Hacker News Reader

Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a company that sold EMC products. one of those was an email product that made sure companies captured ALL emails for ETERNITY. these were mainly banks, where (pardon my spelling) sarbanes oxley required banks to keep them (always and forever). emails from say exchange would be copied before it went to their in box, stored on disk and also immediately stored to optical media, which would also automatically be copied. not getting into the other parts that prevented emails from being lost,

I havent worked at that job since 2007. I find it unbelievable that any major government organization such as the IRS does not make sure ALL emails are never lost.

edit: the fact that they lost emails is a huge scandal in its own right IMO

View on HN

The official party line from Koskinen's testimony this week is that IRS staff members are individually responsible for determining what email is "official" IRS correspondence, then...I shit you not...printing hardcopies of those emails and filing them into physical file cabinets. All other email is subject to a capacity quota, and staff members are instructed to rotate out the email sitting on the servers to free up space when needed, rotating the old email into PSTs on their IRS-issued laptops/desktops (they use Exchange/Outlook).

I would be interested to find out what the email lossage rate is for IRS staff. Not just the 6-8 individual members identified in relation to the Lerner issue, but across the entire organization (even more interesting would be a statistical analysis of the Lerner Group's lossage rate compared to the organization-wide rate).

The NSA has proven the Federal Government has the wherewithal to record everything. I'd like to see what the arguments are against Congress mandating that all forms of communication (snail mail, email, voice comms, telex, etc.) at all Federal agencies for all Federal employees are continuously e-vaulted.

It's probably true. Most of the government is busy moving to cloud email, but the IRS's IT security bible -- Pub 1075 is too prescriptive and narrowly focused (it includes mandates for things like rack door locks) to allow that to happen. So they are probably stuck paying some contractor $50/GB for SAN disk to run mail.

After the South Carolina Tax Department was owned, lack of encryption was the main technical issue, so encrypting "all of the things" is probably their main focus.

As a government employee, records management is a shitshow. There's a 50 page schedule of documents with prescriptive retention periods -- but these are intended for the "record copy" only. An email itself isn't a document. Employees either squirrel away everything or toss everything... The higher up you go, the more you toss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com