Quote Originally Posted by HoneyBadger View Post
Something seems left out of the equation here (which I alluded to before): why do so many people think that you need physical access to a digital device to find out what's on it? Didn't the original Snowden revelations show that every big communications company including Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are already in cahoots with the NSA? Based on that, I think It's fairly safe to assume that any digital transmission is monitored/recorded in some way but would most of the relevant data for this case even be encrypted? What if there isn't anything relevant to the crime even encrypted on the phone?
Phone conversations are stored for a set period of time (I don't actually know how long that is), unless they are given higher priority. Higher priority can be given for several things, including a long list of key words/phrases that the automated system watches for. Other reasons include NSA/CIA/Warranted LEO interest in certain people. But, unless you give them reason to want to go back through your recorded calls, they roll off the storage rather quickly. The record of the call (from, to, duration, cell tower used, often GPS, etc) is all stored by the phone company for a LOT longer. Texts take up very little space, so I assume they are stored for quite some time, but I have no idea how long. They are sent as plain text, not encrypted, so those are easy to scan realtime for concerns.

The problem is the actual space used for all of the NSA's intercepts, so they have to prioritize. When Snowden released his information, several years ago now, there were sites where they were collecting so much information that they could only store it for 24 hours. He was talking about 20+ Terabytes of data per day. Hard drives have gotten bigger, so they can probably hold it for longer, but the number of phones has also gone up. So who actually knows how long they can keep the un-prioritized data at this point.

Now, if all that data was over written before the phone number of the suspects was known, then the only thing left as a record is the information the phone company keeps, which can be helpful, but is pretty limited. They are going to want to go through the phone in great detail to try and uncover information about the attackers and accomplices that the phone records wouldn't/couldn't show.