When you delete a text message, is it truly gone forever? Given America’s willingness to spy on its citizens, simple common sense would suggest that no they’re not gone forever, and law enforcement agencies can use inexpensive consumer-grade software to recover at least some of your deleted text messages if they can get into your phone. But deleted text messages between two Secret Service agents have become the focal point of the House committee’s investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot because, for the moment, those messages are gone without a trace, and may or may not be able to be recovered.
Messages between the agents in question on Jan 5 and 6 are nowhere to be found as the House committee examines whether or not those missing messages can be reconstructed, The Guardian reports. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, the watchdog of the Secret Service, told Congress this past Thursday that those records were deleted after his office had requested them. According to The Guardian, the Secret Service asserts that the messages “were lost during a pre-planned, agency-wide cellphone upgrade scheme in January 2021 because some agents apparently had not backed up messages as required.”
The House committee is currently looking at ways to forensically reconstruct the deleted communications — communications from a government agency with “secret” right there in its name — as they believe they may provide “greater clarity on how security plans developed” in the days before and during the capitol insurrection, The Guardian reports. Multiple sources have reported on the role the Secret Service played in keeping then-President Donald Trump from returning to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6.
For the majority of Americans who are not Secret Service agents, these current events raise interesting questions about how a normal citizen can protect their text messages. Whatever the outcome of this investigation, the assumption that any text message you send, receive, and delete is still being digitally recorded somewhere is not an outlandish one, but details about where the lost texts might be found are scarce. Are they potentially in the cloud? Are they some kind of ghost data still on the agents’ phones? When you delete anything on your phone, your device labels that space as available to be overwritten by new information, but until the new information arrives to overwrite it, it’s still there. It’s like deleting any information about your house in a phonebook, but still being able to find the house if you just walk around the neighborhood.
But privacy-focused messaging apps like Signal do exist, offering end-to-end encryption allowing only the people involved in conversations to see the content of their messages — so not even the company itself can spy on you. Signal says that the app is truly private and that even if the Feds do come knocking, the company doesn’t have data to hand over. Just to be clear, however, end-to-end encryption does not necessarily mean your messages are truly off the grid, but it’s certainly more secure than texting.
Whether or not the House committee can reconstruct the Secret Service texts remains to be seen, but this isn’t the first time the agency has abruptly lost documents sought by investigators. And this also isn’t the first time the inspector general has been asked to reconstruct text messages, having used “forensic tools” in 2018 to recover texts from two senior FBI officials who investigated Hillary Clinton and Trump.
