You use that word “archive,” but I don’t think it means what you think it does.
A couple of things have led me to think about archiving this week. The first is the brouhaha about a crashed hard drive at the IRS, and the IRS claim that all the backups are overwritten after 6 months. When is an email a record? What are the retention policies at the IRS? I lack the motivation and the stamina to examine this question in detail, but for the brave souls that might want to dig deeper, I offer these documents:
- National Archives: Records Control Schedules RG 0058: Internal Revenue Service
- Internal Revenue Manual – 1.15.2 Types of Records and Their Life Cycles
- Internal Revenue Manual – 1.15.6 Managing Electronic Records
There is, of course, the occasional variance between policy and practice in the real world.
The other thing that made me think about archiving is the recent going offline of the Orly Taitz ESQ web site. Naturally, when such a site goes offline for a while, there is something on it needed. The Wayback Machine is a great source to find old web pages, but a fair portion of Orly’s site is not in the Wayback Machine for some reason. The Google Cache captures some things, and some sites, including Orly’s site and this one, get republished by Before It’s News. BIN provides us a copy of Orly’s article that some suggest is the reason her web site has been taken down. Here is the advice of “Attorney Orly Taitz” from the article:
Now there are a lot of lost Mexican children, who wandered into the US territory. Well, it is time for every American to become a good Samaritan and help the lost Mexican children by driving them to the border and taking them to thecustody of Mexican border patrol, so that Mexican border patrol that speaks Spanish, can reunite them with their families in Mexico.
Bizarre! Attorney Taitz is giving advice that could result in anyone who follows it ending up in federal prison.
What hit home for me is that over 700 articles on my own web site are not in the Wayback Machine for some reason. Some missing articles are current, but many date back as early as 2010. Ouch! I have been busy coding software yesterday and today to deal with this problem. What I did was to use the WordPress API to download the URLs of all the posts on this blog into a database. I then used the Wayback Machine API to determine which of them were not in the Wayback Machine archive. I then developed a system for adding them. Right now, I have to push a couple of buttons to scroll to the next missing page and add it. I’ll automate that shortly. I just have to be careful not to add to fast, or I’ll get kicked off as an attacker. A 5-second delay seems to work pretty well.
I’m glad you found that Taitz article; this morning I had copied and posted just a part of it, and later regretted I didn’t have the whole thing to include in a complaint.
This link shows all Taitz articles at Before It’s News.
http://beforeitsnews.com/contributor/pages/24/233/stories.html
I can’t speak for the IRS but generally an e-mail isn’t a record by itself. For me to be ordered to retain e-mail records it usually involves: a regulation that states so (e.g. development of a medical device), an internal investigation, or by court order vetted by our lawyers. And even in all these cases – I would not leave it to the end-user to retain the records. We would grab them without them knowing about it. That assumes that the infrastructure is available to do that – many government agencies (especially local) do not.
According to the IRS documents linked in the article, it looks to me that most emails are records under IRS guidelines. The example it gives of an email that is not a record, is a notice of a staff meeting that can be deleted after the meeting. Anything related to policy, the development of policy or enforcement is definitely a record and those are the kinds of emails being sought in this instance.
Don’t assume that the IRS regulations are the only ones in play: one of my clients is currently unhappy with me because I haven’t been able to spare enough time to bring up an in-house email that they reallyreallyreally want because their lawyers are telling them that they need to archive emails that definitely wouldn’t be relevant to tax matters in order to meet some “government requirement” (FTC, maybe??? They’re a car dealership chain).
Orly’s crack computer expert Chito Papa has the solution for recovering the emails:
We need to get him before the Congressional investigation committee ASAP! 🙄
Amazing! Who knew that government employees used the mail servers of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo?
It would be hilarious to watch Chito Papa testify to something like this. Another one of Taitz’s buffoons.
One thing to keep in mind about the IRS record-keeping regulations is that their rules have been changed in the wake of the phony Tea Party targeting scandal. For example, the Internal Revenue Manual – 1.15.6 Managing Electronic Records this post links to is from March 27, 2014 and contains a section on what to do with email archived on an employee’s hard drive that is not included in the previous version from 2010, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20100528065619/http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-015-006.html
“lost” Mexican children wandering in to American territory?
WTF?
Even for Taitz, that’s stupid. There is a flood of Latin American children coming north, but they aren’t exactly “lost” or “wandering”.
Nor Mexican, for that matter.
They all look alike to certain persons. To certain persons, anything crossing north is a Mexican. They just came from Mexico, right? Hardehar.
The loading of all Obama Conspiracy Theories articles to the Internet Archive has been completed. I’m going to check on static pages next.