Recently, the DHS Office of the Inspector General, the January 6 House committee, the National Archives, and likely the Department of Justice requested Secret Service text messages from around the time of the rioters’ attack on the US Capitol. It’s a reasonable request. Secret Service agents would have had front row seats to all relevant events from multiple perspectives. While the Secret Service did provide copies of action reports written after the events (and subject to internal review), the agents’ texts were requested to provide real-time context to events as they were unfolding.
In response, the Secret Service produced exactly ONE text message. Their excuse? Text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 were all erased as part of a device replacement program. They claim that their agents were individually responsible for migrating their data… but they didn’t.
As a professional data analyst who has served hard time in multiple IT departments over a long career, I feel qualified to weigh in here:
Bullshit.
All government agencies are required by law to preserve all data related to government activities. In addition, Congress sent a specific preservation demand to the Department of Homeland Security (the parent organization of the Secret Service) on January 16, 2021 for all data related to the events of January 6.
In any IT organization, preservation of data is paramount. That responsibility is even more important when there are clear legal requirements for data protection and preservation. No one who has ever set foot in any IT department would embark on any major systems upgrade without making multiple levels of backups of everything. In no case would any IT organization leave sole responsibility for backups to its user base. To any IT professional, that is simply a laughable concept.
The Secret Service says all of this resulted from a device replacement program. Why weren’t all of the old and new devices in question immediately quarantined? To truly “delete” data takes absolute intent, advanced device knowledge, and considerable effort. If the old devices weren’t destroyed, they could still have contained at least some of the data in question. Also, if any deletions were miraculously accidental, the data could well have been discoverable and recoverable via forensics analyses if conducted early enough.
Finally, no sane IT department would ever schedule any major systems upgrade to overlap with critical events happening within its parent organization. Given all of the chaos surrounding the election certification process and given the Secret Service’s responsibility to guarantee the safety of people on all sides of that process, there is no way in Hell that any rational IT professional would decide to screw with their agents’ means of communication until things were relatively calm.
There are only two possibilities here. Either every single member of the IT organization within the Department of Homeland Security is grossly incompetent or there is a massive cover-up within the Secret Service. I’m comfortable placing a huge bet on the latter. The Secret Service is supposed to be a non-partisan organization. It cannot function as a political arm of either party.
In any case, a deep cleaning seems to be in order.