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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

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.

Spooky23 12y ago
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.

Spooky23 12y ago

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.