The judge of the Supreme Court, Leopoldo Puente, summoned on Thursday four experts from the Civil Guard and two others hired by the defense of Santos Cerdán to compare their assessments on the eight intercepted audios of Koldo García, which constitute a key element in the accusations of the two former secretaries of the PSOE organization prosecuted by the Supreme Court, Cerdán and José Luis Ábalos. Experts from the armed institute defended the veracity of the recordings, while those from Cerdán maintained their doubts about the possibility that they had been manipulated or modified by artificial intelligence.
The agents submitted an expert report last September in which they concluded that the files registered, at least, between 2019 and 2023 had not been manipulated, but Cerdán’s lawyers registered a second expert report a few weeks ago which concluded the opposite, the magistrate therefore wanted to contrast the versions to “clarify, complete or specify” the result of his analysis.
Cerdán’s defense insisted this Thursday on asking what methods were used to analyze the audios within the Criminalistics Service of the Civil Guard. He points out that one of the audios appears to have been recorded on two operating systems, although agents explained that this happened due to an operating system update. software. During the interrogation it was also asked whether the recordings could be changed using artificial intelligence. Some sources indicate that the agents did not rule out this possibility, but others say that the Civil Guard assured that there was no evidence that they had been modified.
The audios intercepted by Koldo García during the search of his home support much of the accusations against the former Minister of Transport, his former advisor and Santos Cerdán, whose involvement in the alleged manipulation of public works contracts in exchange for bribes had not been confirmed until the Civil Guard examined these files. Thus, the defense of the former organizational secretary of the PSOE based part of its strategy on questioning the audios and on the request for their cancellation.
The Supreme Court has so far ruled out this possibility, but the judge summoned the experts after Cerdán’s lawyers presented a report prepared by two computer engineers, according to which the files “were processed, reconstructed, transferred or manipulated after” their recording. The proof of this manipulation, according to experts, is that the audios contain traces of versions of the Apple operating system subsequent to the time when the recordings were allegedly made.
The conclusion reached by this document is the opposite of that indicated by two agents of the Digital Engineering Department of the Criminalistics Service of the Civil Guard, who in a report sent to the judge declared that in the audios “no trace has been identified that shows alterations, manipulations or abnormal behavior”. In the report. Specialists from the armed institute are studying possible elements of the audios which “falsify the hypothesis of their authenticity”. And the experts detected “incidents” in some of the audios – “inconsistencies” in the date of recording in at least one of the files or other technical discrepancies between the audio and the device used to record it – which, in many cases, are explained by Civil Guard specialists in the updates of the operating system of the cell phones with which they were recorded.
However, the agents admit that the absence of certain recordings in the files studied “limits the reliability to precisely establish the exact moment when they were recorded, being unable to establish a reliable chronology of events.” It is for this reason that in several cases they mention the need to carry out “further studies” to dispel any doubt, even if they consider that it is “more probable” to observe the results of the authenticity analysis carried out on the archives “if the hypothesis of authenticity is the one that is considered true than if the opposite hypothesis is considered true”.
Taking into account the discrepancies between the two reports, the instructor considers it “relevant” that it is possible to “know, to the extent technically possible” whether the files “were recorded directly on the terminals in which they were found, or whether they could come from other audio files subsequently recorded in them, as well as whether said audio files are authentic, in the sense that one can exclude, in terms of reasonableness, that they could have made the object of some kind of manipulation, cutting or editing.
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