United States Customs and Border Safety (CBP) is asking tech firms to pitch digital forensics instruments which are designed to course of and analyze textual content messages, footage, movies, and contacts from seized telephones, laptops, and different gadgets at the US border, in accordance with paperwork reviewed by WIRED.
The company mentioned in a federal registry itemizing that the instruments it’s searching for will need to have very particular capabilities, corresponding to the power to discover a “hidden language” in an individual’s textual content messages; establish particular objects, “like a purple tricycle,” throughout completely different movies; entry chats in encrypted messaging apps; and “discover patterns” in giant knowledge units for “intel era.” The itemizing was first posted on June 20 and up to date on July 1.
CBP has been utilizing Cellebrite to extract and analyze knowledge from gadgets since 2008. However the company mentioned that it desires to “broaden” and modernize its digital forensics program. Final 12 months, CBP claims, it did searches on greater than 47,000 digital gadgets—which is barely larger than the roughly 41,500 gadgets it searched in 2023, however a dramatic rise from 2015, when it searched simply greater than 8,500 gadgets.
The so-called request for data (RFI) comes amid a string of experiences of CBP detaining folks coming into the US, typically questioning them about their journey plans or political views, and at instances gathering and looking out their telephones. In a single high-profile incident in March, a Lebanese professor at Brown College’s medical college was despatched again to Lebanon after authorities searched her cellphone and alleged she was “sympathetic” to the previous Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated in September 2024.
Within the RFI, CBP mentioned that the digital forensics vendor it chooses will signal a contract within the third fiscal quarter of 2026, which runs from April by June. CBP at the moment has eight lively contracts for Cellebrite software program, licenses, tools, and coaching—price greater than $1.3 million in complete—that may finish between July 2025 and April 2026. CBP seems to make use of instruments aside from Cellebrite. The company mentioned within the current itemizing that it makes use of “all kinds of digital knowledge extraction instruments,” however it doesn’t title these instruments.
CBP didn’t reply to requests for remark. When reached for remark, Cellebrite spokesperson Victor Cooper tells WIRED that the corporate is “unable to touch upon lively requests for data proposals.”
Three federal contract listings point out that CBP pays for Cellebrite’s Common Forensic Extraction Machine (UFED) 4PC, software program designed to investigate knowledge on a consumer’s present PC or laptop computer. The itemizing for the “license renewal” doesn’t point out a particular product, however might have referred to the Investigative Digital Intelligence Platform, which is Cellebrite’s “end-to-end” suite of instruments of analyzing knowledge from gadgets.
Throughout Cellebrite’s intelligence platform, customers have a variety of capabilities. It may possibly kind photographs based mostly on whether or not they include sure parts, like jewellery, handwriting, or paperwork. It may possibly additionally undergo textual content messages, in addition to direct messages on apps like TikTok, and filter out messages that point out sure matters, like proof obstruction, household, or the police. Customers may also unveil photographs “hidden” by a tool proprietor, make social maps of buddies and contacts, and plot the places the place an individual despatched textual content messages.