The numbers stated work out to suspiciously close to a transmission every 30 seconds, which may suggest this is a capture including both routine cell-tower transmissions and texts, with the former dominating the data.
I doubt the accuracy of the story as reported, though whether that's a misstatement in the report or a misunderstanding by the reporter isn't clear.
The report in question:
https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/wiretap-report-2...
It states:
The federal wiretap with the most intercepts occurred during a narcotics investigation in the Southern District of Texas and resulted in the interception of 9,208,906 messages in 120 days.
XLSX tables with underlying data are provided.
My read is that intercepts are not limited to user-initiated comms, and include automated telco service messaging
Or were they targeting 45 but actually collecting for vastly larger numbers (eg entire cell towers' throughout) ? Would make sense of the suspects had many phones or kept switching phones.
Average character count per text is probably low. Median character count could be something like 3.
That’s all rank speculation on my part. Would be interesting to see actual data on this though!
I somehow doubt that very much.
The comment above reached a figure of 700 per day per person. For my teen self, that's about two or three hours of conversation per day. It's certainly sustainable for months. Hell, I was known as the outlier in my teen circles because I liked to send longer messages (actually combining full sentences into one message) from time to time.
That may not be what its author intended, but it's what they wrote. Twice.
Nowhere did I say that rate would be sustained for 24 consecutive hours.
It is the ultimate in moving goalposts to take my response to a claim of 700/day being insane, to recast the debate as if it were over sending 17,000 texts per day.
https://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/what-teens-do-with-th...
But when did I ever say many?!
I think this horse is now dead, and or has come to enjoy the beating.