By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--July 22, 2014
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Days after IRS officials said in a sworn statement that former top agency employee Lois G. Lerner’s computer memory had been wiped clean, the agency put out word to contractors Monday that it needs help to destroy at least another 3,200 hard drives.Now, as the Times points out, this is a routine part of operations at the IRS. They collect vast amounts of data on virtually every American, and at some point they are required to destroy it. However, at a time when they're being investigated for the elimination of their own incriminating evidence, this just reeks of the worst kind of self-serving corruption. Shouldn't someone within the agency - again assuming that this is just business-as-usual - have said "hey guys, maybe now's not the time?" Wasn't there anyone working for this entirely-innocent-and-not-at-all-crooked federal department who stood up and said "we'd better be careful how we word this?"
“After all media are destroyed, they must not be capable of any reuse or information retrieval,” IRS officials stated in the contract papers. ....The agency estimates the need to destroy at least 65,464 magnetic tapes, 3,225 hard drives, 5,856 floppy disks and 708 reels, according to procurement records. About 500,000 pieces of electronic data — including cassette tapes, reels, CDs, hard drives and USB media — have been collected since 2008, according to the IRS solicitation. “Due to system changes, a significant amount of electronic portable media containing [personally identifiable information] and potentially sensitive but unclassified data such as taxpayer return information is being collected at IRS facilities and locked in secure storage areas awaiting destruction,” officials wrote in a statement of work attached to the solicitation."See? System changes. They're doing it to protect the people they serve. They're very worried about your privacy, and they don't want to do anything that could possibly invade your personal space. You should be thanking them, not suspecting them of wrongdoing. We're sure that there's no way any incriminating communications would ever end up in this massive pile of stuff that they're sending off to be "recycled."
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