I.R.S. Conspiracy and the White House: Who do you trust?

So the I.R.S. is claiming that they lost all of Lois Lerner’s e-mails for the last two years or so. Any one with a I.T. background would know that a high level government organization like the I.R.S. would and does have redundancy checks in place to protect against losing e-mails or data on their file servers. Any organization, like the I.R.S., with an I.T. department that does not have such checks against data loss is probably filled with incompetent people, in particular the management.

However, I refuse to believe that this is the case, it is my opinion that the I.R.S. is filled with competent I.T. workers that are smart and capable. It is my belief, that the upper management, some members of Congress, including the White House are involved in a conspiracy to keep those e-mails secret. Think about it for one moment. Why would would government officials, in particular publicly elected officials want to hide or discard those e-mails that Lois Lerner sent?

The answers are not hide to find, all we have to do is put two and two together and we will see that it is about keeping the current two party system in power and intimidating conservative groups. Congress requested the e-mails of Lois Lerner, and the I.R.S. from 2009 through 2011, when most of the targeting of the conservative groups were taking place. Now as the public pressure to investigate grew in 2013, Congress began its investigation, along with a White House promise to get to the bottom of this whole fiasco.

Unfortunately, Commissioner Koskinen promised to produce to all of Lois Lerner’s documents, when it came to time to hand in his homework, he failed to produce it. Why? Because to produce the documents in question would have exposed not just the members of Congress, the I.R.S. but would have implicated the White House. So, as a result, President Obama through indirect channels along with members of Congress told certain I.T. employees of the I.R.S. to make unavailable the documents in question.

It sounds crazy, right? Any one in their right minds would believe that a conspiracy such as this would be good for a Saturday Night Live comedy skit, but unfortunately, this is not the case. Remember:

• if the United States government can fabricate an incident like the Gulf of Tonkin which led us straight into a conflict with Viet Nam and learn years later the event was a false flag,
• if the government can fabricate a wild story, that a man in a cave orchestrated most massive conspiracy and attack against the United States, and yet there are so many coincidences that leaves much to the laws of physics being absent on that horrible day
• if the government can fabricate a story that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and come to find out, Saddam Hussein had no WMDs
• if the government can fabricate a story that only two brothers, Tamerlan and Jahar Tsarnaev with a rice cooker orchestrated a conspiracy knowing full well that they were in contact with the agencies of the CIA and FBI
• if the government can fabricate a story, that a boy with asperger syndrome can suddenly become a mass murderer of 26 people

. . . than how can we believe what the government is saying is true? What makes you think the government would not fabricate another story?

Keep in mind, to question government version of events is paramount to being called paranoid, delusional or my favorite term, a conspiracy theorist. They like to call people who question the government narrative crazy, or that the Boogey man is out to get them. However, it is not a conspiracy theory or one isn’t being paranoid when the Boogey man actually does say he is out to get you!

Now back to the I.R.S., their I.T. and those lost e-mails. . .

Why this story continues to be a debate in the mainstream media and general public at large would be a topic appropriate for an investigative report in psychology and not an issue in the respective fields of I.T. or American politics. The average American citizen is not expected to have the technical expertise of complex enterprise e-mail systems or expertise of some one who has been in the I.T. field for the past 20 years. It should be noted that I am not field expert in enterprise I.T. solutions but base my observations for last 20 years from being in the field of I.T. as a programmer, operating systems enthusiast and having to interface / communicate with those involved with file server and e-mail administration.

Most big companies, like say, Adobe, Yahoo!, or Google have I.T. infrastructures with data retention. In other words, these big companies store information, like your emails, photos, documents, etc. on massive hard drives. The same can be said with the I.R.S., Congress, and the White House. These hard drives than are copied, and are backed-up onto other hard drives. Now, to ensure that the e-mail system is not damaged and to ensure continuity, there are secondary hard drives(5 to 10 or even more) connected to the e-mail system. These hard drives are called a R.A.I.D. The word R.A.I.D. stands for “Redundant Array of Inexpensive(or Independent) Disks.” There are different types of R.A.I.D. levels, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll just say RAID. Now if main drive of the e-mail server fails, one of the RAID disks will pick up where the main drive left off. So this prevents the e-mail system from crashing and the data is still intact.

Now, every now and than, the e-mail server will do some house keeping called data backup. During a data back up, the e-mail system will take its current data from the main drive and copy itself to another hard drive. This hard drive that the e-mail is backed up to is than removed and a new blank disk is put in so that when the next scheduled back up occurs, it can put in the new data. Now most organizations use Microsoft Outlook as their client and Microsoft Exchange as their e-mail server. E-mail Servers can have terabytes of data backed up but which are accessible by simply using the e-mail server to get that data back or by using recovery software to retrieve e-mail. Now back ups can go as far back as 5 to 6 years depending on the I.T. infrastructure and resources available. Given that the I.R.S., Congress and White House have funds available courtesy of the American tax-payer to meet this kind of I.T. demand, the odds of them having e-mail back ups from the Bush, Sr. and Clinton days, odds are they have the e-mails of Lois Lerner and those involved in the conspiracy.

Now for the interesting part! If the White House, and I.R.S. use the software I think they use, also known as Microsoft products, on every PC that uses Microsoft Outlook, the email client, their exists a file called a PST file which holds also the emails that the user has sent, received or is in draft format. This file can grown very fast or very slow depending on the e-mail activity and my intuition tells me Lois Lerner, some members of Congress and the White House were extremely busy e-mailing each other over who to target. Now keep in mind, this communication could occur over other channels as well such as encrypted instant messages but for the sake discussion, lets concentrate on the e-mail client.

So an I.T. administrator could go into the e-mail server, either by using the interface or write a piece of programming code to literally go into hard disk and remove the e-mails in question of that user. By doing that, you erase the e-mails, however, there remains a problem: the back-ups! This would mean, that the I.R.S., and their co-conspiractors would have had to go into the data back-ups and do the exact same thing. Keep in mind, these data back-ups can range from gigabytes of data to terabytes of data. They would have to do this to also to those involved, such as the members of Congress that are involved to members of the White House. Odds are, they replaced those data drives with modified data which excludes mysteriously the incriminating evidence of Lois Lerner which could be just scrambled data. Another problem is that the e-mail keeps a log of all the activity, so we could pretty find out who e-mailed who, at what time and day. It won’t have the contents of the e-mail but you would get an idea of the activity.

So if I was looking something, I would start at the log level. Look at the data logs of the e-mail activity, and work your way backwards by subpoenaing the e-mails of those that e-mailed Lois Lerner, certainly their e-mails haven’t been damaged, and if they mysteriously are, than you know they deliberately deleted them. If they did, just go to the e-mail back-ups and that should have the answers.

Hopefully this gives you a small idea of how e-mail systems work, while I am not an expert by any means in e-mail servers or their administration, however, I have been dealing with people in the I.T. industry for 20 years who handle e-mail servers and data retention. So every now and than over the past 20 years, I have had to collaborate with them and learn how e-mail systems work because of projects I have had to do at work. So I would hope and think my experience is worth something, I hope. I would urge any one in the I.T. field, please fact check what I said, and if I am wrong, fine, feel free to mock me at my expense.

Oh yeah, one more thing, should this blog post “mysteriously” disappear, don’t worry, I have back ups and will be posted in different websites and locations!

A Little About Me:

Programmer since 1996: Java, PHP C, C++, JavaScript, VB, BASIC, PERL, bsh

Proficient in Linux/UNIX, MS Windows, OS X, VAX/VMS

Database Proficiency: mySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server

Proficient in MS Outlook, Thunderbird and most software used in enterprise level organizations