while russ's suggestions weren't bad, they weren't really all that possible to implement.
most carriers stay as far away from reading your SMSs or recording your phone calls as they can, the reason being that if you read it, then you have to store it for 7 years, and must inform the customer that it's been recorded. that's a long time to store data not particularly valuable to the company.
secondly, since they don't have any legitimate business reason to record them, they don't have software to decode them. so to search for "help" or other words in SMS messages, then you'd have to write software to decode them and then search them. not something that can be done in a short period of time. secondly, SMSs aren't stored for any legitimate period of time as the collection directories aren't that big relatively speaking.
so you would have a tough time of going back to old messages after you'd written your code.
if at&t had the software to do this, which is somewhat hard for me to believe, then it was most likely being used for nefarious purposes before 9/11.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
while russ's suggestions weren't bad, they weren't really all that possible to implement.
most carriers stay as far away from reading your SMSs or recording your phone calls as they can, the reason being that if you read it, then you have to store it for 7 years, and must inform the customer that it's been recorded. that's a long time to store data not particularly valuable to the company.
secondly, since they don't have any legitimate business reason to record them, they don't have software to decode them. so to search for "help" or other words in SMS messages, then you'd have to write software to decode them and then search them. not something that can be done in a short period of time. secondly, SMSs aren't stored for any legitimate period of time as the collection directories aren't that big relatively speaking.
so you would have a tough time of going back to old messages after you'd written your code.
if at&t had the software to do this, which is somewhat hard for me to believe, then it was most likely being used for nefarious purposes before 9/11.