[ExI] he didn't see a thing

[BillK]

On 3 March 2015 at 15:39, spike wrote:
> Astonishing.  According to an affidavit filed by one of the IRS officials
> now under scrutiny, the IT guy who examined Lois Lerner's crashed drive was
> blind.  See Para 14:
>
> http://www.scribd.com/doc/257177361/Blind-Investigator-IRS-Declaration-of-Stephen-Manning
>
> OK then.
> Para 10: the drive was removed and delivered to the IRS Criminal
> Investigation Division Electronics Crime Forensics Lab.
>
> Para 15: they couldn't recover any data, returned the drive to User and
> Network Services.
>
> Para 17: the drive was degaussed.
>
> Para 20: they tossed the drive in a junk bin and now have no way of knowing
> if it was shredded. Note that the affidavit contradicts the testimony of IRS
> chief Koskinen who said the drive was destroyed.
>
> I can imagine they now have the shredder cranked up to redline, grinding
> anything they can get their hands on.
>



Hmmm. I've read the affidavit and it sounds like standard large
company procedure for a failed hard drive.

Basically the technician tried and failed to get the disk working in
another computer so he installed a new hard drive and returned the
fixed laptop and the broken hard drive.

Comments:
If the user (Lerner) has insisted that important information had to be
retrieved and was prepared to bear the cost, then the drive could have
been sent to a specialist data recovery company. But the cost would be
thousands of dollars and is a very unusual request. (That's why users
are told to backup important data). But business networks do daily
backups anyway, so most business users don't bother with their own
backups. For security reasons business users are not supposed to hold
important data on their laptops, as many are lost or stolen.

As the technician demonstrated by just replacing the drive, he didn't
think the user would be much inconvenienced, as all the important data
was held on the network.

As many many techies pointed out originally, a crashed hard drive
doesn't affect the business data storage. Drives crash and laptops get
stolen all the time. Doesn't matter.


BillK