Over at Fox News [Insider] it looks like Judge Andrew Napolitano and I arrived at the same conclusion, the IRS has willfully destroyed evidence. As an old IT guy I can confidently say that a disk drive crash will not delete emails stored in an Outlook/Exchange mail system. That leaves us with one possibility. Someone in the IRS deleted them. The rules for deleting emails were set up after the Iran Contra affair and require written permission from the archivist. For all practical purposes government emails are never legally deleted. If someone in the IRS deleted the emails then we have a federal crime. If the Administration believes that there is not a smidgen of corruption then the FBI should start an investigation immediately into the tampering with evidence crime and let the issue be decided in a non-partisan court. I am not sure we can restore the public’s respect for the IRS in my lifetime but this is a good first step on a long road.
Author: bill
Just Because Stuff Happens Does Not Change The Fact That Lois #Lerner Probably Deleted Her Emails To Hide Her Tracks
The missing Lois Lerner emails is a hot subject. There are over 900 comments on the Washington Examiner article, Lois Lerner on IRS hard drive crash: ‘Sometimes stuff just happens’ . Obviously there are a lot of people annoyed with this excuse. The idea that the emails were lost in a disk drive crash rankles me so I joined the fray. I can understand where she may not have lost some of her Word or Excel documents but not her emails. Here is what I said:
To an old IT guy like me, recovering files is a completely different problem than recovering emails. It is my understanding that the IRS uses Outlook with Exchange servers as their email system. When you install Outlook on a new drive it creates a new copy of your mailbox with all of your emails. I literally have done this dozens of times. If she is missing files then we are probably talking about Excel and Word documents that were not emailed, saved on the server, or backed up by some other means. If there are missing emails in her mailbox then she deliberately deleted them and the IRS will have to find copies of them in the backups and archives.
Eventually the IRS and the Administration are going to have a Nixon moment in which they figure out that the cover-up is having bigger political repercussions than the original crime.
If Lois Lerner’s Emails Are Missing We Have To Conclude That She Deliberately Deleted Them To Avoid Prosecution
As an old IT guy I am slightly amused with the unfolding Lerner email scandal since I thought we had fixed these problems in the last century and the Inspector General did not catch this. Not surprisingly a PJMedia post has a former IRS IT specialist conveying doubt on this scenario. He confirms my guess that the IRS is using Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange for email and that they have followed the generally accepted business practices for backing up and archiving the emails. For almost a decade I supported Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange at our business so I have to conclude that if the emails are missing from her copy of Outlook then she deliberately deleted them to avoid prosecution. If they are missing from the backups and archives, she had help from someone in the IT department.
Here is what the former IRS IT specialist said in the post at PJMedia.
First, he points to the United States Code for government record retention. That code, 44 U.S.C. Chapter 33, governs what a government record is and requires that agencies must notify the Archivist of any records that are destroyed and the reasons for destroying them. The code was put into place after Iran-Contra to keep government workers and contractors from deleting records.
Section § 3309 states that records “pertaining to claims and demands by or against the Government of the United States or to accounts in which the Government of the United States is concerned, either as debtor or creditor, may not be disposed of by the head of an agency under authorization granted under this chapter, until the claims, demands, and accounts have been settled and adjusted in the General Accounting Office, except upon the written approval of the Comptroller General of the United States.”
“These environments were required by federal regulations to be redundant and recoverable,” the former IRS IT worker says. “The recoverability requirements were put into place for exactly the reasons we see today.” Disposal of records outside the statutory standards requires permission in writing.
He says that the IRS uses Microsoft Outlook/Exchange systems, which are backed up using Symantec NetBackup.
He also says that “the IRS is the cash cow of the federal government. When they ask for funding for anything it was granted without discussion.”
In the case of the prime contract and record retention, “The IRS IT projects were fully funded and never lacked for resources. To state ‘Backup tapes were reused after some short period’ is a complete joke. The IRS had thousands and thousands of tapes and ‘Virtual Tape Libraries’ (VTL or non-tape backups based on hard drive storage technologies). There was never a reason to reuse tapes.”
Indeed, the U.S. government has been getting out of the tape backup regime for years. The former IRS IT worker points to this ExaGrid document from 2011. In the document, ExaGrid discusses its work with the federal government to eliminate tape backups in favor of faster and more secure record retention systems.
ExaGrid specializes in disk-based records retention systems.
The former IRS IT worker adds that in his time on the prime contract, “I have worked for many federal agencies and the IRS had some of the best people.”
“This reason is why I scoff at the story being put out. Those folks would not have had such a short retention period for email unless they had it in writing from the highest levels. It would have made the local IT water cooler gossip if the IRS had screwed up and lost tons of email by accident.”
Yet the IRS claims that it lost the emails a year ago, and is only now telling congressional investigators.
What Did The Inspector General’s Report On The IRS Say About The Missing Lerner Emails?
The IRS reported on Friday that they “lost” former IRS manager Lois Lerner’s emails to and from other IRS employees sent between January of 2009 and April of 2011 due to a ‘computer crash’. This revelation bothers me on multiple levels. As an old IT guy the idea that an executive can lose emails due to a local disk drive failure in this century is mind boggling since we solved that problem in the last century. Since the court system has shown no tolerance for this type of criminal neglect by publicly traded businesses, I wonder what the courts and the Inspector General will say about this practice. It is hard for me to believe that this practice would not raise an audit flag on the Inspector General’s report.
