Secret Service may disable text messaging on employees’ phones, memo says

The US Secret Service may temporarily disable text messaging on employee cell phones, two sources familiar with the matter tell CNN, as the agency scrambles to respond to concerns it may have erased messages relevant to investigations into January 6, 2021.
Secret Service Director James Murray sent an agency-wide memo on Tuesday, the details of which are being first reported by CNN, informing employees that it is considering temporarily suspending the use of texts while the agency fixes gaps in how it retains those messages, according to sources who described the memo. CNN's Jessica Schneider reports. #jessicaschneider #CNN #News

46 comments

  1. The most important security detail in the history of the world and they’re talked about like my grandfather trying figure out how his phone works.

    1. You just know someone in this mess kept copies. Too many involved for it not to be the case. When they turn up, all hell breaks loose. 🍿🍿🍿

  2. Maybe the Secret Service ARE experts; devious experts. A group that’s expert at finding things would surely be damned good at hiding other things. Why did they choose iPhones? Maybe, as was suggested it was the absence of cloud storage.

    1. @maggie carneiro it’s a bot – I see the same kinda comment all the time.
      The ‘Fuk’ is the giveaway. Almost always exact same. I just report when I see.

    2. @Roddy Thanks, Roddy! It was beginning to annoy me. Now that I know it’s a ‘bot’, I’ll do what you do; report it then forget it.👌

  3. No. Nope. Don’t try to spin a pass for them. Doesn’t matter what “improvements” they make now – what’s been done is *criminally unacceptable,* and likely intentional.

  4. I’m a federal employee and I’m told my records on my phones and computer are always kept. This is interesting…

    1. All that seems to have happened is the file references were deleted but the messages are still on the phones. It’s like burning a phone book and thinking all the people referenced in it are now gone…

  5. The new slogan for the Secret Service: We do all our crimes and sedition only by phone calls.

  6. If you disable the texting, you don’t have to back up the employee’s texts when you are ordered to provide it

  7. That just means there won’t be written accounts of malfeasance.

    That is like a police station deleting all their body cam footage after a police killing a civilian and then announcing going forward all body cams will have duct tape covering the lense and microphone going forward…

  8. Where are the mobile service providers in this? We already know that communications in the US are all swept up in the counter-terrorism drag-net that archives every website we visit. SMS texts should be persevered in numerous private and public databases that would have collected the data.

  9. How can they use “text messages” and not some secure system that retains everything in a secure environment in the first place?

    1. Exactly so. (I one of my workplace we were not aloud to send SMS involving sensitive issues and the policy was to use SMS as little as possible. – We had other messenger system. – And I am quite sure, all the messages I send some 10 years ago, are still there.

  10. So now they’re just going to prevent people from putting anything in writing in the first place? That’s not shady or anything.

  11. Great panel, glad to hear their take. Curious to know why and when the secret service implemented a policy of putting all the responsibility of phone backups on the employees themselves. Maybe it’s their way of getting around the preservation of records requirements, or worse. Everything about this stinks.

  12. Even if the messages were wiped, it only means that the references to the files were erased, not the messages themselves. Unless somebody went out of his way to overwrite the actual memory segments. That would be a deliberate act, not a mistake or oversight.

    1. Yeah I’m not sure why these data are being portrayed as unreachable. How memory works isn’t hard to explain to viewers and if more people understood what you said, maybe there would be more appropriate outrage…

  13. Obviously, the character of civil servants has become an afterthought or low priority.
    ANYBODY that is granted excessive power; social media platforms, police, judges…character needs to be placed as the #1 priority/skill set ; otherwise…it’s like letting teenagers run the school.
    Disastrous.

  14. Wait, they relied on their agents to back up their own texts? So…you’re telling me *none* of the agents backed their phones up? There are always people who are on top of these things and would have backed things up. So, that would explain some of them missing, but not all or even most. No, this doesn’t hold water.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.