FOIA docs: law enforcement in over 11 states, including CA, FL, and NY, spent $4M+ over the past decade on software and devices that can break into smartphones
While the FBI requests ‘backdoor’ iPhone access, documents indicate law enforcement already has easy access to encrypted devices
Context & Ripple Effects
This FOIA haul puts a dollar figure on a story that has been building for years: since the FBI's $1.3M San Bernardino iPhone break-in in 2016, the bureau's public posture has been that it cannot get into encrypted phones — with Director Christopher Wray reporting agents failed to unlock over half of the 6,900+ devices they tried in fiscal 2017 — even as vendors quietly sold access to local police. Motherboard's earlier reporting traced Cellebrite working with US agencies across 20 states, and leaked Cellebrite docs later showed NYC police could unlock all iOS and high-end Android devices on their own since 2018.
The new documents matter because they undercut the central argument of the FBI's 'backdoor' campaign: if agencies in over 11 states have already spent $4M+ on phone-cracking tools, the encryption debate is not about capability the government lacks but about access it wants formalized.
First-order effects
- Local police departments in CA, FL, NY and other named states are revealed as paying customers of smartphone-cracking vendors, shifting scrutiny from federal agencies like the FBI to thousands of municipal buyers with far less oversight.
- The FBI's public case for mandated backdoors — that lawful-access needs exist because technical workarounds fall short — is directly contradicted by its own field offices' procurement records.
Second-order effects
- Vendors like Cellebrite gain a documented, decade-long revenue base across state and local law enforcement, entrenching a commercial market whose growth the NYT's later count of 2,000 equipped agencies confirms.
- Apple and device makers face pressure to harden against not just one adversary but a distributed buyer base, since every local department holding extraction tools widens the attack surface beyond what an FBI-only threat model assumes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US encryption policy splits into two tracks: a public legislative fight over backdoors coexisting with a quiet, procurement-driven status quo where access is already bought — making formal lawful-access mandates less necessary and vendor regulation the real battleground.
- FOIA-driven accountability becomes the primary check on this market, since the spending happens below the level where congressional oversight or court precedent (like the San Bernardino case) currently reaches.
The trend: Law enforcement's access to encrypted phones is being built through decentralized commercial procurement rather than legislation, hollowing out the FBI's backdoor argument as it makes it.