The FBI successfully retrieved critical video footage of a person of interest in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping from her Google Nest doorbell camera despite the device being disconnected with no active cloud storage subscription. The FBI was able to retrieve footage from Google’s “backend systems,” raising privacy concerns about smart home devices.
Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of U.S. television host Savannah Guthrie, disappeared under mysterious circumstances after returning home on the evening of January 31. When she failed to arrive at a friend’s house for church the following morning, concerned acquaintances reported her missing to authorities. The case quickly escalated into a complex investigation involving local law enforcement, the FBI, and multiple technology companies.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos initially indicated that recovering video from Guthrie’s doorbell camera would be extremely challenging. The camera had been disconnected at 1:47 a.m. local time, Guthrie did not have an active subscription service that would have saved video to the cloud, and the device itself had not been located. Despite these obstacles, law enforcement announced a breakthrough more than a week later.
FBI Director Kash Patel revealed that the bureau had recovered video footage showing an unidentified person wearing a mask and gloves, carrying a backpack and a gun, approaching Guthrie’s home shortly before she vanished. Investigators extracted the evidence from “backend systems” associated with the Google Nest camera infrastructure.
“Over the last eight days, the FBI and Pima County Sheriff’s Department have been working closely with our private sector partners to continue to recover any images or video footage from Nancy Guthrie’s home that may have been lost, corrupted, or inaccessible due to a variety of factors — including the removal of recording devices. The video was recovered from residual data located in backend systems,” Patel wrote on the social media platform X.
Timothy Gallagher, a retired FBI agent who previously led the Newark field office, explained that even without an active paid subscription, the device could still have been transmitting data. “The data is being transmitted to the cloud, but even if it had not gotten there, there are many stops in between where data will reside, and the FBI prides itself on being able to tear into these data streams and pull out bits and pieces of data and piece together an image like we see here today,” Gallagher said.
Former FBI cybercrime agent E.J. Hilbert emphasized the technical complexity of the recovery. “Nest/Google deletes billions of data points every hour,” Hilbert said. “To find this data set means that they are finding a single needle in a 10K ft by 10K ft haystack.”
Sheriff Nanos had previously acknowledged the challenges during a February 3 interview. “The cameras we’re working with, they’re not on a cloud, so the data has to go through a server, has to take some time to get to the company that has that and get them warrants and services,” he explained. He also praised cooperation from tech companies: “I can’t even tell you how many different corporate America, Google, Apple, Meta, all these companies have said, ‘Whatever you need, Sheriff, they’re there,’ and we’re utilizing that leverage to get things done as quickly as we can.”
Google acknowledged its involvement but declined to provide specific details about how the video was recovered. The company’s transparency report states it maintains strict protocols to protect user privacy, noting: “For example, if a U.S. government agency presented us with a search warrant to investigate a crime they think was captured on a Nest Cam, we wouldn’t just hand over user data. We’d analyze the request to be sure the warrant wasn’t overly broad, then we’d make sure the information they requested was within the scope of the warrant.”
Josh Brunty, a professor of cyber forensics at Marshall University, explained that law enforcement agencies must submit formal legal requests through Google’s Law Enforcement Request System, with responses typically processed within a few days.
Newer Google Nest doorbells include backup batteries and local storage that automatically capture events such as a person approaching the door, potentially preserving data even if the device is disconnected. The exact circumstances surrounding the camera’s disconnection remain part of the ongoing investigation.
Read more at NBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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