Secret Service Provided One (1) Text Exchange In Response To DHS IG’s Sweeping Request

Interesting question…actually, would have expected that you would know the answer to that one.

I hoping the answer is “no, they don’t need a warrant” —Mittens has said that corporations are people, are government agencies people?

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Does anyone, ANYONE, believe the story?

The Secret Service, which was for decades a truly elite organization, needs to be gutted and rebuilt from the bottom up. (And it probably should be moved from DHS back to Treasury.)

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Personally, I’d fire all their asses, and normally I’m pretty easygoing.

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The ONE text message brings to mind the classic Monty Python scene in Life of Brian, where ~30 Roman guards search a one room home: “We found this spoon, sir!”

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I’m sure the Little Rock office is lovely this time of year.

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A commenter on a post over at emptywheel mentioned having read (article not cited) that a retired FBI guy suggested that, if indeed they cannot get any of the J5/J6 messages from the SS (personally, I still think they may materialize from an unexpected source), then the SS agents messages from the day of and the day after Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony should be requested…

A novel and interesting possible workaround.

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I’m aware of examples that indicate the FBI needs a search warrant against a particular elected official or government employee. But we’re kind of at the point where it’s the agency itself that needs to get searched from top to bottom, and I can’t recall of that ever happening before.

Coincidentally, I’m sure, the Director of the Secret Service announced his imminent retirement a couple weeks back. Nothing to see here, move along.

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Well now they are just being cute but this is come back to bit them on the ass, which is going to be awesome!

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I’m still a bit open to general assholishness and umbrage at anyone making demands of them-- after all, they’re the Men in Black-- coupled with what would be a regular refresh of things at the end of a term (hey, remember how Clinton’s folks took all the "w"s off the keyboards… and turned out that it was actually just a scheduled swap for new computers for the new admin. So not like this tech refresh is a new thing).

That individual agents didn’t spend the countless hours needed to cull through their texts to figure out which were to the escorts (non-official) and which were job-related doesn’t really surprise me. They’ve got a day job, after all, and it’s not like they don’t have to still do that, so when the archivists think they’re actually getting the time to do that task is beyond me.

So, yeah, I’m open to just seeing a world where it’s a general “fuck you” from them and not specifically that they needed to cover something up here.

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Yeah, quite the coinkydink.

But instead of the usual “spend more time with the fam” excuse, he went on to a cushy job as head of security (or something) at Snapchat.

:thinking:

Definitely nothing to see here…

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Smooth transition. Go from sending dick pics to escorts on the latest presidential trip to sending dick pics to colleagues to “test out the app”.

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Rowe told the committee that all Secret Service employees are responsible for “appropriately preserving government records that may be created via text messaging,” and were responsible for doing so before the agency’s phone migration (transferring data between devices) began on Jan. 27 last year.

I’m trying to wrap my brain around the idea of ANYone with ANY experience in I.T. thinking that “well, we told all our users to run a backup” is an effective data-migration strategy.

Nope, failing. Sorry.

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I don’t know the answer to your question, but I would think anything done on company computers and phones is the property of the American people. I find it fascinating that these people used their work phones to conduct their coup-ing. The stupidity of doing so is kind of scary. When you start a new job anywhere these days, the first thing they tell you is that the equipment, the server, and everything connected to it belongs to the company.

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Goverment. Lowest Bidders. Lousy taxpayers that don’t want to pay taxes, and a Congress that never funds things appropriately or to the levels needed.

They can snag all the stuff on the servers, but aren’t all equipped to capture everything on the devices. Then, due to encryption coded to the users in many cases, even they can’t see inside what the user has, unless the user exports that from the full-disk-encrypted local machine to their server.

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The committee may have more luck with the social media posts of SS. Perhaps we will see some of these tomorrow?

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I’m in IT, and use Intune with some familiarity.

there’s no requirement to wipe a device prior to enrolling it with Intune. To be fair though, depending on their previous MDM vendor, it might have been desirable to do so.

Regardless, iCloud backups are still available and can be restored

MSFT docs are easy to search when you know the right terms!

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Seconded. I’m hard pressed to get most to press one button to run automatic updates that popup.

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Turning over a single text exchange is more like trolling than an attempt to comply.

We need a complete housecleaning off the Secret Service. Any lower-level guy who went ahead and deleted texts because they were “only following orders” instead of following their oath to the Constitution needs to be punished.

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Back in my day when I worked for the Federal Government, the equipment provided like computers and phones were the property of the Government and therefore they did not need anything to seize and otherwise search Government owned equipment including any Government provided office space. You also had no expectation of privacy that your calls and emails were not being listened to and read by the Government.

You of course had the same rights as anyone else for what you did not on duty and not using Government equipment or on Government property, but in regard to your phones, computer and office space, you have no expectation of privacy and therefore no Fourth Amendment rights.

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Dunno what Android calls their backup stuff, but iCloud backup IIRC is enabled by default for iPhones which includes VM and text messages

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