That they were caught using the Infernal Revenuer Stasi as a weapon is certainly not new. When Bill and Hillary Clinton got caught at it they first moved it off the headlines by bombing Kosovo. When that didn’t work quite well enough, they created a titillation circus that did work.
Different with this administration, their hideout is loss of all relevant data with hard drive crashes! The IRS told Congress it lost more than two years of emails from Lois Lerner, the former IRS official in charge of tax exempt organizations.
I was a USAF computer operator in 1970. Even then computer data of lowly shipping manifests was backed up on site and with redundant backup in an offsite bunker. Everything the government did was backed up. If we lose our e-mails, some high school geek down the street can get them back for us. Most of us are fairly sure the NSA has multiple backups of our e-mails if they were really important.
Yet we are supposed to believe the IRS CANNOT produce the relevant data that Congress is lawfully demanding. Not just one, which would be a stretch by itself, but ALL of them! Oceanfront property in Nebraska anyone?
They must be finding it hilarious that they are getting away with it. Heck, they locked Martha Stuart up for lying to the FBI, but have the chutzpa to lay this lyin’ line on the whole world.
Heck, it worked so dang good they used it again right away.
Congress is investigating the use of the EPA as a weapon of mass destruction… bribes, insider crap and such. But, shock of all shocks, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy testified to Representative Darrell Issa’s committee that some emails may have been lost related to a decision blocking a proposed mining operation in Alaska.“Oh silly us… We can crack nearly any encryption algorithm on Earth, but somehow these e-mails got corrupted beyond recovery.”
On a roll now, our unfettered rulers don’t even bother changing from “the dog ate my homework” after using it every day for the first 10 weeks of school.
The head of the Feral Erections Committee got caught campaigning to resurrect her current boss for a second term… on company time with resources belonging to the people of this once-upon-a-time free country.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Monday made yet another request to the federal government for details about a crashed hard drive that may have contained information allowing criminal charges to be brought against a federal official.
Issa’s newest letter concerns the hard drive of April Sands, a former employee at the Federal Election Commission who resigned in the spring after admitting to violations of the Hatch Act. That law puts restrictions on the ability of government officials to conduct political activities while on the job, or from government offices.
Issa noted that while Sands admitted to violating the law, the FEC just recently told Congress that it could not recover her hard drive, which made it impossible to seek criminal charges against her.
Where would you be if you “admitted to violating the law”? She’s sucking at the public tit anyway, she might as well eat in a federal chow hall, sleep in a federal bed and be protected by federal corrections officers.
However, the bigger picture that formed in my mind was the general incompetence of federal officials to operate computers. They seem to lose data any time retention seems important.
Just as I’m thinking it is time they go back to typewriters and
carbon paper, the Germans are contemplating that very thing.
Last year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to U.S. National Security Agency surveillance in Germany, including her own cellphone.
To add to German distrust of the United States, a man who reportedly worked for Germany’s intelligence agency was arrested this month for allegedly selling documents to the United States.
Germany would not be the first country to turn to less sophisticated technology in countersurveillance efforts. . Last year, Russia’s Federal Guard Service decided to use more typewriters and paper documents after Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified NSA documents.
At the time, Nikolai Kovalev, the former head of the Federal Security Service, told Russian newspaper Izvestia, “Any information can be taken from computers. … So from the point of view of keeping secrets, the most primitive method is preferred: a human hand with a pen or a typewriter.”