Prompts betrayed: How did the police recover history from Gemini and are you exposed too?
Photo: Facebook page. The investigation into the escape of Meli and Liel Yahalomi has revealed the technological methods used by the police to recover data from AI chatbots.
The tense escape drama of Meli and Liel Yahalomi concluded in the season finale when Walter Alejandro Cogan, an Israel Police agent in South America, located the two and questioned them on a bus in Argentina. Now, technological details behind their escape are being revealed, shedding light on the investigation by the police cyber division.
It was discovered that the two used Google's Gemini to plan their escape: they checked where to purchase phones without identification, which countries lack extradition agreements with Israel, and which apps to delete to prevent tracking. Despite deleting their search history, Lahav 433 investigators managed to recover the information and track them down.
Can the police reach your AI history?
How do police extract information deleted from AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini? Adv. Guy Bakshi, head of the privacy protection services department at the Pearl Cohen firm, explains that there are two main paths. The first is "forensic production" of physical information from the device itself.
Even if chats are deleted, browsers and applications save cache, temporary files, and logs. If a user shared a chat link via messaging apps or left an active session on a computer, this can assist in locating the information. Additionally, specialized companies can extract data that was allegedly deleted from SSDs. As long as the space has not been "overwritten" by new data, it can be recovered. Law enforcement agencies worldwide utilize the capabilities of forensic firms, such as the Israeli company Cellebrite, to locate such data.
The second path is a request for data from the cloud provider or the AI company. "I assume that the tools used in the current case are relevant to the first path," notes Bakshi, adding that, to his knowledge, Google was not involved and did not receive a warrant to provide information from its servers.
Binding warrant for an international company
The legal aspect is complex, as the Computer Law requires a specific and focused judge's warrant to search queries and prompts. However, when data resides in the cloud, issues arise. "When penetrating a device that synchronizes to the cloud, a question arises whether the warrant even covers cloud information not saved on the device itself," explains Bakshi. Since Gemini conversation history is typically stored in the cloud, some information might not be accessible through routine local production.
Enforcing warrants on tech giants is a significant challenge. Having a local representation of a foreign company is significant, as it is harder to enforce an Israeli warrant against companies without an Israeli connection. Google has both sales and development representation in Israel, whereas OpenAI and Anthropic currently do not.
Bakshi explains that companies receiving requests from authorized authorities are obliged to act accordingly, but they strive to disclose only the minimum information required. This is even more relevant if servers are located in Europe and subject to GDPR, which permits the transfer of information to foreign authorities only under valid international agreements.
