In the wake of the arrest of hundreds of people in July 2004 during the Republican National Convention assembly in New York, the city's attorneys are prying for access to text messages used to chronicle the event, and possibly the crimes, in snippets.

The New York City Law Department on Feb. 4 subpoenaed Tad Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wrote the code for the TXTmob text messaging service.

New York attorneys ordered Hirsch to provide records of the content of the messages exchanged on TXTmob during the convention, as well as the identification of people who sent and received messages, the time the messages were sent for the duration of the event, and a list of people who used the service during the event.