At the beginning of last week, the prosecutor in the case of Alexander AstesianGabriela Fossati, announced that only 2% of the data could be extracted that were inside the cell phone former custodian of Luis Lacalle Pou.
At the end of September, Astesiano was arrested at the presidential residence of Suárez and Reyes and it is presumed that he was alerted to such a thing, since he had deleted a large part of the data on his phone.
Faced with this panorama, and when the device was seized, they began the skills to recover the deleted data that, in electronic devices with a hard drive, remain for a certain time before being rewritten with new information.
But there was little success and 98% of what was on the smartphone had not been restored. For this, Fossati said, many economic resources were required that were not available.
“Retrieving that information takes a long time and is very expensive. […], you have to pay application services. It is very unfortunate for this Prosecutor’s Office, but it is something to which we are all exposed”, argued the lawyer.
The license was held
But there was a dizzying turn of events when nearly all of Astesiano’s smartphone data could be recovered using software called Cellebrite UFED 4PC, despite Fossati’s claims that “application services” had to be paid for.
The first attempt to buy the software was in 2016: On March 28 of that year, Direct Purchase 21/2016 was published, under the purview of the National Directorate of Scientific Police of the Ministry of the Interior. The concept was “renewal of two Cellebrite UFED equipment licenses for a period of 24 months”. The amount in national currency destined for this concept was not detailed in said call.
However, that purchase was rendered null and void on April 8 of the same year, meaning that no payment was made for such licenses. “Due to the amount, an abbreviated tender will be called,” reads the annulled award.
But on September 12, 2018, as it appears on the portal of the State Purchasing Regulatory Agency (ARCE), Direct Purchase 87/2018 fully awarded the purchase of the Cellebrite UFED 4PC software license to the company Softron Uruguay SA (ID 214530410012).
The total amount paid to the successful bidder was $399,245.00. In this case, only one license was purchased and not two, as had been the case in 2016.
