Earlier this
year, at the height of a very public battle between the FBI and Apple
over whether the computer maker would help decrypt a mass murderer’s
locked iPhone, it appeared that a little-known, 17-year-old Israeli
firm named Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization might finally get its
moment in the spotlight.
After weeks
of insisting that only Apple could help the feds unlock the phone of
San Bernardino killer Syed Rizwan Farook, the Justice Department
suddenly revealed that a third party had provided a way to get into
the device. Speculation swirled around the identity of that party
until an Israeli newspaper reported it was Cellebrite.
It turns out
the company was not the third party that helped the FBI. A Cellebrite
representative said as much during a panel discussion at a high-tech
crimes conference in Minnesota this past April, according to a
conference attendee who spoke with The Intercept. And sources who
spoke with the Washington Post earlier this year also ruled out
Cellebrite’s involvement, though Yossi Carmil, one of Cellebrite’s
CEOs, declined to comment on the matter when asked by The Intercept.
But the
attention around the false report obscured a bigger, more interesting
truth: Cellebrite’s researchers have become, over the last decade,
the FBI’s go-to hackers for mobile forensics. Many other federal
agencies also rely on the company’s expertise to get into mobile
devices. Cellebrite has contracts with the FBI going back to 2009,
according to federal procurement records, but also with the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, and DHS’s Customs
and Border Protection. U.S. state and local law enforcement agencies
use Cellebrite’s researchers and tools as well, as does the U.S.
military, to extract data from phones seized from suspected
terrorists and others in battle zones.
Full
report:
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