Delhi Police possess Cellebrite tools (since at least 2020) and have used phone seizures extensively during recent protests, but specific verified cases of full cloning/extraction with Cellebrite on detainees’ phones are limited primarily to an unverified allegation by YouTuber Dhruv Rathee regarding his own device.
In early-to-mid October 2026, protests (linked to the Cockroach Janta Party / CJP and demands related to the Chief Election Commissioner and electoral roll revision) led to large-scale detentions in central Delhi (areas including Connaught Place, Jantar Mantar, etc.). Hundreds of people—including protesters, journalists, minors, and others—were detained over several days. Many reported that police confiscated mobile phones, sometimes without proper seizure memos, demanded passwords, browsed galleries, deleted protest-related photos/videos, and in some cases did not promptly return devices (or returned them after delays). Some phones remained unaccounted for. Allegations also included physical assault and other mistreatment while in custody or transit. Delhi Police have denied certain specific claims (e.g., regarding missing phones or systematic misconduct in some reports).
Cellebrite possession and Dhruv Rathee’s allegationDelhi Police tools: Public reporting (including MediaNama in 2020) confirms Delhi Police have held Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer (among other forensic tools) at facilities such as the National Cyber Forensic Laboratory. In March 2025, the Home Ministry cleared additional Cellebrite products (UFED 4PC, Digital Collector, and Inspector) for the Crime Branch via a Make-in-India exemption.
Broader Indian procurement: Multiple Indian agencies (NIA, SFIO, state police/forensic units in Kerala, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, and others) have tendered for or purchased Cellebrite products in 2026. One notable NIA purchase of a high-end “Premium” tool (with passcode bypass and full extraction capabilities) involved a Make-in-India exemption approved at the Home Minister level.
Rathee case (10 October 2026): Delhi Police (Crime Branch teams involved) detained YouTuber Dhruv Rathee from his Gurugram residence ahead of a planned protest. His phone and his parents’ phones were taken. After release, Rathee stated on Kunal Kamra’s podcast that technical examination found no spyware, but he believes police attempted to clone/extract data from his iPhone using Cellebrite. He cited battery history showing prolonged charging while in custody (suggesting a computer connection) and said the attempt likely failed because his iOS version was newer than what the tool then supported. This specific claim has not been independently verified, and Delhi Police have not publicly confirmed or denied the Cellebrite attempt.
Cellebrite tools (UFED and related products) are commercial digital forensics systems widely used by law enforcement globally. They can unlock many locked devices, perform logical or full file-system extractions (messages, photos, app data, deleted files, etc.), and create lasting copies of data that remain with the agency after the physical phone is returned. They are not consumer “cloning” apps but professional extraction platforms.Legal and oversight gaps noted by criticsOrganizations such as the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) have highlighted that India lacks clear published rules or statutory limits specifically governing when seized phones may be unlocked/extracted with such tools, what data may be copied, how long copies may be retained, or who may access them. Related powers (e.g., under the IT Act) face ongoing legal challenges. IFF and others have called on Delhi Police and the Home Ministry for transparency on whether Cellebrite (or similar tools) was used on any of the phones seized during the October protests, deletion of any copies if obtained without proper process, and publication of governing rules.
In short, phone seizures and content access were widely reported during the detentions. Delhi Police have long possessed Cellebrite capability, and Rathee has publicly alleged an (apparently unsuccessful) extraction attempt on his device. Confirmed, independent forensic evidence of successful Cellebrite cloning across the broader group of detainees has not been publicly established in the reporting available.
A Home Ministry letter and an NIA bid document record that the Union Home Minister approved, in January 2026, the National Investigation Agency’s purchase of Cellebrite’s most advanced phone-unlocking tool. Indian agencies have published fifteen listings for Cellebrite products this year.
A letter from the Ministry of Home Affairs dated 20 January 2026 records that Union Home Minister Amit Shah approved, on a note dated 17 January 2026, a proposal permitting the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to set aside the government’s Make in India procurement rules and buy the most powerful phone-cracking product sold by Cellebrite, an Israeli company whose tools forensic researchers have found used against journalists and activists in Serbia, Jordan, Kenya and Russia. The NIA’s own bid document names the Minister as the authority who granted the exemption. We have not seen the note itself and have sought it under the RTI Act. The contract has since been awarded for ₹4,97,99,515. It is one of fifteen procurement listings naming Cellebrite products that Indian agencies have published in 2026 alone, spread across eleven tenders. The buyers range from the NIA and the Serious Fraud Investigation Office to the Department of Military Affairs and the police and forensic departments of Kerala, Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh. The Delhi Police has held Cellebrite tools since at least 2020, and the Home Ministry cleared three more for its Crime Branch in March 2025 through the same exemption route.
