United States Customs and Border Safety (CBP) is asking tech corporations 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 units at the USA border, based on paperwork reviewed by WIRED.
The company said in a federal registry listing that the instruments it’s looking for should 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 pink tricycle,” throughout completely different movies; entry chats in encrypted messaging apps; and “discover patterns” in giant information units 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 “develop” and modernize its digital forensics program. Final 12 months, CBP claims, it did searches on greater than 47,000 digital units—which is barely increased than the roughly 41,500 devices it searched in 2023, however a dramatic rise from 2015, when it searched just more than 8,500 devices.
The so-called request for info (RFI) comes amid a string of reports of CBP detaining people entering the US, sometimes questioning them about their travel plans or political beliefs, and at occasions collecting and searching 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 phone 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 means of June. CBP presently has eight lively contracts for Cellebrite software program, licenses, gear, and coaching—value greater than $1.3 million in complete—that may finish between July 2025 and April 2026. CBP seems to make use of instruments apart from Cellebrite. The company mentioned within the latest itemizing that it makes use of “all kinds of digital information extraction instruments,” but it surely doesn’t identify 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 info proposals.”
Three federal contract listings point out that CBP pays for Cellebrite’s Common Forensic Extraction System (UFED) 4PC, software program designed to investigate information on a user’s existing PC or laptop. 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 tools of analyzing information from units.
Throughout Cellebrite’s intelligence platform, customers have a variety of capabilities. It may sort images based mostly on whether or not they comprise sure parts, 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 matters, like proof obstruction, household, or the police. Customers also can unveil photos “hidden” by a tool proprietor, make social maps of pals and contacts, and plot the locations the place an individual despatched textual content messages.