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Technology
How tech is being used in Nancy Guthrie disappearance investigation
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Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of “Today” show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing from her home in the Catalina Foothills area near Tucson after she failed to appear for church and could not be reached by family. When deputies arrived, several things stood out. Her phone, wallet and car keys were inside the home. The daily medication she relies on was left behind. Given her age and mobility challenges, investigators said she would not have left voluntarily.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has since stated publicly that the case is being treated as a suspected abduction, and the home was processed as a crime scene. As the search continues, investigators are piecing together not only physical evidence and witness tips, but also the digital trail left behind by everyday technology.
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Investigators are examining digital clues from phones, cameras and networks to help narrow the timeline in the Nancy Guthrie missing person investigation. (Courtesy of NBC)
Why technology matters in missing person investigations
In cases like this, technology rarely delivers a single smoking gun. Instead, it helps investigators answer quieter but critical questions that shape a timeline. Investigators ask when everything still looked normal. They look for the moment when devices stopped communicating. They try to pinpoint when something changed. Phones, medical devices, cellular networks and cameras generate timestamps. Those records help narrow the window when events may have taken a dangerous turn.
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Smart cameras and neighborhood footage can provide crucial time markers, even when images are unclear or partially obscured. (Courtesy of NBC)
How investigators connect data across agencies
Behind the scenes, investigators rely on advanced analytical systems to connect information from multiple sources and jurisdictions. In Tucson and across Pima County, law enforcement agencies use artificial intelligence-assisted crime analysis platforms such as COPLINK, which allows data sharing with at least 19 other police departments across Arizona. These systems help investigators cross-reference tips, reports, vehicle data and digital evidence more quickly than manual searches.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department, Tucson Police Department and the FBI also work through real-time analytical crime centers, including Tucson’s Real-Time Analytical Crime Center (TRACC). These centers allow analysts to review large volumes of data together, from phone records and license plate reads to surveillance timestamps.
This type of analysis does not replace traditional police work. It helps narrow timelines, rule out possibilities and prioritize leads as new information comes in.
Bluetooth data and Apple’s potential role
iOS may retain low-level Bluetooth artifacts outside the pacemaker app. Access to this data typically requires:
- Legal process
- Apple cooperation
- Device forensic extraction
Bluetooth artifacts cannot determine distance. They cannot show that two devices were a few feet apart. What they can sometimes provide is timestamp correlation, confirming that a Bluetooth interaction occurred. That correlation can help align pacemaker activity with phone movement or inactivity. It is not publicly known whether Apple has been formally contacted in this case. An inquiry has been made. Apple typically does not comment on specific investigations but may confirm what categories of data could be available.
What the iPhone itself may reveal
Even without medical data, the iPhone left behind may provide valuable corroboration. With proper legal access, investigators may examine:
- Motion sensor activity
- Cellular network connections
- Wi-Fi associations
- Camera metadata
- Power and usage patterns
This data can help establish whether the phone moved unexpectedly or stopped being used at a specific time. Again, the value lies in confirming timelines, not speculating motives.
Cell tower data and coverage around the home
Public mapping databases show dense cellular coverage in the area surrounding the Guthrie residence. There are 41 cell towers within a three-mile radius. The closest carrier towers are approximately:
- AT&T at 1.0 mile
- Verizon at 1.4 miles
- T-Mobile at 3.0 miles
Carrier records can be analyzed to identify device connections, sector handoffs and anomalous activity during the critical window between Saturday evening and Sunday morning. This analysis is complex, but it can help confirm whether a device moved or disconnected unexpectedly.
Cameras, license plate readers and neighborhood footage
Investigators are also reviewing surveillance systems. Tucson primarily uses Verkada cameras integrated with the Fusus platform. Flock Safety cameras are used in other parts of the region, including South Tucson.
More than 200 automatic license plate readers are deployed in the broader area, allowing investigators to review historical vehicle movements during the critical time window. These systems can capture license plates, vehicle make and color, vehicle type and alerts tied to suspect vehicles.
Private sources may matter just as much. Neighbor doorbell cameras and home systems can provide important timeline markers, even if the footage is grainy. Some modern vehicles also record motion near parked cars if settings are enabled.
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Everyday devices quietly record timestamps that may help investigators understand when something has changed and where to look next. (Courtesy of NBC)
Ways to keep your loved ones safe
Technology can help protect older or vulnerable relatives, but it works best when combined with everyday habits that reduce risk.
