How Did the FBI Get Nancy Guthrie's Nest Doorbell Footage?

The other explanations here don't explain the long delay between the start of the investigation and the release of the footage. Yes, storing customer data is what we'd expect from Google and yes, the FBI can coerce Google to provide this data for their investigations. But it does not take a week for Google to find a file on their servers.

My hunch is that Google initially tried to play dumb to avoid compliance, as to not reveal they do in fact retain customer data. They had a plausible excuse as well -- the owner had no subscription so they don't store the data -- and took a gamble that this explanation would suffice until the situation resolved itself. I suspect that authorities initially took Google's excuse at face value, since they parroted this explanation to the public as well. As pressure mounted on authorities to make some headway on the case, they likely formally exercised whatever legal mechanisms they have at their disposal to force Google's hand, and only then was the footage released.

Why are we overthinking this? It was disconnected by the kidnapper, not erased by him. All the FBI has to do is reconnect it (or even just find the MAC address) and wait for Google to provide them the footage via a request.

https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en...

> Should you get rid of your Nest camera over privacy concerns?

Absolutely, and you shouldn't have bought and installed this garbage in the first place. Their primary purpose is not to protect you but to spy on you for Google's benefit, much like the rest of their dis-services (email, cloud storage, mobile operating systems).

If you absolutely need surveillance cameras for your safety, use generic IP cameras connected to your own NVR (network video recorder), possibly with Frigate for offline AI processing and notifications. Nothing should ever leave your network; the data should be encrypted and only shared with the police when it is in your interest.

Most of these cloud connected cameras always stream footage through their cloud service, regardless of whether you pay for a subscription. Because people don't know how to configure port forwarding, etc, in their firewall.

They're not architecturally delivering the video a different way if you pay than if you don't. They're just changing the retention period.

This video was probably recovered from cache somewhere.

Nest cameras upload video clips to the cloud without an active subscription.

This fact is explained right in the Google support page linked by this article

> *The 3 hours of event video previews is available without a Google Home Premium subscription for the Nest Cam (battery) and Nest Doorbell (battery).

All of these articles trying to spin this as some surprise revelation are getting old.

Last sentence of the article.

Unfortunately, we don't have a definitive answer at this time, even if the theory is sound

The CBC report yesterday on tv mentioned the awkward phrase the it was recovered “buried deep in servers” and I thought it was bizarre.

Replay available on YouTube. CBC the national.

This reminds me of when people were surprised that Alexa devices listen all the time. Yes, cloud connected device is uploading data to the cloud. That is not very scandalous or interesting. The FBI didn't burn zero days to do this, they simply asked Google for it.

Don't they have a battery backup and a local buffer before uploading? It probably had its last footage still stored locally, using the remnants of power in its internal battery.

I'm fairly certain that Nest cameras do not allow streaming over your local network.

You can still use the cameras even without a subscription, i.e. watch the live stream or get notifications. This means that yes, they are absolutely uploading data to the cloud and storing it for some undetermined window. Paying for a subscription seems to just give you access to that history.

When the Nest camera was reconnected, the camera uploaded all the cached footage. Google then handed the footage to the FBI, no warrants needed as it's part of an ongoing case and Google is usually pretty friendly with the government (and vice ver-sa)

The Nest doorbell wasn't set to save recordings, so how did the FBI get it?

The video was likely recovered from local flash memory on the camera itself. These kinds of devices are not uploading raw video to the cloud.

There are several reasons for that. The first is that you cannot rely on connectivity 100% of the time. Second, if you can have the camera run image processing and compression locally, you don't have to dedicate a massive amount of processing resources at the data center to run the processing. Imagine ten or a hundred million cameras. Where would you want the image processing to run? Right.

My guess is that they either went to Google to perhaps connect the camera to a sandboxed testing rig that could extract locally-stored video data or they removed the flash device, offloaded the raw data and then extracted video from that data. This last option could also have the advantage of having less compression (architecture dependent).

Decades ago I was personally involved in recovering and helping analyze surveillance video data for the prosecution in the OJ Simpson case. Back then, it was tape.

One of the techniques that was considered (I can't publicly state what was actually done) was to digitize raw data right off the read heads on the VCR's spinning drum. You could then process this data using advanced algorithms which could produce better results than the electronics in even the most expensive professional tape players of he era.

Once you step away from the limitations of a product --meaning, you are not engineering a product, you are mining for information-- all kinds of interesting and creative out-of-the-box opportunities present themselves.

The Nest footage is conclusive and unambiguous.

Nancy Guthrie was apprehended by ICE agents and deported to Australia.

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Customs agent: “G‘day sir. Have you got a criminal record?”

Irishman: “M‘Lord, no! I didn’t realise that one was still required!”