The question became urgent on 10 October 2026, when the Delhi Police detained YouTuber Dhruv Rathee ahead of the Cockroach Janta Party protest, held him for most of a day, and took his phone and his parents’ phones. Rathee has since said, on comedian Kunal Kamra’s podcast, that he believes the police attempted to copy the contents of his iPhone using Cellebrite and that the attempt appears to have failed because his phone ran a version of iOS newer than the tool could handle. His account has not been independently verified and the Delhi Police has not responded to it publicly, but the issue it raises does not depend on him. Scores of protesters, creators and journalists had their phones seized over those three days, and no law, rule or published procedure in India states when a seized phone may be unlocked, what may be copied from it, how long the copy may be kept, or who may read it. The one statutory power that comes close, the decryption power under Section 69 of the IT Act, is itself under challenge in a petition IFF filed in the Supreme Court in 2019, which remains pending. IFF has spent the past few months investigating how this software is entering Indian policing. This post sets out what the procurement record shows, what the law does not provide, and what we are asking the Delhi Police and the Home Ministry to answer.
The Background
Early on the morning of Saturday, 10 October 2026, a group of men in plain clothes arrived at a house in Sector 56, Gurugram, where Dhruv Rathee was staying with his parents. The Cockroach Janta Party had called a protest at Jantar Mantar that day to demand the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner. The Delhi Police had refused permission for it, and across central Delhi mobile internet had been suspended, train services halted and barricades erected. PTI, citing the police, reported that three Crime Branch teams carried out the detention and that Rathee was questioned at a Crime Branch office before being driven into Delhi. Reuters, quoting a police source, put the number of people detained in the central Delhi protest area that day at about 200. When Rathee was released in the early hours of the following morning, he said he had been kept away from his phone and his lawyer for most of the time he was held.
Journalists who went to cover the protest were treated in much the same way. DIGIPUB News India Foundation documented the detention of reporters from Newslaundry, Scroll.in, Navbharat Times and The Quint, several of them after they had shown their press cards, and Newslaundry said the police had seized the official phones its reporters were using. On 12 October, we demanded that the Delhi Police return those phones and make the seizure records public. Nearly a month later, neither has happened, and nobody whose phone was taken has been told what was done with it while it was in police custody.
Rathee’s account turned a general suspicion into a specific allegation. On comedian Kunal Kamra’s podcast, in a conversation that also featured YouTuber Shyam Meera Singh, he said that his phone and his parents’ phones had been taken. Once his phone was returned, he said, he had technical experts examine it for a full day, and they found no spyware or other infection. He believes the police instead attempted to clone the phone using Cellebrite. The phone’s battery history, he said, showed it on charge for several hours while in police custody, which he took to indicate that it had been connected to a computer. He added that his phone was running a version of iOS newer than the one Cellebrite’s software could then process. Patrika, which reported his remarks on 4 November, noted that a battery log alone cannot prove that a phone was extracted. We are not in a position to confirm or rule out his account, and nothing in this post depends on it. What we can show, from the government’s own procurement records, is that the tool he named is being purchased across the Indian state without any law to govern its use, and that the Delhi Police has had it for years.
The Delhi Police’s possession of these tools has been known for some time. In December 2020, MediaNama reported that the Delhi Police held Cellebrite’s UFED and Physical Analyzer, along with MSAB’s XRY, Oxygen Forensic Detective and MOBILedit, at the National Cyber Forensic Laboratory in Dwarka. A Deputy Commissioner of Police told the publication that all the forensic tools through which data could be extracted were available. In July 2025, Astha Savyasachi reported in The Wire that the Home Ministry had approved a Delhi Police request to exempt a list of foreign forensic tools from the Make in India clause. IFF later obtained the order itself, which the Crime Branch had attached to a tender for its cyber lab. Dated 20 March 2025 and signed by an Under Secretary, it clears nineteen products by brand, three of them from Cellebrite: UFED 4PC, Digital Collector, and Inspector with MacBook Pro.
