The general rule is that text messages are allowed as evidence.
Yes, text messages are admissible in court in Florida. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.Contact Us Now Does Florida consider text messages admissible in court? SHAPIRO: Paul Luehr is a former federal cybercrime prosecutor at the Department of Justice, now in private practice. Obviously, if the situation is even worse and there was a concerted effort to intentionally go out and hide this information or delete it, that could be a more serious charge, one that would be criminal in nature and brought to the Department of Justice or the FBI for investigation. LUEHR: Sure, there could be employment or administrative consequences, disciplinary action being brought against those particular individuals. Are there typically consequences for that? SHAPIRO: The leaders of the January 6 committee say that the Secret Service might have violated the Federal Records Act in deleting these messages. And they also will tell you if anything goes wrong and you lose your device or have it stolen, we reserve the right to delete it entirely. And usually, there is a bargain struck between the employer and the employee.
And that's where people are bringing their own phones to the workplace. In other situations, though, there's a concept called BYOD, bring your own device - not bottle. But in many cases, the employer may actually give you a device, and then that employer will have a large say over who controls the device and all of the content on that device. This is a problem that all companies and even the government have because it usually boils down to who owns the device. LUEHR: (Laughter) Welcome to the modern world. SHAPIRO: Who ultimately owns this information? Is it the sender, the Secret Service, the tech company, the phone company, the recipient? I mean, like, whose is it? But anybody else who was part of that conversation should still have those texts on their device. So when I wipe my device, when I delete my entire conversation, it may disappear from my phone. One possibility is going to other people in the conversation. LUEHR: I think there's a likelihood we'll see a few messages come out. SHAPIRO: I realize there are a lot of unknowns here, but what do you think the likelihood is that these messages can be retrieved somehow? I'm sure what the folks are doing now at Homeland Security and at the Secret Service is they're scrambling to see are there any other locations where these texts could be located? If the message or the texts or the entire phone has been wiped, that's a bigger problem because in that case, the underlying content has actually been zeroed out or overwritten, and therefore it's no longer available, at least on that device. And there are common forensics tools used by both law enforcement and civil investigators to recover them. If you simply delete a text, they are still available. Is that deleting or wiping? Do you know what happened there? So if the Secret Service says the texts were erased in a - system migration was their term. You might not be able to find the chapter page where that section of the book begins, but the story is still intact.
So think of it like a table of contents that's been ripped out of a book. So when you delete a message as a normal consumer, the message is actually not gone. LUEHR: There's a big difference between deleting and wiping a message, and I think that's getting lost in the context here. To start with, what typically happens when somebody deletes a text message? So walk us through what that might involve. SHAPIRO: So leaders of the House Select Committee investigating the insurrection put out a statement yesterday saying every effort must be made to retrieve the lost data. So what would it take to retrieve them? Paul Luehr is a former federal cybercrime prosecutor at the Department of Justice, and he's done these kinds of investigations before. The Secret Service says text messages from that day were deleted and may not be recoverable. Agents were also driving the president that day when, according to sworn testimony, Donald Trump physically tried to redirect the car to the Capitol. On January 6, Secret Service agents were protecting Vice President Pence from an armed mob that wanted to kill him.