Last year, the phone hacking tool maker Cellebrite announced it had suspended Serbian police as customers, after human rights researchers alleged local police and intelligence agencies used its tools to hack into the phones of a journalist and an activist, and plant spyware.
This was a rare example of Cellebrite publicly cutting off a customer following documented allegations of abuse, citing Amnesty International’s technical report for its decision.
But following recent similar accusations of abuse in Jordan and Kenya, the Israeli-headquartered company responded by dismissing the allegations and declining to commit to investigating them. It’s unclear why Cellebrite has changed its approach, which appears contrary to its previous actions.
On Tuesday, researchers at The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab published a report alleging the Kenyan government used Cellebrite’s tools to unlock the phone of Boniface Mwangi, a local activist and politician, while he was in police custody. In another report from January, the Citizen Lab accused the Jordanian government of breaking into the phones of several local activists and protesters using Cellebrite’s tools.
In both investigations, the Citizen Lab, an organization that has investigated abuses of spyware and hacking technologies around the world, based their conclusions on finding traces of a specific application linked to Cellebrite on the victims’ phones.
The researchers said that those traces are a “high confidence” signal that someone used Cellebrite’s unlocking tools on the phones in question, because the same application had been previously found on VirusTotal, a malware repository, and was signed with digital certificates owned by Cellebrite.
Other researchers have also linked the same application to Cellebrite.
“We do not respond to speculation and encourage any organization with specific, evidence-based concerns to share them with us directly so we can act on them,” Victor Cooper, a spokesperson for Cellebrite, told TechCrunch in an email.
When asked why Cellebrite is acting differently from the Serbia case, Cooper said “the two situations are incomparable,” and that, “high confidence is not direct evidence.”
Cooper did not respond to multiple follow-up emails asking if Cellebrite would investigate the Citizen Lab’s latest report, and what, if any, differences there are with its case in Serbia.
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