Cell Phone Text Messages Are Private...NOT!

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Uh oh...talk about a couple of folks who were caught with their hand in the cookie jar (so to speak)...and caught lying under oath.

CNN recently ran a story about how Christine Beatty resigned from her position as chief of staff for Detroit, Michigan, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick after a large amount of explicit Blackberry text messages, "tens of thousands" were discovered from 2003 and 2004.

They both are married...to other people...as they were back when the text messages occurred.

"Both Beatty and Kilpatrick denied a relationship existed when they testified in a whistleblower case brought by two former Detroit police officers who claimed they were fired for investigating the mayor's extramarital affair. The officers were awarded $6.5 million by a Wayne County jury. In total, the case has cost the city more than $9 million."

So, Beatty and Kilpatrick are now subject to being found guilty of perjury.

SkyTel, a Mississippi telecommunications company, preserved, and continues to retain, the text messages.

This case points out something important you and your personnel should know...

Most people believe cell phone text messages go only from the sender's to the receiver's phone. This is a good lesson demonstrating that messaging of all kinds, including text messaging, cannot be considered as secure and private.

If you are sending and receiving text messages using a phone paid for by your employer, keep in mind your employer may be able to read those messages. Let your employees know that they should not be sending any text messages on company cell phones and Blackberry devices that they would not want the rest of the company to read, and that those messages are also subject to e-discovery access.

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

Comments

Everything can be archived. Anyone with a corporate BlackBerry might already be having their text messages archived by their employer.

Companies like GWAVA have software that can archive ALL text messages including SMS, PIN messages and phone logs.

Posted by: John Milhouse | January 29, 2008 9:33 AM

CommonDesk also has a solution for archiving SMS, PIN. Their solution can also archive BlackBerry Webmail as well as Blackberry Messenger message.

Posted by: Mitchell Balsam | January 30, 2008 7:59 PM

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