1) Use connected cameras
Install smart doorbell cameras and outdoor security cameras that notify family members when someone unfamiliar appears. Alerts can matter just as much as recorded footage. Many newer systems allow AI-based person detection, which can alert you when an unknown person is seen at certain times of day or night. These alerts can be customized, so family members know when activity breaks a normal pattern, not just when motion is detected.
2) Wear an emergency pendant or medical alert device
Emergency pendants and wearable SOS devices let someone call for help with a single press. Many newer models work outside the home and can alert caregivers if a fall is detected. Some devices also include GPS, which helps when someone becomes disoriented or leaves home unexpectedly. This remains one of the most overlooked safety tools for older adults.
3) Enable device sharing and safety features
If your loved one agrees, enable location sharing, emergency contacts and built-in safety features on their phone or wearable.
On smartphones, this can include:
- Emergency SOS
- Medical ID access from the lock screen
- Trusted location sharing through apps like Find My
These features work quietly in the background, allowing help to reach the right people quickly without requiring daily interaction.
4) Create simple check-in routines
Use apps, text reminders or calendar alerts that prompt regular check-ins. If a message goes unanswered, it creates a reason to follow up quickly instead of assuming everything is fine. Consistency matters more than complexity.
5) Use devices with passive safety monitoring
Some phones, wearables and home systems can detect changes in normal daily activity without requiring a button press. For example, smartphones and smartwatches can notice when movement patterns suddenly stop or change. If a device that usually moves every morning stays still for hours, that shift can trigger alerts or prompt a check-in from a caregiver. Smart home systems can also flag unusual inactivity. Motion sensors that normally register movement throughout the day may show a long gap, which can signal that something is wrong. Passive monitoring works in the background. It reduces the need for constant interaction while still creating early warning signs when routines break.
6) Know emergency contacts and escalation steps
Enable smart alerts from home security systems so that family members know when doors open late at night, remain open longer than normal or when systems are armed or disarmed. Fire and smoke listener alerts and bedside panic buttons add another layer of protection, especially overnight. Car apps can also share safety signals, such as when a vehicle is unlocked, a door or window is left open or when location sharing is enabled with trusted family members.
“No single device can protect someone on its own,” a law enforcement expert told CyberGuy. “What helps most is layering. A camera paired with a wearable. A phone paired with check-ins. Technology paired with human attention. Each layer adds context and reduces blind spots. Together, they create earlier warnings and faster responses when something goes wrong.”
Kurt’s key takeaways
The disappearance of Nancy Guthrie is heartbreaking. It also highlights how deeply modern technology is woven into everyday life. Digital data from phones, cellular networks, and cameras can offer valuable insights, but only when used responsibly and in compliance with privacy laws. As this investigation continues, technology may help law enforcement narrow timelines and test theories, even if it cannot answer every question. In cases like this, every detail matters.
As digital footprints grow more detailed, should tech companies give law enforcement broader access when someone goes missing? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.
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A long time ago, in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission laid down a rule designed to prevent a monopoly: No one company could broadcast to more than 39 percent of all the TV households in the United States. But then Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Brendan Carr became FCC chairman and immediately kicked off a deregulatory initiative called “Delete, Delete, Delete,” in which Carr vowed to get rid of “every rule, regulation, or guidance document” that placed “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on companies. And within months, Nexstar, which already owned over 200 stations nationwide and had hit its ownership cap, announced that it had entered an agreement to purchase its rival, Tegna, for an estimated $6.2 billion — something that could only happen, however, if Carr agreed to change the FCC’s rules.
If you ask Nexstar why it’s pursuing a merger that would give it control of over 80 percent of the market, it’d point to Big Tech as the culprit. As advertisers take their money to Netflix, YouTube, and other digital streamers, linear television — the local television news, the broadcast affiliates, the basic cable networks — has suffered, forcing them to consolidate and shut down newsrooms. In that sense, Nexstar argued, the merger would help it compete for ad revenue with the streaming services, thereby building more robust local journalism. However, the merger’s opponents believe that this is a basic violation of antitrust laws and principles — not to mention the danger of letting one company have editorial control over the vast majority of America’s local television newsrooms.
