Deflation-gate

This sounds skeptical to me.
On the front of it, I find it much more likely that the two guys who fooled with the pressure actually had very little "desire" to adjust the pressure.I find it much more likely that they're on the short end of the stick either doing what Bellicheck/Brady wanted... or losing their jobs.If there's going to be firings, I think it should be a little closer to the top, not the guys on the bottom. Unless there's a "large bonus check" in their accounts or something?Meh. Maybe it's just my conspiracy side coming out... but it just doesn't feel right to me that these guys would be the "masterminds" behind the whole ordeal. Seems a bit much to expect out of a couple of busy-workers.

Yes, exactly.That's exactly why the uppers should be fired and not the ones following orders.We're not talking about basic human rights where anyone should know better.
We're talking about air pressure in a ball for a past time.Nuremberg defense should be front and centre.Or are you saying the Kingpin should never go to jail as long as underage teenagers do the dirty work?It's all about context, of course. And the context here is that the uppers should be slapped much harder.

Completely agree.
I just don't think the little guys deserve to be fired over following these sorts of pressured orders in this sort of situation.
(If that's actually what happened, even...)There are many ways to discipline an employee without firing them.
If someone's getting fired in this situation, I think it should be the ones calling the shots... the ones putting this ball in motion... the ones at the top.

Your last message said the phone was a red herring, and I completely agree with that.My thoughts on your cell-phone questions (just thoughts, I don't know-for-sure any of this). These are my current understandings, if anyone else knows differently, please feel free to correct me: Not for normal folks, no. Here's what usually happens:
-hand me down to other family member/friend
-sits around in junk drawer
-recycled at Best Buy
-garbaged
...whether or not the phone gets wiped before hand (simple factory-reset type of thing) is user-dependent. Depends on the cell phone and the software it's running on.Older ones - yes, until memory limitations are met
Newer ones - I don't think so, I believe they have built-in default time limits now (ie - only kept for a year or so, maybe a month... depends on software used) If you delete an old text message, it's deleted from your phone. Like putting a file into the recycling bin and then emptying the recycling bin on your PC.
Like your PC... there are some ways to recover deleted things that have varying results.But, really, this doesn't matter at all.Every message you send to/from your phone goes through the phone company database as well.
When you delete a message from your phone, it definitely does not delete it from the phone company's database.
The phone company never deletes their database.That's why courts subpoena cell phone records (including text messages) from the phone company and not from you and your phone directly.In this sense, you are completely correct when you say that destroying Brady's cell was a red herring. If any text messages were required by police, they could (even now) still get them from Brady's phone company. I do not believe it transfer's over like your contact list.
However, newer and newer phones and transferring-software may be correcting this and perhaps now such things are transferred over if you're going from iPhone 5 to iPhone 6 or Android phone to Android phone... these things would not be copied over if you're going cross-platform (contact list can sometimes still be transferred cross-platform, but I doubt text-history would at this point). Sounds like a prudent procedure to include if you ask me.
Things like text-messaging, though, would still leave a copy with the phone company.If you send text-messages through an app (say, like Viber or Snapchat or even Twitter) your phone company does not have a record of such texts. However, those individual companies themselves would have their own never-deleted database of everything you send/receive that could be subpoena-ed by police and such.Therefore, it's possible that police want to look at the phone to know what companies they should send subpoenas to.
If they don't find what they're looking for at the phone company, they may not know if Tom has an account with any other messaging app (probably hundreds of possibilities, but mainly in the 10-15 range of popular ones?)

Probably not.
Likely not legally, anyway.
Are they rich/corrupt enough to try to obtain such a thing illegally? For a PR legal matter..? I don't really care At this time, I don't really care. I was just interested in the procedures surrounding cell phones in the more general sense than this particular situation.But, since you asked... my initial impression is that he didn't really ask. My second (very quickly after the first) impression is that cell phone companies are shitty to deal with so this very easily could have happened and I wouldn't be surprised."Shitty to deal with" = are very large companies which include a lot of HR bloat. That is, the guy-you-get-on-the-phone-when-you-call is likely not very tech-savvy with getting in and out of their internal databases. That would take a higher level security and likely even technical ability. To get to someone who could actually help you would take a great amount of time. Would Tom have the time/resources to spend on tracking this down (or getting someone to track it down for him?) Likely yes. Would he have the desire to do extra-work like that in this situation? I don't see why...