For the past few months, IFF has been tracing these purchases tender by tender as part of a wider investigation into how phone-extraction software is bought and used in India. Our tracker now holds about a hundred surveillance-related tenders published since July 2025, covering facial recognition networks, number plate readers and mobile forensic vans, among other systems. The Cellebrite records discussed below are drawn from it and have been checked against the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) and the state procurement portals. Some of this work is already public, including our reporting on the Delhi Police’s use of signal jammers and on the facial recognition cameras it tendered for Ramlila Maidan before that ground was designated the city’s new protest site.
Analysis
The Home Minister’s approval
The most significant document in the record is a one-page letter. On 20 January 2026, the Police Modernisation Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs at Jaisalmer House issued a letter under file number 80016/2026/ADMIN NIA-HQ, signed by Vinod Kumar Dubey, Assistant Commissioner (Procurement), and addressed to the Director General of the NIA. It refers to an NIA note of 20 August 2025 and conveys, in its own words, “the approval of the Hon’ble Home Minister for one time exemption from Public Procurement (Preference to Make-in-India) order 2017 and its subsequent revision order dated 19.07.2024” for the purchase of one Cellebrite Premium Tool with a three-year licence at a cost of ₹4,98,15,000. Its closing paragraph records that the ministry’s Integrated Finance Division concurred on 13 January 2026 and that the Home Minister approved the proposal on a note dated 17 January 2026. Seventeen days later, the NIA published bid GEM/2026/B/7172473 on GeM. Every GeM bid carries a field for the competent authority who waived the Make in India preference, and in that field the NIA entered: Shri Amit Shah, Hon’ble Home Minister of India, Ministry of Home Affairs.
We have not seen the Minister’s note of 17 January 2026 itself. What we have are two of the government’s own records: the ministry’s letter conveying his approval, and the NIA’s bid naming him as the authority who waived the preference. Everything said in this post about the Minister’s role rests on those two documents, and we have sought the note under the RTI Act.
The purpose of the Make in India order is to require a government buyer to consider whether an Indian supplier can meet the requirement before public money is spent abroad. The file shows the question being asked in a form that could only have one answer. The reason the NIA recorded the bid for setting the order aside is a single line: “As no other Company is manufacturing the software with the same name and specifications”. Its Proprietary Article Certificate, issued under Rule 166 of the General Financial Rules and naming M/s Cellebrite DI Ltd. of Petah Tikva, Israel, as the sole developer and proprietor, adds that “No other make or model is acceptable.” This is true of every branded product, and it does not answer the question the order actually asks, which is whether an Indian product could perform the same function. Nothing in the record we have seen shows that anyone tested whether one could. A government that has made technological self-reliance one of its signature policies chose, according to its own ministry’s letter at the level of the Home Minister, to buy a foreign phone-unlocking tool on the basis of a brand name.
When the Delhi Police Crime Branch sought a similar exemption for nineteen forensic products a year earlier, the Home Ministry’s letter of 20 March 2025 conveyed the approval of “the Competent Authority” over the signature of an Under Secretary, without identifying that authority. The NIA’s single licence, by contrast, is recorded as having gone to the Minister himself, with his approval following four days after the concurrence of his own finance division. The record is also internally inconsistent. The bid gives 13 August 2025, the date on the Proprietary Article Certificate, as the date of the competent authority’s Make in India approval, five months before the Minister’s note. The certificate leaves blank the lines meant to record the concurrence of the finance wing and the approval of the Director General. The model listed on the bid is a licence with a one-year subscription, while the ministry’s letter and the technical specification describe three years, and the bid asks the manufacturer for only one year of updates and support. Among the features the bid lists are “iOS Passcode Bypass” and “Password Recovery features to decrypt the devices”. Five bidders participated, and GeM now shows the contract awarded to Nextechno Gen Private Limited for ₹4,97,99,515, which is ₹15,485 below the estimate.
Fifteen listings across eleven tenders
The NIA’s purchase carries the most senior approval on record, but it is part of a wider pattern. We checked every Cellebrite entry in our tracker against the records on GeM and the state procurement portals as they stood on 6 November 2026. We found fifteen separate listings published in 2026 that name Cellebrite products, spread across eleven tenders, three of which have already been awarded. Values are shown where the portal discloses them; many state bids disclose only the earnest money deposit.
