Supreme Court magistrate Ángel Hurtado has issued a rogatory commission to ask WhatsApp and Google for help in order to recover the chats and emails of the state attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz.
The instructor has agreed this diligence at the request of the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard and in the framework of the investigation that leads by the complaint filed by Alberto González Amador, partner of the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, against the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office for alleged disclosure of secrets. In an order, collected by Europa Press, the magistrate explains that he adopts this decision by considering that the request of the UCO is “reasonable” and “coherent” to try to recover the information of the messaging applications linked to the phones of the attorney general. This measure takes place after the Civil Guard informed the magistrate that it had found “zero messages” in the devices that were seized from García Ortiz during the search of his office. To try to recover this information, the instructor asks WhatsApp LLC for the messages received and/or sent by the users, indicating the basic details associated with these communications (sender, receiver, day, time, etc.), the backup copies of the chats and/or multimedia files available and associated with the users and the log or record of the communications made by the users, including the date, time, origin, destination and type of communication. For its part, it claims from Google Inc the data stored in the various services and products linked to the account, backups of the devices linked to the account, backups of third-party applications, backups of the chats and/or multimedia files available and associated to the user and log or record of the communications made by the user, including date, time, origin, destination and type of communication.
Analysis from March 8 to 14
In addition, the magistrate agrees to conduct a working copy of the complete information dump corresponding to a cell phone belonging to García Ortiz and authorizes an analysis to be made in order to access the instant messaging applications and obtain the information that will allow access to them.
In the event that access could be gained to the communications contained in any of these instant messaging applications, Hurtado authorizes the corresponding analysis to be carried out from March 8 to 14, 2024, the days investigated for being the key days of the alleged leak. The instructor also authorizes the UCO to connect to the databases where files susceptible of containing the information of interest could be found in order to proceed to its downloading, processing and subsequent analysis. On this point, he stresses that it should be taken into account that, from what has been done so far, the information that has been obtained of interest to the case has been extracted from the instant messaging application Whatsapp.
