Hours after the FBI released surveillance footage from the night of Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance Tuesday, one person was taken into custody in Arizona while police began a search of a property in Rio Rico.
The FBI released the surveillance footage on Tuesday after days of no major breakthroughs, and it might not have been possible without the expertise of tech giant Google, reports suggest.
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Google’s role in releasing FBI surveillance video
The investigation into the disappearance of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today anchor Savannah Guthrie, initially suffered a major setback because no security camera footage was available.
At the time, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said there were no videos because the 84-year-old man “had no subscription” to Google Home, which stores videos recorded from Nest cameras in the search giant’s cloud.
This proved to be a major obstacle to the investigation, as authorities had no leads or footage of the suspects.
The situation was so dire that investigators, who understood the technical complexity of restoring footage without backups, didn’t even know if extraction would be possible.
That’s where Google stepped in, with CNN citing a person familiar with the investigation saying it depends on the search giant’s technical expertise.
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How did Google find the missing data?
CNN reported that Nest cameras still store about three hours of “event” video history for free before the data is deleted. This data is stored in the cloud and on Google servers.
Basically, even if data is deleted from Google systems, it can still exist somewhere and be recoverable, because even files meant to be deleted can exist until they are overwritten by fresh data.
But why is that? Adam Malone, a former FBI special agent focused on cyber and now the top cyber crisis expert at the consulting firm Kroll, told the newspaper that video recorded by cloud systems goes through “layers and layers” of components, that data can go through hundreds of thousands of servers and systems distributed around the world. This, Malone explained, makes it more likely that data will be left behind.
“The wipe function just tells the file system to ignore that data and feel free to use that hard drive space for new data … so until it’s actually reused, that old data is still recoverable,” Nick Barreiro, an audio-video forensics analyst and founder of Principle Forensics, was quoted as saying by CNN.
“I’ve had cases where I could go back months or even years and find small fragments of video files that were still on the hard drive,” the digital forensics expert added of his experience.
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FBI Director Kash Patel hinted as much when he announced when the footage was released that some of the videos were recovered “from residual data located in backend systems.”
“Everybody would look at their development feeds and say, ‘Hey, are we processing any data? Do we have any historical data that’s still sitting around waiting to be deleted?’ Malone explained to CNN, commenting on Google’s likely approach.
Google technicians recovered this data, a process so complex that it took 10 days.
Shortly after the video was released, former prosecutor and current criminal defense lawyer John W Day told the New York Post: “It (the breakthrough) gives us some insight into what Google is capable of”.
“Even without a paid subscription, there’s a way to go to some data center and spend a lot of time and effort trying to find a particular camera at that particular time without a subscription. You can only imagine how difficult it would be if it took 10 days to get there,” Day explained.
However, the company has not yet commented.