Shop Talk

legal reasons i've heard that they are required to keep certain things on thier HD's .. but for how long, i dunno.

It is possible with a court ordered subpoena, BUT, it has to be done within 5 days of the message being sent or it is permanently deleted from the systems.

I was told by our tech guys that all txt for the carrier are stored on servers for 72 hours and then deleted. For blackberry pin messages their system is different since they go to a RIM server before bouncing back to our networks and RIM doesn't store the messages. I believe thats why the government uses blackberry's since a PIN is pretty well untraceable. France banned the use of blackberry's in government offices a few years ago since the RIM server is located in the UK. I know the military uses them. Aside from being untraceable in the field they require less signal and send PINs in shorter signal bursts making it harder for the enemy to locate them.

Thanks for the feedback. This guy came back in today. Apparantly he got his ATT/Cingular bill and there are several text messages from the same number to his wife's phone. He doesn't know who the number is.

Sounds to me like he's got some problems. #1, a cheating wife, #2, can't get to the txt messages because by the time you get your bill you're past the 72 hour mark for retrieving messages from network, and finally #3...I'm at a VZW agent, nothing to do with Att/Cingular. Closest thing I am to them, is across the street.