Cliff Notes for Lindzen Lecture at EIKE
Yesterday I watched the Dr. Richard Lindzen lecture at EIKE in Germany on Models vs. Measurements in April 2014. The folks at Watts Up With That had posted the lecture link at their site. The lecture, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jOD4CK8MSM, primarily addresses these questions.
- What is the sensitivity of global mean temperature to increases in greenhouse gases?
- What, if any, connection is there between weather events and global mean temperature anomaly?
- Is our understanding of the greenhouse effect adequate?
- How relevant is the simplistic notion of global mean radiative imbalance driving global mean temperature to actual climate change?
His first point is that he does not quibble with the question that global warming exists but he does take exception with the quantitative estimates of global warming changes. He goes on to show that the change in temperature due to doubling of CO2 in the models is very dependent on your assumptions for aerosols.
His second point is that when we look at the radiative forcing effects due to anthropogenic emissions and volcanoes we see a climate system that responds to these events in a manner that is less sensitive manner than what is being used in the climate models. The volcano data implies effects due to doubling of CO2 is closer to 0.75~1.0 C.
He next goes on to discuss the natural variability of introduced by the oscillations in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and argues that their effects are at least comparable in magnitude to AGW.
He finishes up his lecture with a short discussion that despite what the press says the IPCC reports do not attribute extreme weather to global warming. He reminds everyone that extreme weather depends on the temperature difference between the tropics and the high latitudes. In a warmer world, this difference is expected to decrease not increase.
LOL… The #IRS Says It Lost Key #Lerner Emails?
As an old IT guy this excuse has me laughing out loud! 😆 The most common corporate email system, Exchange, is host based. Some businesses and government agencies have switched to Gmail and it is host based, too. In all of my years in the IT business I have never run across an email system that was susceptible to a local disk drive failure. This makes no sense! Why would anyone put in a system that stupid? This would require a level of incompetence I have trouble imagining.
Broad Policy Failure… “Watching the administration is like watching a cross between Keystone Cops and amateur hour”
On the eve of what looks like Iraq’s demise, I think the case for a broad foreign policy failure by the Administration has been made. It is all over except for the shouting when a former Defense official says,
"The bottom line," the official added. "Watching the administration is like watching a cross between Keystone Cops and amateur hour."
Benghazi was the tip of the ice berg where we should have learned our lesson. Instead we get the same story being played out in Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq. With great power comes great responsibility and we walked away.
Clean Power By The Numbers
I am skeptical about climate models since most of the models have proven to be terrible at predicting anything. I have to admire the chutzpah of the EPA for advocating new regulations while ignoring the IPCC forecasting problem. This irony was not lost on the folks over at Watts Up With That who wrote, EPA leaves out the most vital number in their fact sheet, and are more than willing to provide the “temperature change avoided” metric. It is hard for me to imagine how we can plan our work and work our plan without using the temperature change metric as one of our key goals. The problem is that it is only 0.018°C and considering our measurement error this would make this goal indistinguishable from zero. In the annals of government failure this is one of those times where we achieved our objective before we have even started and are still going ahead with the plan.
The EPA highlighted what the plan would achieve in their “By the Numbers” Fact Sheet that accompanied their big announcement.
For some reason, they left off their Fact Sheet how much climate change would be averted by the plan. Seems like a strange omission since, after all, without the threat of climate change, there would be no one thinking about the forced abridgement of our primary source of power production in the first place, and the Administration’s new emissions restriction scheme wouldn’t even be a gleam in this or any other president’s eye.
But no worries. What the EPA left out, we’ll fill in.
Using a simple, publically-available, climate model emulator called MAGICC that was in part developed through support of the EPA, we ran the numbers as to how much future temperature rise would be averted by a complete adoption and adherence to the EPA’s new carbon dioxide restrictions*.
The answer? Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100.
0.018°C to be exact.
We’re not even sure how to put such a small number into practical terms, because, basically, the number is so small as to be undetectable.
@DaveRamsey, What advice would you have given a dead-broke Hillary Clinton if she called your show in 2001?
This is a somewhat humorous question for Dave Ramsey.
- Do you think the Clinton’s made a written budget?
- Did you think the Clinton’s considered selling one of their houses?
- What do you think of the Clinton strategy of getting gazelle intense about increasing their income rather than cutting costs and working the debt snowball?
- What can the average Financial Peace University attendee draw from the Clinton experience?
Would You Believe It Has Gotten Colder Over The Last Ten Years?
This weekend I was reading the Watts Up With That article, NOAA shows ‘the pause’ in the U.S. surface temperature record over nearly a decade, and thought that the graph of the data from the U.S. Climate Reference Network sure looked like a decline. Since my anecdotal experience is that the recent winters are colder than 2004 I was curious what the data would say. Is this one of those rare cases where anecdotal weather information has started to match climate data? So I went over to the NOAA page, downloaded the data, and ran it through R to create graphs of the average, maximum, and minimum temperature anomalies. When we are talking about weather data it is the high and low temperatures of the day that are reported in weather reports. I am still looking for that brave weather forecaster to include the average temperature for the day. For a person who was already inclined to believe that it has gotten colder, it was not surprising that the slope for minimum temperature anomaly showed the greatest decline. All three graphs show a decline and the maximum anomaly showed the least decline. Since most people are sensitive to maximum temperatures during the summer and minimum temperatures during the winter it explains to me why I think the winters have gotten colder. Without further adieu here are the graphs.