But the second Trump administration handles regulatory hurdles a little differently than others, and companies have found that it’s faster to get what they want if they bypass the agencies and talk (read: suck up) to Trump directly. And when Nexstar did so publicly, it confirmed its opponents’ fears about political influence. Last September, in the fraught weeks after the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, Nexstar announced it would no longer broadcast Jimmy Kimmel Live! — a response to Carr’s claim that the FCC could revoke the broadcast licenses of TV stations that aired the comedian’s comments related to Kirk. It briefly led to ABC suspending Kimmel’s show, though ABC and Nexstar soon reversed their decision after a massive nationwide backlash and an ABC boycott.
However, Nexstar’s loyalty to Trump himself was not enough to win over his most powerful MAGA supporters. Newsmax, a cable news network with a deeply pro-Trump bent, and its CEO, longtime Trump donor and outside adviser Chris Ruddy, filed a lawsuit objecting to the merger, claiming that Nexstar’s anticompetitive behavior would force channels like his off the air with steeper carriage fees. He specifically accused Nexstar of jacking up the fees for stations to carry Newsmax, while offering its similar network, NewsNation, for much cheaper.
The Nexstar-Tegna MAGA makeover then took a more subtle turn. NewsNation hired the pro-Trump Fox News commentator Katie Pavlich and gave her her own primetime show. (The network had already hired a slew of former Fox journalists as well.) Around this time, a political group called Keep News Local began airing ads in DC that seemed to directly address Trump, praising him for having “defeated the fake news monopolies before through independent voices and local news” and claiming that the Nexstar-Tegna merger was “crucial for MAGA to survive.” (A little self-contradictory and mildly illogical, but it’s the kind of stuff that Trump likes to hear.) When I last spoke to Ruddy in February, I asked if he’d worried that the dark money going into Keep News Local would sway Trump, and he chose his words carefully: “I think at the end of the day, Trump makes up his own mind. I’m not sure he’s going to be influenced by an ad campaign.”
For months, no one could accurately predict if Trump would override Carr’s wishes and bless the deal, as he’s often done for other companies facing regulatory scrutiny. Trump’s Truth Social posts about the merger have been a good indicator of how precarious the merger has been and who’s been able to influence him at any given moment: Last November, he blasted the deal as an “EXPANSION OF THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS,” but by February, he posted that the deal would “help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition.”
Several current and former NewsNation employees told Status at the time that they feared that the parent company was steering NewsNation away from the centrist, “unbiased” reputation they’d long cultivated. “A lot of people within the network believe that the network has gone hard right to appeal to Trump and Brendan Carr,” one former employee told Status. Coincidentally, days before the deal was finalized, NewsNation began ramping up its explicitly pro-Trump content, tweeting a clip of CNN’s Kaitlan Collins being berated by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, along with the comment “Just going to leave this here.”
When Trump greenlit the merger in mid-March, but before the FCC’s three commissioners could vote on whether to waive the ownership cap, Nexstar and Tegna immediately announced a new complication: Tegna and Nexstar had already started merging. Tegna was no more and CEO Mike Steib had already sold $22.6 million of his company stock.
In response, eight state attorneys general and satellite TV operator DirectTV, which had already been planning to file separate federal antitrust suits against the merger, asked US District Judge Troy Nunley in Sacramento for an emergency restraining order that would prevent Nexstar from taking over Tegna’s assets. The order was granted on March 27th and on April 17, Nunley issued a formal injunction, ruling that Tegna must be operated as an independent financial entity, and Nexstar must take steps to ensure it remains separate from Tegna before further legal proceedings.
For now, Nunley has allowed the states and DirecTV to combine their cases, in which both argue that the merger was a clear violation of antitrust laws and would crush news competition.
Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats in Congress are furious at Carr. On March 30th, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sent the chairman a joint letter admonishing him for allowing his staff to waive the regulations to let the merger pass, instead of having the full commission of political appointees — one from the Biden administration — vote on it. “Under these circumstances,” they wrote, “any subsequent vote risks being largely procedural rather than a genuine exercise of commission responsibility.” They also pointed out that their hasty approval without the commission’s approval would now complicate the merger financially: “In a transaction of this scale, where integration proceeds quickly and unwinding becomes impractical, delay in judicial review can insulate the decision from meaningful challenge.” Notably, though they share similar ideological views on the media and deregulation, Cruz and Carr have frequently clashed over how to achieve their objectives. Cruz previously slammed Carr as a “mafioso,” for instance, for the way he’d used the FCC to silence Kimmel.
But even if it’s legally paused, the journalistic merger’s fallout has started to hit local news. NPR’s David Folkenfirk reported on Tuesday that Tegna journalists had already started receiving orders to stop broadcasting content from major broadcasters like ABC, CBS, and NBC — media outlets being targeted by Carr — and instead begin airing content from Nexstar’s NewsNation.
