United States Customs and Border Safety (CBP) is asking tech corporations to pitch digital forensics instruments which might be designed to course of and analyze textual content messages, photos, movies, and contacts from seized telephones, laptops, and different units at the US border, in line 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 flexibility to discover a “hidden language” in an individual’s textual content messages; determine particular objects, “like a crimson tricycle,” throughout totally different movies; entry chats in encrypted messaging apps; and “discover patterns” in giant datasets for “intel technology.” The itemizing was first posted on June 20 and up to date on July 1.
CBP has been utilizing Cellebrite to extract and analyze information from units since 2008. However the company mentioned that it needs to “increase” and modernize its digital forensics program. Final 12 months, CBP claims, it did searches on greater than 47,000 digital units—which is barely greater than the roughly 41,500 units it searched in 2023 however a dramatic rise from 2015, when it searched simply greater than 8,500 units.
The so-called request for data (RFI) comes amid a string of stories of CBP detaining individuals getting into the US, typically questioning them about their journey plans or political opinions, and at occasions gathering and looking 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 has eight lively contracts for Cellebrite software program, licenses, gear, and coaching—price greater than $1.3 million in whole—that can finish between July 2025 and April 2026. CBP seems to make use of instruments aside from Cellebrite. The company mentioned within the latest itemizing that it makes use of “all kinds of digital information extraction instruments,” however it doesn’t identify these instruments.
CBP didn’t reply to requests 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 System 4PC, software program designed to investigate information on a consumer’s present PC or laptop computer. The itemizing for the “license renewal” doesn’t point out a selected product however could also be referring to the Investigative Digital Intelligence Platform, which is Cellebrite’s “end-to-end” suite of instruments of analyzing information from units.
Throughout Cellebrite’s intelligence platform, customers have a variety of capabilities. It may type photographs based mostly on whether or not they comprise sure components, like jewellery, handwriting, or paperwork. It may additionally undergo textual content messages, in addition to direct messages on apps like TikTok, and filter out messages that point out sure subjects, like proof obstruction, household, or the police. Customers may unveil photographs “hidden” by a tool proprietor, make social maps of pals and contacts, and plot the areas the place an individual despatched textual content messages.
