I don’t know. I’m guessing if I set my phone back to factory setting the feds would still find everything they wanted to.
But I could be very wrong. Not the most tech savvy
Maybe we will find out that the NSA data base has been selectively wiped. You know, the data base that collects every phone call and message in the world.
You’re right. The way storage works is that a flag is set that the file (more specifically, the location that the file sits on) can be overwritten. Until the location is overwritten the data is still there. Additionally, enterprise device management systems capture everything that goes on on a device. For devices given to people performing investigations like these people were supposed to, the integrity of the investigation would have been cause to implement the most stringent data capture and backup policies on the devices. the DOJ need only get their IT people to recover the data from backup, and if it doesn’t exist there they can have computer forensics specialists, or data recovery specialists, recover the data directly from the media on the device.
For the record, I am an IT professional with 25 years of experience, so these are things I have dealt with myself in the past.
You're right, but they probably did a lot more than that. They most likely had special software that would write alternating patterns of ones and zeros to the memory. You write patterns of "1010" (hex A) and patterns of "0101" (hex 5). Then you swap and write patterns of hex 5 and hex A. This is repeated about 5 times so that every bit is written over repeatedly in order to completely hide the data that was there previously. At least that's how we did it "back in the day".