- Brendan Carr’s views on using the FCC to punish major broadcasters was outlined pretty extensively in the chapter he authored in Project 2025, an initiative led by the conservative Heritage Foundation on how to reform the federal bureaucracy to be more favorable to the American right.
- Exactly how much is local television losing to digital? According to industry publication NewscastStudio, in an investor call defending the purchase, Nexstar chairman Perry Sook cited a market research study from Borrell Associates, which found that “digital advertising in local markets exceeds $100 billion, compared to just $25 billion for local linear television advertising, with nearly two-thirds of digital ad dollars flowing to five major technology companies.”
- If you want to see exactly how much Keep Local News was trying to suck up to Trump, the ads are archived here.
- The Vergecast has a long-running segment called “Brendan Carr is a dummy.”
- The LA Times reported on last week’s preliminary hearings in front of Nunley, and how lawyers for Nexstar, the states, and DirecTV plan to argue their case.
- The Desk has insights from Kirk Varner, a former TV newsroom director, on how the case could go.
- Andrew Liptak covered Nexstar’s previous acquisition sprees for The Verge in 2018.
- Adi Robertson walks through exactly how the Kimmel suspension was an attack on free speech.
- Brendan Carr keeps trying to convince people that he’s not threatening to suspend broadcast licenses for reporting on unfavorable things like the Iran war, reports Lauren Feiner.
- The Vergecast has a long-running segment called “Brendan Carr is a dummy.”
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A Chinese-built humanoid robot beat the human half-marathon world record in Beijing on Sunday, marking a breakthrough moment in a high-stakes global race for technological dominance.
A robot developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor completed the 21-kilometer (13-mile) race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human record of about 57 minutes set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo last month.
The performance marked a dramatic improvement from last year’s inaugural event, when the top robot finished in more than 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Dozens of humanoid robots competed alongside about 12,000 human runners, navigating a parallel course to avoid collisions.
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A robot crosses the finish line in the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon held in the outskirts of Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Andy Wong/AP)
Nearly half of the robots ran using autonomous navigation, while others relied on remote control, organizers said.
Despite the breakthrough, the race still saw glitches, with some robots stumbling at the start or veering into barriers.
Engineers said the winning robot was designed to mimic elite athletes, featuring long legs of about 37 inches and advanced cooling systems to sustain performance.
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“Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas,” said Du Xiaodi, an engineer with the Honor team. “For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios.”
Team members celebrate next to the winning Honor Lightning humanoid robot during a medal ceremony after the second Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in Beijing, China, on April 19, 2026. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)
Spectators reacted with a mix of amazement and unease at the machines’ rapid progress.
“It’s the first time robots have surpassed humans, and that’s something I never imagined,” Sun Zhigang, who attended the event with his son, told The Associated Press.
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“The robots’ speed far exceeds that of humans,” spectator Wang Wen told the outlet. “This may signal the arrival of sort of a new era.”
A robot starts alongside human runners at the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Half Marathon on the outskirts of Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Ng Han Guan/AP)
Experts say the race highlights China’s accelerating push to dominate robotics and artificial intelligence, even as widespread commercial use of humanoid robots remains limited, according to Reuters. The experts said Chinese robotics firms are still working to develop the AI software needed for humanoids to match the efficiency of human factory workers.
Runners take pictures of a humanoid robot during the second Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Haruna Furuhashi/Pool Photo via AP)
“The future will definitely be an AI era,” engineering student Chu Tianqi told Reuters. “If people don’t know how to use AI now … they will definitely become obsolete.”
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The competition underscores a broader technological race between China and the United States, as Beijing invests heavily in advanced robotics as part of its long-term economic strategy.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.
The world’s largest memory makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — are all working to add new fabrication capacity, but almost none of it will be online until at least 2027, if not 2028. SK opened a fab in Cheongju in February, but that is the only increase in production among the three for 2026.
Nikkei says that production would need to increase by 12 percent a year in 2026 and 2027 to meet demand. But according to Counterpoint Research, an increase of only 7.5 percent is planned.
The new facilities will primarily focus on producing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is used in AI data centers. With the companies already prioritizing HBM over general-purpose DRAM used in computers and phones, it’s not clear how much these new fabs will help alleviate the price crunch facing consumer electronics. Everything from phones and laptops, to VR headsets and gaming handhelds have seen price increases due to the RAM shortage.
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