The government of India is reportedly buying the rights to the technology that the FBI had apparently used to unlock the iPhone 5C of a shooter in the San Bernardio case. The technology is owned by a company called Cellebrite and currently used by many law enforcement agencies around the world.
As you may remember, FBI had asked Apple to help them unlock the shooter’s iPhone, but Tim Cook turned down the request, citing privacy terms and technical grounds. This forced the FBI agency to resort to alternative means like going to ethical hackers. Ultimately, it was reported that Cellebrite managed to unlock the phone, and subsequently the company was paid a huge lump sum for this ‘mission impossible’.
The Indian government was clearly impressed by the work of Cellebrite. So much so that they have decided to buy the technology for their personal use and also to lease it to other countries.
“We are likely to have the technology within a month or so. India will become a global hub for cases where law enforcement is unable to break into phones”, a senior Forensic Science Laboratory official said.
It must be noted that the Gandhinagar laboratory had hired help from Cellebrite previously, but now they will have permanent rights to the technology, which will also help other forensic units in India.
It is also possible that the Government of India will use all the expertise that it will gain from buying Cellebrite towards helping its intelligence agencies. Currently, it is unclear if India is buying the exclusive rights to the technology, and on what terms it will lend a helping hand to other countries.
Although the FBI hasn’t yet officially confirmed that it took Cellebrite’s help to break into the terrorist’s iPhone 5C, it did disclose that the ‘service provider’ was paid close to $1 million. From that, we can safely deduce that the Indian government would be paying a big sum to acquire the technology.
Is it a smart investment by the Indian government? Looks like! Will they use it for cracking down on criminals only and not to spy on the general public? We hope so!