

Senate to force cellular service providers to retain the substance of text messages for at least two years. Indeed, various law enforcement groups, including the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, asked the U.S. Legislators have resisted attempts to force retention of content. The Boston Globe reported that carriers, including the four biggest in the country ‑ AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint ‑ have publicly confirmed that they delete their copies of messages after delivering them. As recently as November 25, 2015, T-Mobile’s privacy policy indicated that it retained “calls and text messages you send and receive (but we do not retain the content of those calls or messages after delivery).” Nathan Freitas, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University explained that the carrier may have “details of whom texted and when” but “the actual text is what is really hard to get, if not impossible” from the carrier. As of 2010, Verizon Wireless saved text message content for three to five days while Virgin Mobile retained text message content for ninety days but stated that it would only disclose that content if law enforcement had a search warrant containing a “text of text” request. However, the majority of cellular service providers do not save the content of text messages at all. All of the providers retained records of the date and time of the text message and the parties to the message for time periods ranging from sixty days to seven years. The memorandum contained information from the six largest cell phone carriers in the United States: Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T/Cingular, Sprint, Nextel and Virgin Mobile. In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) served a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) request to the Department of Justice seeking an internal memorandum regarding the data retention plan of major cellular service providers. They do not, however, retain the content of text messages for very long, if at all.

The Text of Texts Are Often Only Available On The Device ItselfĬellular service providers retain records of the parties to a text message and the date and time it was sent. While the use of its products to get past passcodes might have garnered more public acclaim, one of the other less well known features is its ability to speedily uncover information that might have been previously unrecoverable, including deleted data and text messages.Ī. What many practitioners don’t know is that the FBI, DOJ and the SEC have been using Cellebrite’s forensic cell-phone cracking tools for years.
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Cellular phone forensics company Cellebrite recently gained national notoriety for its rumored assistance in cracking the password of an iPhone related to the San Bernardino murders.
