Lois Lerner’s emails are back from the dead – sort of. The former IRS official’s BlackBerry, however, is still long gone. The IRS intentionally destroyed it in June 2012 (after congressional staffers interviewed Lerner about the IRS targeting conservative groups) as the Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel acknowledged in a recent sworn declaration.
We’ve all met someone we just don’t trust but don’t know why. There’s often a pretty good reason to feel that way.
Has someone ever made an insincere attempt to flatter you? Their words might be complimentary, but their body language, tone, and/or context let you know the compliment is phony. Does this guy really think I’m that stupid?
So, up goes your trust wall. If he’ll lie about this, he’ll lie about anything.
The IRS debacle is a prime example of why we build trust walls. The emails Congress requested had (supposedly) been deleted when several hard drives crashed. I asked my colleague Alex Daley (our in-house technology guru) what the probability was of that happening. Here’s what he had to say:
Everyone who ever owned a computer knows that hard drives are finicky beasts. In fact, Google uses a LOT of hard drives and so they have published all kinds of research on their failure rates. The gist: there’s about a 1 in 36 chance a hard drive fails in any given month. The math says then that if the IRS was practicing good data center management practices – we have to assume, however silly it might seem, that the agency responsible for holding the most personal information on American citizens outside the NSA is following best practices – then the chance of seven hard drives failing at the same time and wiping out the data on them is about 1 in 78 billion.
This post was published at GoldSeek on 2 September 2014.
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