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Text Messages in the Courts
KennyG944 noted a story running on CNN which talks about Text Messages being used in the Kobe Bryant trial. This raises a host of issues about the phone company keeping these messages around and expectations of privacy.
The idea that the courts determine whether or not someone ACTUALLY IS GUILTY is a stupid and common American fallacy. (I don't know what it's like elsewhere.)
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK, then if a court has found you guilty, then legally speaking you _are_ guilty, until and unless an higher court overturns that finding. It's called a "legal fiction" -- that is, it may not be true, but it is assumed to be for the purposes of running the legal system.
A similar thing is evident in civil procedures, where if you send a claim form to someone by first class post, it is assumed to arrive the next day. Even if it doesn't arrive until two weeks later, the counting of dates for procedure purposes still takes place from the day after it was sent. (Although in practice, the defendant can generally apply for an extension and will almost always get one).
From the Article: ATT didn't keep the messages, but they have a backup storage system which automatically backs up everything - including the text messages.
So it's not that they wanted to keep the messages - they just forgot to tell the backup program not to back them up, or delete them after a certain period of time.
Very interesting. I would be surprised if the other wireless companies (which immediately claimed they didn't keep messages around) didn't have the same problem.
Any professional company would have a backup system for their main servers. You really think they would go through the trouble and remove the text messages from that? What if the text message can't be delivered instantly and the server crashes? You would want to retrieve them from the backup system of course. This is not a trivial problem - you would really have to give this some thought.
Do i really think that the marketing-drones who were quick to repeat the official company line really thought this through? No.