Push to Store Text Messages for Law Enforcement Use

[Sheryl Loch]

Law enforcement wants to be able to look through your text messages up to 2 years after you sent them. They say it is in case these messages and the info about them are ever needed in a criminal investigation. I could see how those messages may be able to prove a person committed a crime, yet storing that info would cost ungodly amounts. A cost that would probably be passed on to the end user.
Would that cost be worth it to store bazillions of "LOL"?

Maybe they should change it and only store messages by elected officials? Then we could catch the real crooks. Oh, we could add onto that and say to store messages sent by any phone assigned to any Government agency? Then we could really catch the wasteful spending and fraud.

I'm sure that if they ever did get a law passed to store text messages, the Government and its employees' would be exempt. The government would never pass anything that would possibly expose their fraud.

Full CNet article HERE.

Sheryl Loch

[Brad West]

It's just amazing to me how many different policies there are for retaining SMS messages. Some providers don't retain them at all but Virgin Mobile keeps them for 90 days and AT&T keeps theirs up to 7 years. If this happens I think one year should be sufficient. If law enforcement makes a move fast enough that should be plenty of time, Heck 90 days storage should give them a bunch of info.