Buyer
What is being bought
Published
Status on 6 Nov 2026
Value or award
National Investigation Agency (MHA)
Cellebrite Premium Tool, 3-year licence
6 Feb 2026
Awarded to Nextechno Gen Pvt Ltd
₹4,97,99,515
Serious Fraud Investigation Office (Ministry of Corporate Affairs)
Cellebrite Digital Collector and Inspector, 3-year subscription, bundled with an OpenText forensic imager
17 Mar 2026
Awarded to TNS Networking Solutions Pvt Ltd, contract dated 25 Mar 2026
₹21,98,350 in all, of which ₹11,99,780 for Cellebrite
Home Department, Kerala
Facility management service with Cellebrite Inseyets mobile extraction
16 Jul 2026
Awarded to Alibi Global Pvt Ltd
₹99,99,910
Department of Military Affairs, Central Delhi
Cellebrite Inseyets, 40 unlocks
3 Jul 2026
Technical evaluation
₹1,77,88,500 (estimate)
Department of Military Affairs, Central Delhi
Cellebrite Inseyets, 40 unlocks
24 Aug 2026
Financial bid opening
Not disclosed
Home Department, Himachal Pradesh
Cellebrite Inseyets Online Pro, 40 unlocks a year, 3 years
1 Sep 2026
Technical evaluation
Not disclosed
Directorate of Forensic Services, Himachal Pradesh
Three lots, a new Inseyets Online Pro licence (40 unlocks a year, 3 years) and 1-year and 2-year renewals
26 Aug 2026
Technical evaluation
Not disclosed
Directorate of Forensic Services, Himachal Pradesh
Three lots, the same new licence and the same two renewals
27 Jun 2026
Technical evaluation
Not disclosed
Karnataka State Police
Cellebrite Inseyets or equivalent
21 Aug 2026
Under evaluation
Not disclosed (EMD ₹12.29 lakh)
Karnataka State Police
Maintenance of Cellebrite UFED4PC, State FSL Bengaluru
10 Aug 2026
Under evaluation
Not disclosed
Karnataka State Police
Maintenance of Cellebrite UFED4PC and 3 years of Digital Collector
29 Jun 2026
Financial evaluation
Not disclosed
The Serious Fraud Investigation Office, a regulator under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, now holds the same brand of forensic software as the country’s counter-terrorism agency, under a contract dated 25 March 2026 that records the country of origin as Israel. The Department of Military Affairs is buying phone unlocks in batches of forty. Kerala’s purchase is framed as a facility management service, which suggests that the extractions there may be carried out by a private contractor’s staff rather than by police officers. Karnataka is renewing maintenance on older Cellebrite equipment at its state forensic laboratory while tendering for newer versions. Our tracker also lists twenty-five tenders for mobile forensic extraction software whose brand is not disclosed at the bid stage, most of them from state Home Departments, so the fifteen listings above are only those that name Cellebrite expressly. The buyers span the political spectrum, from the Union Home Ministry to the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala, and the vendor is the same.
Two older Delhi Police records precede all of this. The first is the Home Ministry’s exemption of 20 March 2025 naming three Cellebrite products for the Crime Branch. The second is the cyber lab tender the Crime Branch floated five days later. It asked for generic items such as mobile phone imaging and extraction software and an all-in-one tool for phones, computers, drones and cloud services, and its 108-page request for proposal specifies tools that can reach from a seized phone into the cloud accounts it is logged into. GeM now shows that tender awarded to 3rd Eye Techno Solutions Private Limited for ₹4,98,04,850, although the award record does not list the brands supplied.
What the Premium tool is built to do
The clearest statement of what the Indian state wants from this software is the two-page technical specification that the NIA attached to its bid. It requires the tool to break phone passcodes by brute force on a long list of Android devices, including Samsung phones on Qualcomm, MediaTek and Exynos chips and Huawei phones on Kirin chips. On iPhones, it requires brute force from the A8 chip to the A13 chip, which it identifies as the iPhone 11 and the second-generation SE, and full file-system extraction from the iPhone 11 to the iPhone 14 on A13 to A16 chips or later, once the phone has been unlocked at least once since it was switched on. It must identify, extract and decrypt the Samsung Secure Folder, Huawei Private Space and Xiaomi Second Space, the protected areas each manufacturer offers its customers for their most private material, and it must allow extraction app by app, so that the stored data of a messaging or email application can be taken off the device by name.
A full file-system extraction goes far beyond a search for a single message. It copies what is stored on the phone, including chats, photographs, contacts, call logs, location history and the stored data of every app, and the copy remains after the phone is returned. A phone taken from someone at a protest while it is still switched on is, in the specification’s own terms, in exactly the after-first-unlock state that the tool is built to exploit. The same is true of a phone taken from someone in their home.
