Baltimore Brings Back Controversial Cellphone Hacking System
Cellebrite is a dream come true for police surveillance. Plug in any cellphone, even a locked one, and get a full report of every file on its hard drive. Cellebrite, along with its main competitor, Grayshift, is one of the few companies offering this service. No wonder the Baltimore Police Department, like 6,900 other law enforcement agencies, bought a subscription.
Where police saw a dream, however, courts saw a constitutional nightmare. In September 2022, the 5th Appellate Judicial Circuit in Maryland ruled that police must stop using “general and overbroad warrants” to scrape the entire content of people’s cellphones. After the ruling, Baltimore police announced that they would suspend their use of Cellebrite and work with lawyers “to ensure the current search warrant template is in line with all requirements.”
Less than a year after the ruling, Baltimore cops re-upped their Cellebrite subscription, Reason has learned. In response to a Maryland Public Information Act sent through the website MuckRock, the Baltimore Police Department disclosed a $112,940 contract for Cellebrite services from March 2023 to March 2024, and another $6,100 contract from September 2023 to September 2024.
The Baltimore Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The contracts also shed light on how Cellebrite services work. The March 2023 contract includes a license for using the Cellebrite software for an unlimited number of scans over one year and a physical kit for conducting the scans. The September 2023 contract is an additional subscription to the “UFED 4 PC Ultimate” service, which allows police to run the cellphone extraction software on their office computer.
Cellebrite “probably provides the device and then has something on the device that— after the subscription expires—will lock the device, so that [police] need to renew the subscription,” says William Budington, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties nonprofit. “So they’ll have this specific device that’s provided to the law enforcement agency, and then they’ll have to get a contract for a certain amount of time.”
The device works to bypass the “secure enclave,” the hardware that prevents a phone’s storage from being read while it is locked. Then the software generates a report, sometimes thousands of pages long, listing all of the information stored on the phone. Police can specify what specific parts of the phone’s storage they would like to search, although they are often loath to limit their searches.
“When you have a cellphone and you suspect it’s used as an element of a crime, you don’t know where those elements are going to be stored,” digital forensics expert William Folson told the Baltimore Sun in response to the 2022 court ruling. “Let’s say, for example, I send a threatening letter to somebody. I can type that out on my phone, I can send it as an em
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