Report: at least 2,000 US law enforcement agencies, including 49 of the 50 largest police departments, have the tools to access locked, encrypted phones
At least 2,000 law enforcement agencies have tools to get into encrypted smartphones, according to new research, and they are using them far more than previously known.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'going dark' era appears to be over as a practical matter. When FBI Director Christopher Wray disclosed in 2017 that agents were unable to unlock over half the mobile devices they tried to access, the capability gap was framed as a national crisis justifying backdoor proposals. This new research shows the gap was instead closed by procurement: [[a:949842|FOIA records already showed agencies in over 11 states, including CA, FL, and NY, spent $4M+ over a decade on phone-breaking software]], and the reach has now spread to at least 2,000 agencies, including 49 of the 50 largest departments.
What makes the report significant is not just ownership but usage — the tools are being used far more than previously known, which reframes device encryption from an absolute barrier into a cost-and-procurement question that mid-sized departments can now answer.
First-order effects
- Suspects' locked phones are no longer reliably opaque to investigators: with 49 of the 50 largest departments equipped, extraction becomes routine evidence-gathering rather than a special-ops exception reserved for terrorism cases.
- Apple and Google's encryption promises are effectively bypassed at the hardware level by third-party forensic vendors, meaning the platform makers' policy choices about backdoors matter less than the gray market's capabilities.
Second-order effects
- Vendors of phone-extraction tools gain a proven, expanding customer base across thousands of local budgets, incentivizing them to keep pace with each new iPhone and Android security release — a private arms race running parallel to the public one.
- Oversight pressure intensifies on the pattern already visible in local policing: investigations like the Fog Reveal tracking tool used at times without warrants show what happens when powerful surveillance tooling reaches small agencies without warrant discipline, and lawmakers will connect the two.
Third-order effects
- If extraction tooling stays broadly distributed, the policy debate shifts from 'should companies weaken encryption' to 'should governments regulate who can buy forensic intrusion tools' — an export-control-style question applied domestically.
- The Sky episode points the same direction: court records show agencies increasingly drawing on the 500M-message haul from the 2021 hack of encrypted phone company Sky, suggesting law enforcement's access model now combines purchased exploits, hacked datasets, and vendor tooling rather than any single lawful-access mechanism.
The trend: US law enforcement's access to encrypted devices is consolidating into a mature commercial market spanning thousands of agencies, moving the encryption fight from platform backdoors to procurement oversight and tool regulation.