No law governs when this may be done
India has no statute, rule or published protocol governing the forensic extraction of a person’s phone. In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, decided in August 2017, the Supreme Court held that privacy is a fundamental right and that any intrusion on it must rest on a law, pursue a legitimate aim and be proportionate to that aim. Copying the entire contents of a phone fails the first of those tests before the others arise, because there is no law that authorises it, sets its limits or provides for oversight.
The provisions that come closest do not fill the gap. Section 106 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS) permits the police to seize property connected to an offence, and Section 105 requires searches and seizures to be recorded on video, but neither says anything about unlocking a device or extracting its data. Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 governs how electronic records are certified for use in court; it presumes that an extraction was lawful rather than making it so. Section 69 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 does require a written order from the Union or State Home Secretary before information stored in a computer resource is decrypted, and we are not aware of any such order for the phones taken in October. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 exempts processing for the investigation of offences under Section 17(1)(c), and so offers no protection here.
The lawfulness of the Section 69 framework is itself before the Supreme Court. In January 2019, IFF filed Writ Petition (Civil) No. 44 of 2019, challenging Section 69 of the IT Act, the Interception Rules of 2009 made under it, and the Home Ministry’s notification of 20 December 2018 authorising ten central agencies to intercept, monitor and decrypt information in any computer resource. The NIA and the Commissioner of Police, Delhi, are both among those ten. The petition argues that a power to read and decrypt the contents of a computer which is authorised, exercised and reviewed entirely within the executive, with no judicial or independent oversight, cannot satisfy the tests laid down in Puttaswamy, and it seeks a declaration that the provision and the Rules are unconstitutional. A bench headed by the Chief Justice of India issued notice on 14 January 2019 and tagged the petition with others raising the same question. Nearly seven years later it remains pending. The decryption power that the Cellebrite tenders are designed to exercise is therefore one whose constitutionality the Supreme Court has yet to decide.
The Court has separately been aware of the gap in the law on device seizure for four years. In Foundation for Media Professionals v. Union of India, W.P. (Crl.) No. 395 of 2022, in which IFF has assisted, the petitioners sought binding guidelines on the search and seizure of digital devices. In November 2023, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul observed in open court that the seizure of journalists’ devices was a serious matter and that better guidelines were needed. In December 2023, the Centre told the Court that a committee was being constituted to frame them. Nearly three years later, those guidelines have still not been placed before the Court, while the same government’s Home Ministry records its Minister as having approved the purchase of the most capable phone-unlocking tool on the market.
What this means for everyone whose phone was taken
Most of the people held in October were detained to prevent a protest, not arrested for an offence. A phone taken from a person in preventive detention is not evidence in any investigation, and there is no case file in which an extraction from it could be recorded or challenged. If such a phone was connected to an extraction tool, its full contents may now sit on a police workstation with no record of why they were taken, no limit on how long they may be kept, and no means for the owner ever to find out.
The harm extends beyond the owner of the phone. A protester’s phone holds the numbers, chats and photographs of everyone they know, most of whom were nowhere near Jantar Mantar. A reporter’s phone holds unpublished footage and the identities of sources who spoke on the promise that they would not be named. Once that promise can be broken in a police laboratory, fewer people will speak to the press. Rathee’s parents, who were not protesting, reportedly had their phones taken too. The question therefore engages not only the right to privacy under Article 21 but also the freedoms of speech and assembly under Article 19. A state that can copy the phone of anyone it detains at a protest has raised the cost of protesting, of reporting on a protest, and of simply being present at one. Nothing in the tenders we reviewed, including the NIA’s sanction file, mentions retention periods, deletion, audit logs, or any rule for phones belonging to journalists, lawyers or people not accused of any offence.
How the tool has been used in other countries
The case for rules does not rest on speculation about what might happen in an Indian police laboratory. The record of what has happened in other countries’ police laboratories is long, and it has been documented by forensic researchers who were able to examine the phones concerned. In February 2024, the Serbian investigative journalist Slaviša Milanov was stopped by traffic police, taken to a station and asked to leave his phone at the reception desk. Amnesty International’s Security Lab later found that a Cellebrite product had been used to unlock the phone while it sat there, and that a domestically built spyware called NoviSpy had then been installed on it, a step that in Amnesty’s words “was dependent on the use of Cellebrite to unlock the device.” The same report, published on 16 December 2024, found that Serbian police had used Cellebrite tools to extract data from the phones of protest organisers and activists detained after that year’s protests. At least three more activists and a journalist had spyware planted on their phones during informal police interviews while the devices were out of their hands. Two months later, Amnesty documented the case of a 23-year-old Belgrade student activist whose Samsung phone was unlocked at a police station on 25 December 2024 with a Cellebrite exploit chain built on three previously unknown Android vulnerabilities, two of which Google had not yet patched when the report was published.
