CHINA-ISRAEL: ISRAELI CELLPHONE HACKING COMPANY CELLEBRITE CONTINUES TO SELL ITS HACKING TECHNOLOGY IN CHINA
Even as the Israeli cell phone hacking company Cellebrite tries to go public next week, and said it
withdrew from China and Hong Kong, an Intercept investigation has found that police in Mainland
China continued to buy the company’s Universal Forensic Extraction Device, or UFED, products,
which allow officers to break into phones in their possession and siphon off data. It said while
Cellebrite did deregister its Chinese subsidiary earlier this year, it appears to have done little about
the brokers that peddle its hacking technology. Chinese government procurement award notices
and posts on resellers’ websites show that police have continued to purchase powerful Cellebrite
software, while resellers have continued to provide updates for the software. In one case, a reseller
reported delivering the Israeli company’s software to border guards in Tibet and demonstrating
how it could be used to search people’s WeChat accounts. The Intercept claims the findings follow
reports of abuses involving Cellebrite technology elsewhere in the world — including in Bahrain,
Botswana, Indonesia, India, and Saudi Arabia — that the company has not meaningfully addressed.
Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel for AccessNow, said “Cellebrite hasn’t demonstrated that they have made serious efforts to investigate the misuse of their technology,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech
legal counsel for AccessNow
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