Just how easy is it to destroy your text messages? In the eyes of the NFL, it’s as simple as destroying your cellphone. But as anyone who has ever had their phone stolen can tell you, that’s not even remotely true.
This week, the NFL upheld the suspension of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for four games in the wake of accusations he was "generally aware" of the team's deflation of footballs. The decision, authored by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, largely hinged on the revelation that Brady destroyed his cellphone shortly before meeting with league investigators. The league suggests this was to suppress evidence and obstruct the investigation. Brady insists he was just replacing a "broken Samsung phone with a new iPhone 6."
It was a fun story for a few minutes and there was some mild hoopla surrounding the idea of a frenzied Brady destroying his cellphone. Problem is, even if he had … so what? This isn't The Wire, and snapping a cellphone in half and tossing it in the gutter wouldn’t be enough to erase Brady’s history anyway. The digital trail our phones leave behind long outlive the physical device itself, and the league could have potentially tracked down the information in a number of ways—which is why the whole story was utterly ridiculous. Regardless, here is exactly why it wouldn’t matter if Tom Brady smashed his cellphone.
Once upon a time, it was hard to recover text messages without actually having the phone they were sent to. However, Google and Apple's efforts to sync data across multiple devices has made text message retrieval significantly easier.
As Brady was on a Samsung during the "deflategate" scandal, he was most likely using an Android device. Not only do most modern Android devices use Google Hangouts as their primary text messaging app, Google makes the process of deleting those messages inconvenient and difficult. Android's Hangouts has a setting to delete old text messages, but the feature only does so as disk space fills up. Unlike the iPhone, which can automatically delete messages that are older than a set period of time, Android gives the user no control over how long to preserve messages.
Google Hangouts makes retrieving past chat conversations as easy as a simple search within Gmail. Brady could have deleted his Hangout history using Gmail or Google+, however, the company only allows users to delete conversations on a per-contact basis—Google provides no option for users to wipe all their history with one click without deleting their account—making the process cumbersome. Google provides a similar ability to prevent the initial storage of Hangout history, but, again, only on a per-contact basis.
The main catch with Hangouts that would prevent Brady from retrieving texts from Gmail is that Google does not store SMS messages within the larger Hangout history. However, any text conversation done directly with Hangouts would have been accessible online without someone explicitly purging the data.
Apple offers some text message redundancy as well, although it isn't automatic like Google's. Anyone using an iPhone can have their iMessages sent to their laptop or desktop using Apple's Messages app, providing a second source of message history. Similarly, iMessages can be mirrored on iPads. And now that Apple has introduced text message forwarding, regular SMS messages can be forwarded—and thus backed up—to laptops with Messages.
Had Brady been using an iPhone during the Patriot's Super Bowl run, his personal computer almost certainly would have had a stash of his text messages. When backing up and syncing an iPhone with iTunes, it saves a backup of the phones settings and data—including the device's entire text and iMessage history. This helps make setting up a new phone as seamless as possible. However, it also renders taking a hammer to a phone to destroy evidence almost completely pointless—all anyone would have to do is restore that backup to a new device to scan through past messages.
Android doesn't make this as straight-forward. While backups, either to personal computers or to cloud services like Dropbox, retain most user data, they do not store text messages by default. However, many Android users manage to backup their texts anyway, using apps such as SMS Backup +.
Ultimately, Brady would have had to be significantly more thorough than simply destroying a cellphone to suppress potential evidence implicating him in the deflategate scandal. The league could have demanded Brady surrender his Hangout history or past backups. And investigators could have gone after Brady's contacts, asking to review their phone history with the Patriots' star player.
Of course, Brady already offered to help the league procure his messages directly from his contact's phone—a fact the NFL admitted in a footnote in their latest decision. As much fun as we all had imagining Brady crushing his phone, turning the chassis into dust, it not only wasn’t true, it wouldn’t have worked. Sorry NFL, but if you thought that was enough to nail him, you might want to rethink your investigation tactics.
