The IRS has found the most unreliable hard drives on the market. They all fail at the same time. *UPDATED*

[AndThenThereWas1]

 

 

IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the total number of crash victims to “less than 20,” and also said that the agency does not know if the lost emails are still backed up somewhere. source

 

The new round of computer crash victims includes David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens. source

As investigators attempt to find the emails, the IRS seems to get more hard drive failures. I think the big story here is the hard drives themselves. There needs to be an investigation to find out what brand these unreliable hard drives are. We need the hard drive manufacture to come in an explain why their hard drives are failing so often. We cannot be spending money on hard drives that fail every time someone wants to investigate the contents of the drives. This just wont do.

 

Seriously though, why is no one outrages by there blatant disregard for the law? They are so confident in their lies that they have stopped trying. Anytime congress asks for someones hard drives they just default to: "those hard drives crashed". The US congress is becoming a joke. You know its a problem when even other governmental agencies aren't taking congress seriously.

 

Some statistics:

 

The odds of winning the Florida lottery are 1 in 22,957,480.

 

The odds of winning the Powerball is 1 in 175,223,510.

 

The odds of winning Mega Millions is 1 in 258,890,850.

 

The odds of a disk drive failing in any given month are roughly one in 36. The odds of two different drives failing in the same month are roughly one in 36 squared, or 1 in about 1,300. The odds of three drives failing in the same month is 36 cubed or 1 in 46,656.

 

The odds of seven different drives failing in the same month (like what happened at the IRS when they received a letter asking about emails targeting conservative and pro Israeli groups) is 37 to the 7th power = 1 in 78,664,164,096. (that’s over 78 Billion) In other words, the odds are greater that you will win the Florida Lottery 342 times than having those seven IRS hard drives crashing in the same month.

 

It also doesn’t even mention the fact that these hard drives crashed right after people were demanding to see the emails, making the odds that much more crazy. The fact that so many liberals are buying this hard drive crash lie shows they are either brain-dead or purposefully choose not to care. I can’t decide which is scarier. source

 

And these statistics are only for 7 drives, so what are the chances that nearly 20 drives fail together? The IRS needs to start playing the lottery because with their luck they are sure to win, several times...

 

*Update* As of 7/22/2014

And the truth begins to leak:

 

Camp’s release reported that his investigators had learned that experts informed agency officials that Lerner’s hard drive “was ‘scratched,’ but data was recoverable.” He suggested that this information contradicts an IRS court filing from last week describing the data as “unrecoverable.” Camp also alleged that the IRS – which has an extremely advanced computer forensics program of its own – “refused to utilize outside experts to recover the data,” raising “more questions about potential criminal wrong doing at the IRS.” source

 

Additionally, committee investigators going through the IRS’s internal IT tracking system apparently found one reference to Lerner’s hard drive as being “recovered.” source

 

Despite being out of the public eye recently, Tuesday’s release suggests that the investigation into the targeting of conservative groups by the nation’s tax collector is far from over. In fact, the new accusations were released just hours after reports surfaced suggesting that back-up tapes that might hold Lerner’s correspondence may not have been destroyed on schedule, as the IRS has previously asserted. source

 

“It is these constant delays and late revelations that have forced this investigation to go on so long,” he said. “If the IRS would just come clean and tell Congress and the American people what really happened, we could put an end to this.  Our investigators will not stop until we find the full truth.” source

[CoolBeans]

If they aren't stupid then they will have backups and it should be fine

[BonBon Scott]

Backups are good, backups are great.

[AndThenThereWas1]

If they aren't stupid then they will have backups and it should be fine

Backups have been destroyed, and those that havent may also crash. Remember, these harddrives crash together...

[helping]

This is one of those situations where claiming "idk, I seem to have misplaced them" is the better response, ironically.

[ForsakenLive]

There are stories of people loosing 2-6 hard drives in less than a month. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they don't. I only had 2 hard drives dying on me.

20 Drives can die at the same time if your storage is a huge rack with hundreds of hard drives.

[AndThenThereWas1]

There are stories of people loosing 2-6 hard drives in less than a month. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they don't. I only had 2 hard drives dying on me.

