Regular text messages sent through regular cellphones are not kept in any central repository. When you zap them from your phone they are, in almost all instances, forever zapped. There is no federal law requiring that they be stored or kept by the cellphone provider.
The wireless companies refer to text messaging as SMS, or Short Message Service. It has become almost as popular as cellphone voice communications, with as many as 20 billion text messages being sent each month in the United States alone. Typically, text messages are 140 characters or less, sent via the data networks of the wireless providers from one device to another.
In Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's case, the reason his messages have been exposed is because of the specialized service the city has contracted with to handle wireless communications between city officials.
The device used was a SkyWriter, which looks a lot like a BlackBerry but isn't. It's a dedicated messaging device provided to the city of Detroit by SkyTel, a Mississippi-based wireless company that specializes in providing paging and messaging services to large corporations and governmental bodies through its own wireless network and devices.
The company notes on its website that "every message sent over the SkyTel network ... is recorded, including: Date and time the message was sent ... 'From' address ... 'To' address ... Length of the message ... Entire message content up to 2,000 characters." The company extols the benefits of such "message archiving."
For major corporations and governments, automatic archiving of such messages is important. Legal requirements mandate the storage of all business- or government-related communications.
The irony is that if Kirkpatrick had used a regular cellphone and text messaging service from Verizon, AT&T or Sprint, rather than the city service, there would be no record; those messages are simply passed through to the connected devices by the wireless companies and not stored on any master server anywhere.
"We do keep them for about two weeks," says Mark Elliott, a spokesman for Sprint. "But that's just to make sure they get sent if the customer's phone is turned off or out of the network. After that, even if not retrieved, they're gone. We don't store them. We have no record of them. That's standard practice in the industry."
