Israeli phone hacking firm stops sales to Belarus and Russia
Cellebrite, an Israeli digital intelligence company known for making software tools used to extract data from smartphones, has announced it will halt sales to Russian and Belarus state and law enforcement.
The decision comes on foot of revelations that the company's
technologies were used by state officials to persecute and pressure minority
groups and opposition activists in both Russia and Belarus, as well as Hong
Kong and Bangladesh.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose July 2020 report first shed
light on the questionable hacking practices exposed by civil rights activists,
reports that Yossi Carmil, Cellebrite's CEO, announced a change to the
company's export policies on March 18, 2021 and said this was to ensure the
company operates “according to accepted international rules and regulations.”
Back in July 2020, human rights activist and lawyer Eitay
Mack, along with dozens of other activists in Israel and Hong Kong, blew the
whistle on documents linking Cellebrite's software with state persecution of
political opposition, ethnic minority and LGBTQI+ activists, and rights
defenders in Russia. They also circulated a petition calling on the digital
intelligence company to stop exporting their tools to repressive states.
Earlier, Mack had successfully pressured Cellebrite to stop selling its wares
to Chinese and Hong Kong law enforcement.
One of Cellebrite's most popular tools is UFED, a software
solution used to force entry into and automate data extraction from
smartphones. Russia's Investigative Committee has openly disclosed its frequent
use of this tool in the past. Russian independent news outlet MediaZona
reported in March 2021, that the use of UFED was mentioned in the case file of
Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer at the Anti-Corruption Foundation and political
associate of Russian oppositionist Alexey Navalny.
In December 2020, Sobol was detained after attempting to
visit one of Navalny's alleged poisoners at home. State investigators
confiscated her phone and attempted to break into it. She is currently under
house arrest in the wake of mass protests in support of Navalny in January
2021.
Belarusian de facto president Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime
has been putting increasing pressure on the country's opposition actors and
activists since the disputed election in August 2020, and has also cracked down
on the mass protests in the country.
Though Cellebrite has denied selling its solutions to
Belarus in the past, Mack claims the Belarusian regime has used Cellebrite
tools to hack into the phones of detained protest participants. Belarusian IT
news website dev.by found 17 records on the Belarus state procurement website
indicating that between 2013 and 2019, the regime's Investigative Committee and
Forensic Analysis Committee had purchased the UFED software, renewed licenses,
secured technical support and other services from Cellebrite.
In the past year, Cellebrite also has been pitching its
phone spying and tracking capabilities to governments around the world to
assist with contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Privacy advocates
have cautioned that authoritarian regimes may use the pretext of the
unprecedented public health crisis to significantly expand citizen
surveillance, data collection without consent, and location tracking.
A recent report by Pandemic Big Brother, a joint initiative
of Russian digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda and Belarusian human
rights center Human Constanta, that tracks pandemic surveillance measures in
the region, found that such unchecked surveillance can present “a threat to
privacy, freedom of movement, choice of residence and freedom of assembly, and
can undermine public trust in authorities.”
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