congress, and the public. So have you.
The Obama administration persecuted dissidents while treating Democrats groups with favoritism. They coordinated efforts to speak in code so that key words wouldn’t come up in searches. Advised conspirators to use communications channels that didn’t retain communications in order to prevent disclosure of the criminal activity. They destroyed evidence. They ignored court orders to produce evidence. They lied about whether or not their were back ups then whether or not they were searched. And on and on.
Obama deserves to be in jail along with every Democrat government worker who participated in this pogrom against dissidents.
Who cares?
Clearly you don’t. Where Democrats are concerned you believe in Red Queen justice: sentence first, verdict after.
Its a cover up and a corrupt DOJ is facilitating it. Don’t shit on me and tell me its raining.
Word games, Jim? An archive is a backup.
The only expertise she would need is the ability to run a simple free utility program that repeatedly overwrites her data (even some of that can be recovered by some experts.)
That some forensic ‘experts’ can’t recover data that can be recovered doesn’t surprise me.
An archive is a backup.
But a backup is not an archive. Archives are designed to be kept indefinitely. The point of archiving something is to preserve it whether or not you delete the original. Backups are designed to be temporary. The point of a backup is to let you get your data back immediately after a data loss. The IRS, like many organizations, didn’t keep backup tapes forever — they recycled them. The system was designed to let them restore the system to its state before a catastrophe, not restore any data that had ever been on the system.
The only expertise she would need is the ability to run a simple free utility program that repeatedly overwrites her data (even some of that can be recovered by some experts.)
You’re suggesting that Lerner did that, made up the story of her disk failing, and then took the risky step of asking for data to be recovered (counting on her ability to fool the forensics techs), just to make her story more credible? And she did all that, bringing even more attention to what might have been in her emails, rather than just deleting the emails she was trying to hide? Lerner’s story is more plausible, especially considering how many other IRS employees had similar hardware failures.
Destruction of evidence is every reason to believe they were all lying under oath. In any trial where it surfaces that one side has destroyed evidence, judges consider that to mean that the evidence would have proven the case of the other party (otherwise, there is no reason to destroy the evidence).
Lerner is a criminal. Koskinen and many others at the top of the IRS should be charged under RICO.
Also, fuck you Jim, you lying hack.