20 Drives can die at the same time if your storage is a huge rack with hundreds of hard drives.

These are all separate hard drives on separate computers in separate locations across the country crashing together. They crashed so hard that their IT guys could not recover any data off of any of the drives and instead of using the backups they destroyed the backups.

[wpirobotbuilder]

This is a very misleading headline.

1. The article says nothing about natural hard drive failure being the cause, only that a number of computers have crashed. I'm pretty sure that computers contain more than just a hard drive.
2. The computers in question allegedly contained evidence for an ongoing congressional investigation. Given the number of downed computers, it might not just be natural hard drive failures.
3. If all the hard drives were ordered at the same time, they probably came from the same shipment, which might have been damaged.

We don't know if there was sabotage, a power surge, or something else that would cause this many computers to die within such a short time period. But it is not a bad brand of hard drives.

 

Stop it.

[Yoinkerman]

They only seem to be failing after they're asked after.  It's more fishy than the atlantic coast circa 1665

[AndThenThereWas1]

This is a very misleading headline.

1. The article says nothing about natural hard drive failure being the cause, only that a number of computers have crashed. I'm pretty sure that computers contain more than just a hard drive.
2. The computers in question allegedly contained evidence for an ongoing congressional investigation. Given the number of downed computers, it might not just be natural hard drive failures.
3. If all the hard drives were ordered at the same time, they probably came from the same shipment, which might have been damaged.

We don't know if there was sabotage, a power surge, or something else that would cause this many computers to die within such a short time period. But it is not a bad brand of hard drives.

 

Stop it.

LOL, i thought i made my sarcasm obvious. This is government corruption. The IRS is destroying evidence to prevent the congressional investigators from finding incriminating evidence of the IRS targeting specific groups. Of course the hard drives didnt actually fail and chances are that these hard drives that "failed" are not even the same manufacturer.

[greener]

Yeah blaming the hdds is absolutely outrageous. There is no way the IRS has been operating without backups all these years.

[Real_PhillBert]

Yeah sure... All those HDD's "Crashed" got it.

 

 

I remember when the governments lies were at least good lies.

[Tygron]

Had a Western Digitan Caviar Black 1TB die on me the day after I installed it into my boyfriends PC. It had been laying around my house a few weeks in the box, not moving because I was too lazy to move my PC out of its spot to install it in mine for a back up. His HDD died so I decided to give him that.

HDD's can die at any time, for any reason.

 

If their drives are actually dying I find this funny. And this is why I say the NSA can't keep all of our data. Not only is a large portion of the place likely (or should be) used for backup, there will be failures, there will be lost information. And they don't have the capacity to store the exponential growth of data from every day. They may one day figure it out. But right now it's not possible.

[Imaginaerum]

Yeah sure... All those HDD's "Crashed" got it.

 

 

I remember when the governments lies were at least good lies.

They need a somewhat believable one to avoid doing their jobs. Oh yeah sure we don't have backups and if we did we didn't organize them so it would take thousands of hours of manpower to sift through it all. Quick let's pick a brand to blame. Which one isn't America? All of them? Then it was Chinese hackers. They did it.

[mr moose]

Typical government corruption, we have similar issues in Australia.  The injustice makes me really mad.

[That Norwegian Guy]

This is idiocy, it's blatantly obvious that someone was afraid of being incriminated for something and sabotaged the hardware.

 

Either that, or human error / willful negligence means they didn't back up the data in the first place, and fabricated this excuse.

[TheProfosist]

If the drives are from the same batch it is not uncommon for them to die right after each other. This is why data centers specifically get different batches, if not even more variation than that.

[ducecake]

No I just think that they say that the HD's "fail" but I really doubt they do. I could be totally wrong but they have backups on backups on backups and they prolly cover a lot of stuff up.

[jmaster299]

If they aren't stupid then they will have backups and it should be fine

Not only that, they are legally required to print out and save a physical copy of all emails, but they ignore that law. They also cancelled their contract with the company providing their data backup services immediately after the HDD's crashed. They ordered that company to destroy all data it had backed up and destroyed all HDDs that "failed".

[Askew]

The stench of bullshit is rife among the thickets of this story.

[fishy]

at least are reliably unreliable if they fail at exact set time