A reminder from the Jan. 6 Investigation: Deleting a text may not mean it's gone forever.

Is a text message gone forever when it's deleted? Simple common sense would suggest that no they're not gone forever, and law enforcement agencies can use inexpensive consumer grade software to recover at least some of your deleted text messages if they can get into your phone.

The House committee is looking into whether or not the missing messages can be reconstructed, as reported by The Guardian. The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security told Congress that his office deleted the records after they were requested. According to The Guardian, the Secret Service asserts that the messages were lost during a pre- planned, agency-wide cellphone upgrade scheme in January 2021.

The House committee is currently looking at ways to forensically reconstruct the deleted communications from a government agency with "secret" right there in its name, as they believe they may provide greater clarity on how security plans developed in the days before and during the capitol insurrection. According to multiple sources, the Secret Service kept Donald Trump from returning to the Capitol after he spoke at the Ellipse.

The current events raise questions about how a normal person can protect their text messages. Whatever the outcome of this investigation, the assumption that any text message you send, receive, and deleted is still being recorded is not out of the ordinary. They might be in the cloud. The agents' phones may have ghost data on them. When you uninstall something from your phone, your device labels the space as available to be used again, but until the new information arrives, it is still there. If you just walk around the neighborhood, you'll still be able to find the house even if you're not in it.

Signal, a privacy-focused messaging app, allows only the people involved in conversations to see the content of their messages, so not even the company itself can spy on you. The company doesn't have data to hand over even if the Feds come knocking, according to signal. Even though end-to-end encryption does not mean your messages are off the grid, it is still more secure than texting.

The Secret Service has lost documents before, but it's not the first time. The inspector general has used forensic tools before to recover text messages from senior FBI officials who investigated Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.