Nope. DOJ goes straight to the carrier and gets the texts. DHS will order SS to comply or be fired, then jailed.
I hope you’re right, and quickly.
And of course, a lot of organizations have rules or even laws against destroying documents, except under carefully prescribed procedures, even if the documents are in fact totally innocuous. These rules and laws exist precisely to stop situations like this, so even if a court doesn’t have enough evidence to find that the destruction was deliberate, they can still charge the perpetrators for the document destruction itself.
These two sentences together make no sense to me - if DOJ gets the messages from the carrier(s), why would SS need to comply with anything? DOJ already has the info at that point.
You give them the option to do what they are ordered to do. That way you can cleanly fire their asses when they don’t. Gives you the perfect excuse and one that no-one can argue. Might even give you a way to deny any pension money they might have coming as well. In the meantime, DOJ takes the direct route.
Please produce the texts that I already have via a court order or get fired? Really?
No “please” involved. You need an ironclad reason to terminate everybody involved, and letting them refuse to follow direct orders gives you that.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but In my opinion there is a 0% chance any phone carrier has these messages. Government issued secure phones are typically very locked down (camera disabled, gps disabled, no non-approved apps installed, etc). They also are setup to have all data encrypted both in storage and in transmission. The text messages in question are almost certainly not your regular old SMS messages, but encrypted messages on a DHS system. That’s not even really state of the art, any two iPhones sending messages between them are encrypting things to a level that it would be impossible to intercept. I don’t have specific knowledge of the Secret Service’s cell phone security, but I would be shocked if it were WORSE than that of your average government employee.
I think the only way these texts might be recovered is the messages are saved on some government server, and if the phones were wiped by an incompetent boob who didn’t have access to the backups.
Does this mean you’re saving copies of all the SPAM you got for 7 years?
Agreed.
But I’m also unconvinced that even if they were POTM (Plain Ol’ Text Messages), the carrier would store the content. Metadata, yes; content, doubtful. And https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/2016/06/02/cell-phone-forensics-powerful-tools-wielded-by-federal-investigators/ supports my belief, FWIW.
Archiving my messages without my consent is not legally substantively different from recording my calls without my consent, I suspect.
Text messaging inherently can’t work without the texts being stored by the phone company. And even if the texts were encrypted, they were encrypted to be read by government-owned devices: If the phone company kept the ciphertext, then the authorities can confiscate the phones involved and decrypt them.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised, though, if most of the messages had no security at all. After all, Trump’s own phone didn’t.
Wait, are we sure they used actual SMS text messaging and not some web-based service like Messenger or WhatsApp?
Almost certainly doesn’t have to think about it either way.
Any organization of any size will have servers where any emails sent or received will be kept. Even as a regular corporate drone, if I hit ‘delete’ on my entire inbox, any emails I have sent or received for the last several years are recoverable.
I know I’m just an avatar on the internet, but I was one of the defense attorneys on a felony murder case where we received the results of a search warrant that included the specific text messages that were being sent (along with the time and what number they were sent to). So I know it’s possible for typical text messages to be retrieved.
(The case was one where my client had sent some people to rob a guy. One of the robbers killed the victim - he shot him as soon as he opened the door. My guy was accused of being part of the plot because he was busy texting the guy who got robbed right before to make sure he was home, and also texting the robbers)
ETA: I should add that none of these texts were deleted. I’m not sure if that would matter. But the communications came from phone company records obtained directly from the phone company.
Store-and-forward is not the same as long-term storage.
I know I am. I have an archive of 20 years of spam, on which I do occasional analysis. But I have an, um, interesting email setup, using a domain with a global forwarder.
There’s deleting and then there’s deleting. When I click on an email and hit the delete key, I’m just changing which folder it’s stored in.
Is it also possible that the encrypted texts still exist on a server, somewhere, and that the phones the agents have carry the decryption app/algorithm ?
I have no idea how this kind of secure messaging works.
At all my corporate jobs I was required to save all documents for 7-10 years (different companies had different rules). Documents related to clinical trials and materials used therein were saved forever, although the regulations are something like 10 years after the end of the trial.
Anything electronic like email and my “personal” folder on my computer were backed up automatically and I didn’t have to worry about retention.
But if you went back to some of the older product documentation you’d find boxes and boxes of everything from trial protocols to meeting minutes.
That’s the way it works.
I work for state (not federal) government but I’m sure it’s the same. You can’t just ask for your organization’s texts. It seems weird but that’s how it is. I remember this hurdle at my work when there was an accusation of harassment between employees but both employees had their texts deleted. (I believe the one being harassed did it because she was sick of seeing them, and the harasser did it to cover up.) A subpoena to the carrier was needed to get the texts back.
As to why, it’s because it’s federal law. Cell phone providers don’t hand them out on request, even to the organization that pays the bills. I think it’s to preserve individual privacy, but I’m not entirely sure and I’m having trouble finding an answer on that.