The College Fix

Here’s an early nomination for PolitiFact’s 2014 Lie of the Year:

“IRS emails could not be recovered – they’re (insert excuse of the moment) missing … lost … recycled … crashed … scratched … destroyed.”

Nobody buys that. Not for a second. In fact, this week the IRS started backpedaling on the claim because it is so ludicrous.

Earlier this week, The College Fix added to that discourse with a story citing a computer science professor who discounted the IRS claim.

“Frankly, the official IRS reply to the investigators is similar to that of the student whose excuse for a missing assignment is that ‘my dog ate it,’” Furman University computer science professor Thomas Allen said.

Allen said that – in general – for emails to go missing, it would take something far beyond a simple “computer crash.”

“A hard drive crash … may damage directory information so that the [operating system] cannot find the data, but most of the data would still be there,” Allen told The Fix.

Only when new data completely override the old data will information disappear, unless the hard drive itself is physically damaged – say, using a sledgehammer.

He made the comments for a larger piece that quoted several IT professionals who made similar arguments.

College Fix contributor Courtney Such also interviewed Peter Eckersley, Electronic Frontier Foundation technology project director, who said he sees how a large organization could lose data – but that’s not the end of the story.

“In general, emails tend to be stored in at least 2-4 places: the sender’s mail server, the recipient’s mail server, sometimes the sender’s individual computer and the recipient’s individual computer,” and “there should usually be backups taken from some or all of those places,” Eckersley said.

In fact, the story culled comments from technologists, IT professionals and cyber experts who said they are not only unaware of documented instances of schools citing crashed servers or systems in responding to litigation or records’ requests, it’s becoming increasingly hard to credibly make such an excuse.

The International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, which said last month the IRS’s lost-email explanation “does not seem plausible,” told the Justice Department and Congress on Monday what questions they should be asking as the Lerner probe drags on.

If an IT expert performed the “wiping” or destruction of the hard drive, then there should be documentation of the work, the association said Monday: “Until that documentation is provided, the hard drives should be considered lost, not destroyed.” 

I, for one, am eager to see this email lie exposed. Those emails are somewhere in the bowels of the beltway. Either that, or they were destroyed in an attempt to obstruct justice.

Jennifer Kabbany is editor of The College Fix ( @JenniferKabbany )

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