In the FBI's defense, they did return all the equipment after they were done with it (if I remember correctly within like a day too). Funny enough though, one guy thought it was strange that after they gave his phone back, all of his text messages from then on were suddenly emailed to his work email also. Wouldn't happen to be that all email in the company was saved indefinitely due to the archiving server?
> All email in the company was saved indefinitely due to the archiving server
Not at all. Many companies actually do the opposite. A previous company I worked for had a 30 day email deletion policy, though we could setup special folders for 13 month retention on emails.
At another company, we were in the backup space and some enterprises had very restrictive backup and archive policies. One was to the point that our backup software was pretty much useless.
To limit liability, files that are not involved any ongoing legal issue such as a lawsuit are deleted as soon as possible without interrupting the business. Once there is a lawsuit, any relevant documents or emails can be deleted. This is all from the point of view for civil lawsuits. I assume gov't investigations are similar.
Sorry, that was sarcasm. It turns out that after the investigation started, they saved all emails indefinitely. I'm pretty sure that it was due to something going on with the investigation, but I can't say for sure. It just seemed a little too coincidental that both occurred so close to each other and one right after the other. It might be too that the FBI requested this, because they said they were trying to "catch the other party involved" (not part of the company).
Oh yeah, at the backup company, we worked on a Legal Hold feature where if an employee was tagged as being involved in a company lawsuit, all their backup files would be held indefinitely. You can delete shit after learning of a lawsuit, only before.
