American Football Star Tom Brady Allegedly Destroyed His Phone and His 10,000 Texts. But Are They REALLY Gone?

This is why you should never leave the really important tasks to amateurs - and why those who play 'skill positions' in America's National Football League are paid so much. JL

David Goldman reports in CNN/Money, with additional reporting from Ellen Brait in The Guardian on how to actually destroy your cellphone:

If Brady sent and received text messages using the phone's default text messaging app, those messages were likely stored on his phone's internal memory and permanently destroyed.
But if he used Google Voice, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or any number of cloud text messaging services, those texts would all still be recoverable.
New England Patriots superstar quarterback Tom Brady destroyed his cell phone, and thousands of potentially damning texts along with it.
Or did he?

Though unlikely, it's possible that some of those text messages could still be recovered.
Brady told the NFL that he had his assistant destroy his Samsung phone and SIM card on March 5 or 6 -- the day he was interviewed by the NFL's investigative team about "Deflategate." The NFL reached out to Brady's cell phone carrier, which confirmed that the text messages on his phone couldn't be recovered.
The league had wanted to read some of the 10,000 messages Brady sent in the four-month period before and after the AFC Championship game in order to determine whether the Patriots quarterback might have had anything to do with deflating the game balls below the required air pressure.
The NFL called the cell phone's destruction "an affirmative effort by Mr. Brady to conceal potentially relevant evidence and to undermine the investigation." (Brady denies this.)
But the NFL might have been able to read some of those text messages if it really wanted to.
In an arbitration hearing, Brady's representatives offered to provide the league with a spreadsheet identifying all of the people with whom Brady had exchanged text messages during the period in question. Brady's agents suggested that the NFL contact the relevant parties and ask them to provide texts sent by Brady.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said that would have been "impractical."


There might have been an easier way. Depending on how "destroyed" Brady's phone is, it's possible that relevant texts could have been recoverable.
Most text messages are stored locally on a cell phone. A person can, in theory, recover text messages from a broken phone by connecting the phone to the computer. (It's even possible to read deleted texts -- but you have to act fast: Your phone only saves deleted texts until it needs space in its memory, then it will overwrite them with new information, permanently deleting them.)
Deleted or not, the phone would need to be powered on to recover them.
But Brady told the NFL that he asked his assistant "to destroy the phone so that no one can ever, you know, reset it or do something where the information is available to anyone."
Assuming that Brady's phone was microwaved, dropped from an airplane or otherwise destroyed to the point that it could never again be powered on, there's one possible technique left for retrieving Brady's "lost" messages: the cloud.
If Brady sent and received text messages using the phone's default text messaging app, those messages were likely stored on his phone's internal memory and permanently destroyed.
But if he used Google (GOOGL, Tech30) Voice, Facebook (FB, Tech30) Messenger, WhatsApp, or any number of cloud text messaging services, those texts would all still be recoverable. When using those apps, texts are stored on servers, not the phone itself. All you need to recover the texts is to install that same app on your new phone -- and all the texts would appear, even if they were sent from another phone.
Brady should take note: He said in a Facebook message Wednesday morning that he switched to an iPhone 6. By default, Apple (AAPL, Tech30) stores texts sent to and from other iPhones in its own servers as part of the iMessage service. He might want to turn that function off.

How To Destroy Your Cell Phone

Tom Brady’s four-game suspension has angered many Patriots fans, who’ve since questioned the decision. The 20-page ruling by the NFL revealed that the quarterback had his cellphone destroyed, the very cellphone NFL investigators wanted to look at to see if Brady had ordered the footballs deflated.
Which raises the question: what are the best ways to destroy text messages forever?
Ben Levitan, an engineer who specializes in the design of cellphone networks, said: “Tom Brady should have come to me first.” Levitan outlined some tips on the best ways to delete text messages for good, should you ever need to.

Use a magnet

It’s simple, quick and could potentially be claimed as an accident. Just like how a credit card can be wiped when you put a magnet to it, a phone has a similar reaction. Put a strong magnet on your phone and “it will just completely destroy the memory of your phone”, said Levitan.

Use a text message shredder

To effectively get rid of text messages, one has to overwrite them in the memory space. “It physically writes garbage into every single memory space on your phone so it can’t be recovered,” Levitan said.

Good old-fashioned smashing

If you destroy the chip, the memory will be lost. But this option is tricky. You have to be thorough in your smashing so that the chip is completely destroyed. “If you’re just destroying the keyboard and battery that’s not going to be sufficient,” Levitan said. Smashing one’s phone is also the most conspicuous of the options.
It’s important to note that the above options are only effective if they are used on both the sender’s and the recipient(s)’ phones. The text messages are stored in both locations.Some phone companies also keep records of sent text messages. They sit on the company’s server for anywhere from three days to three months, depending on the company’s policy. Verizon holds texts for up to five days and Virgin Mobile keeps them for 90 days. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint do not keep the contents of text messages. Once that time period has expired, the company deletes the content of the messages but holds on to the time and date of the text and who it was sent to.
To avoid this problem, you can make use of iMessage, a form of communication between two iPhones. iMessages are not stored on phone companies’ servers.

Things not to do

Do not simply delete text messages from your phone. Text messages will be stored even after that. Your phone has limited space but it can still store approximately 1,000 text messages. It completely deletes old text messages after some time, but for the infrequent texter, messages from years and years ago could still be stored away.
Do not throw your phone in water. Generally, it doesn’t delete all of the information from your phone. When a phone hits water, it usually shorts out the battery and kills the power. But if someone were to dry it out for a couple of days and pop in a new battery, it could work again just fine.