By Hadas Gold, Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — A major breakthrough in the Nancy Guthrie case largely came down to Google’s technical expertise, a person familiar with the investigation told CNN.

The mother of “Today” host Savannah Guthrie disappeared over a week ago in Arizona. But on Tuesday, authorities revealed footage of a masked and armed person outside her door on the day she went missing after initially saying the video was not able to be recovered. Engineers at Google, which owns Nest, were able to recover data after several days.

The task was so technically complex that investigators didn’t know if it would be successful, the source said. An FBI official said on X that the bureau released the images within hours of obtaining them.

CNN reached out to Nest and Google for comment.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos initially said there was “no video available” because Guthrie “had no subscription” to Google’s video recording service, which keeps videos from Nest cameras accessible in Google’s cloud.

But Nest still saves around three hours of “event-based” video history for free before being deleted. That data lives in Google’s cloud and servers. Even if the data had been deleted from Google’s systems, it could still exist somewhere and be recoverable because even files slated for deletion can exist until they are overwritten by new data, said Nick Barreiro, an audio-video forensic analyst and the founder of Principle Forensics.

“A delete function is just telling the file system to ignore that data and feel free to use that space on the hard drive for new data …. so until it’s actually used again, that old data is still recoverable,” Barreiro said. “I’ve had cases where I could go back months or even years and find little fragments of video files that were still on the hard drive.”

FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on social media Tuesday that authorities, “working closely with our private sector partners,” recovered some video “from residual data located in backend systems” in the Guthrie case.

Investigators had sent a search warrant to Google for the Nest cameras at the Guthrie residence last week, the source added. Such a move is common in a criminal investigation.

Adam Malone, the top cyber crisis expert at cybersecurity advisory firm Kroll and a former cyber-focused FBI special agent, told CNN that video recorded by cloud-based systems goes through “layers and layers” of components to make the application work.

For example, “there might be one that just processes the data into a new compressed format,” Malone said. “There might be one that renders it a certain visual format.”

The footage and its underlying data could go through hundreds of thousands of servers and systems all over the world — increasing the chance of residual data being left behind.

“All those layers have code, and as data moves around to be processed and made available to the customer, it will move through different layers of sub applications, sub servers, sub storage components,” Malone said, speaking generally about application architecture and data handling.

Each of those components would present an opportunity for data recovery, Malone said.

“They would have all looked at their development pipelines to say, ‘Hey, do we process any data? Do we have any historical data that’s still sitting here waiting to be purged?” Malone said. “It could be that this one, just for some reason, was in a queue that hadn’t been processed and it just still existed.”

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By Sana Noor Haq, CNN

(CNN) — For years, Mahnoor Omer didn’t talk about it.

Every time the topic arose, her school friends in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, flushed with embarrassment, Omer recalled.

“This happened so many times. A class fellow of mine would get her period during class,” she told CNN late last year. “Her white kameez on the back was entirely red. She freaked out. She had absolutely no idea what was going on with her.”

Now, the 25-year-old lawyer and her colleague, Ahsan Jehangir Khan, 29, are trying to rip apart that stigma – and ensure girls and women can access the sanitary products they need – through a landmark legal case which calls on the government to remove tax on menstrual products and categorize them as essential goods instead of luxury items.

Several medical workers and women’s rights activists who support the case told CNN that pervasive social taboos over sexual health in Pakistan have led to tax policies that prevent swathes of the population from being able to afford essential sanitary items, exacerbating gender inequalities in education, health and social welfare.

“I think what we’ve started here is not a legal case, but a movement to now bring period poverty to the forefront,” said Omer.

Omer, the petitioner in the case, and Khan, who is representing her, say they hope to replicate the success of similar efforts elsewhere, which have led to governments either reducing taxes on period products or slashing them altogether – including in India and Nepal.

That regional ripple of legislative change “emboldened” them, Khan told CNN, adding: “In the Global South, people or governments are talking about this. We should be the ones taking charge.”

CNN has reached out to Pakistan’s health ministry for comment on the case.

‘Weak’ implementation of law

Bushra Mahnoor, a reproductive rights activist, counts herself among a small proportion of women and girls in Pakistan – about 12%, according to the UN’s children’s agency (UNICEF) – who use commercial sanitary products, rather than homemade alternatives.

Even so, menstrual products were a “luxury” in her family home, she said, adding that she often lined her pads with cotton, or used cleaning rags, to try to make them last for hours longer than medically advised.

“Periods were very traumatic during my whole childhood,” the 22-year-old from Attock, a small town in Punjab province, northern Pakistan, told CNN. She started menstruating at the age of 10 – a “very isolating” chapter of life, she said.

Lawyers say that by applying tax to sanitary items, the Pakistani government has systemically neglected women’s and girls’ rights to health and education – impeding their ability to fully participate in public life – and violated Article 25 of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.

Under the Sales Tax Act of 1990, an 18% sales tax was imposed on locally made sanitary pads and a 25% cu

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