Member-only story
EXCLUSIVE: Inside New York City’s Partnership With Israeli iPhone Hacking Company Cellebrite
Documents reveal the Manhattan DA subscribes to a program that lets authorities break into iPhones in-house
In June 2019, the secretive Israeli digital forensics firm Cellebrite, which works with law enforcement to unlock cell phones, announced a significant product development: For the first time, government agencies would be able to break into phones in-house using licensed Cellebrite software.
Cellebrite’s new UFED Premium program gave law enforcement the ability to “unlock and extract data from all iOS and high-end Android devices” on their own.
Previously, if law enforcement wanted to get into newer devices, they had to send the phones to one of Cellebrite’s digital forensics labs, located in New Jersey and Virginia. But Cellebrite’s new UFED Premium program gave law enforcement the ability to “unlock and extract data from all iOS and high-end Android devices” on their own, using software installed on computers in their offices.
The announcement made waves in the phone-cracking world. But documents obtained by OneZero reveal that…
