Purchase records and docs show that 14 of the 15 US Cabinet departments and several other federal agencies bought Cellebrite phone hacking tools in recent years
The Intercept :
Context & Ripple Effects
Cellebrite has been a fixture of US law enforcement for years — documents previously showed it working with agencies across 20 states to extract data from locked phones, and leaked files later revealed NYC police could unlock and extract data from all iOS and high-end Android devices on their own since 2018. What this new reporting adds is scale at the federal level: purchase records show 14 of 15 Cabinet departments plus other agencies bought its tools.
That puts Cellebrite alongside a broader pattern of government phone-hacking procurement — the State Department and local police were earlier found buying GrayKey tools to crack iPhones, and an internal catalogue detailed dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by military and intelligence agencies.
First-order effects
- Nearly every Cabinet department is now documented as a Cellebrite customer, meaning phone-extraction capability is standard-issue across the executive branch rather than confined to police and intelligence units.
Second-order effects
- Rival vendors like GrayKey compete for the same budgets, pushing device-unlocking into a competitive procurement market where each department shops for extraction capability independently.
Third-order effects
- With federal adoption this broad and commercial spyware contracts like the reactivated ICE deal with Paragon moving in parallel, US agencies are institutionalizing third-party phone-hacking as routine infrastructure — raising questions about oversight that span multiple administrations.
The trend: Government phone-extraction tooling is spreading from specialist law-enforcement buyers to near-universal procurement across the US federal bureaucracy.