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Earlier this week, the Daily Mail broke a story reporting that former New York congressman Anthony Weiner was sending explicit texts to an underage girl. Now, federal authorities have issued a subpoena for Weiner’s “cell phone and other records,” according to CNN.




The CNN report is still thin on details, and the federal subpoena isn’t publicly available. But we can assume that, as is the case in investigations of this nature, authorities will ask the service providers of applications used by Weiner for his records.

According to screenshots published by the Daily Mail and allegedly of Weiner’s lewd conversations with a 15-year-old girl, Weiner used the messaging app Kik, as well as Twitter and Facebook, to send the messages. All of these companies have a policy of turning over data when authorities issue a warrant. That means, in theory, investigators will receive the full details of Weiner’s alleged sexual text messages to an underage woman.


Kik, for example, has it written into its privacy policy that it will turn over your information “when we believe that disclosure is required or permitted by law, including when responding to subpoenas, warrants, production orders, or similar instruments.” Facebook and Twitter both have similar policies.

Weiner also allegedly used the app Confide, which encrypts messages and sometimes deletes them after they are sent. Authorities may have trouble retrieving these alleged messages, as the developers of Confide wouldn’t have the technical capability to retrieve the messages due to their encrypted nature.

In sum: Weiner appears to have used a slew of apps that will happily cough up the disgusting details of his horny conversations with an underage woman when asked by authorities with a warrant. This is bad news for Weiner, and good news for authorities looking into the troubling allegations.