United States Customs and Border Safety (CBP) is asking tech firms to pitch digital forensics instruments which can 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 looking for should have very particular capabilities, similar to the power to discover a “hidden language” in an individual’s textual content messages; determine particular objects, “like a crimson tricycle,” throughout completely different movies; entry chats in encrypted messaging apps; and “discover patterns” in giant datasets 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 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 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 info (RFI) comes amid a string of reviews of CBP detaining folks getting into the US, typically questioning them about their journey plans or political views, 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 telephone 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 way of June. CBP has eight energetic contracts for Cellebrite software program, licenses, gear, and coaching—value greater than $1.3 million in whole—that can 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 knowledge extraction instruments,” but it surely doesn’t title these instruments.
CBP didn’t reply to requests for remark. Cellebrite spokesperson Victor Cooper tells WIRED that the corporate is “unable to touch upon energetic requests for info proposals.”
Three federal contract listings point out that CBP pays for Cellebrite’s Common Forensic Extraction Machine 4PC, software program designed to research knowledge on a consumer’s present PC or laptop computer. The itemizing for the “license renewal” doesn’t point out a particular product however could also be referring to the Investigative Digital Intelligence Platform, which is Cellebrite’s “end-to-end” suite of instruments of analyzing knowledge from units.
Throughout Cellebrite’s intelligence platform, customers have a variety of capabilities. It will probably type photographs based mostly on whether or not they include sure components, like jewellery, handwriting, or paperwork. It will probably 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 also can unveil photographs “hidden” by a tool proprietor, make social maps of associates and contacts, and plot the areas the place an individual despatched textual content messages.