Serbia prompted a response from the company, but it is not an isolated case. On 22 January 2026, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published seven cases from Jordan in which Cellebrite products were used against political activists, a student organiser and a human rights defender between late 2023 and mid-2025. Nearly all of them concerned social media posts made during the near-daily protests in Amman in support of Palestinians in Gaza; the devices were seized during detentions and interrogations, and passcodes were extracted under pressure. In February 2026, the same researchers found Cellebrite’s traces on the personal phone of the Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi, which had been seized when he was arrested during the July 2025 protests against extrajudicial killings and returned to him two months later with its password protection removed. In Russia, where Cellebrite announced in March 2021 that it would stop selling, Access Now has compiled the record of its tools being used regardless: on the opposition politician Lyubov Sobol; on Andrey Pivovarov, director of Open Russia, whose iPhone the Citizen Lab found had been opened with Cellebrite’s UFED in June 2021 while in state custody, three months after the company’s announcement; and on the student Dmitry Ivanov, whose phone the FSB searched after he opposed the war in Ukraine. In Hong Kong, police court filings in 2020 showed that Cellebrite’s technology had been used on about 4,000 phones, including that of the pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong, during the crackdown that followed the 2019 protests. In Botswana, the Committee to Protect Journalists found from police affidavits that officers had used Cellebrite in 2019 to go through the messages, call logs, emails and browsing history of the Mmegi reporter Tsaone Basimanebotlhe in search of her source, and had done the same to the editor Oratile Dikologang. In Bangladesh, Al Jazeera and Haaretz documented in March 2021 the purchase of Cellebrite’s UFED and the training of the Rapid Action Battalion, a paramilitary unit with a record of abductions, torture and disappearances, in its use.
These cases share features that bear directly on everyone whose phone was taken in Delhi. In none of them was the person told that the phone had been opened; the fact emerged only because the device was later handed to independent researchers who knew what to look for. In each of them, the tool was used on a phone already in state custody, which is the position in which the Delhi Police placed hundreds of people in October. There is a further reason the forensic record matters, in court as well as in the police station. In April 2021, the founder of the Signal messaging app showed that Cellebrite’s UFED and Physical Analyzer software could be made to run code planted in an ordinary-looking file on a phone, which could alter the reports the software produced about that phone and about others, past and future, without leaving a trace. A tool that can be manipulated in this way cannot be treated as a neutral record, and nothing in the Indian procurement record shows that anyone has asked how its output is to be validated before it is placed before a judge.
What has been done about Cellebrite elsewhere
No government has banned Cellebrite. What exists instead is a series of withdrawals by the company itself, each announced after public exposure, together with a small number of court petitions and export reviews that have not produced a binding rule anywhere. On 7 October 2020, after the Hong Kong revelations and a petition in the Tel Aviv district court by the Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack asking the defence ministry to halt exports, Cellebrite announced that it would stop selling to Hong Kong and China, attributing the decision to “a change in U.S. regulations” rather than to the conduct of its customers. On 18 March 2021, after the Sobol revelations, it announced the same for Russia and Belarus. On 25 February 2025, after Amnesty’s Serbia report, it said it could no longer license its products to the relevant Serbian customers. Haaretz has reported that because digital forensic equipment is treated as dual-use technology under the Wassenaar Arrangement, Israel’s defence ministry has had oversight of Cellebrite’s exports since 2020. This is the only state control on the company’s sales that anyone has identified.
The withdrawals have not been effective. A year after the Hong Kong announcement, The Intercept found Chinese police still buying UFED products through resellers, with one purchase recorded a week after the company said it had stopped. The Citizen Lab’s finding on Pivovarov’s phone showed Russian investigators using the tool three months after the Russian exit. The Lab concluded in June 2026 that the way Cellebrite’s systems are built, with much of their functionality running offline and continuing to work after updates stop, “appeared to make it difficult for the company to meaningfully cut off problematic customers.” When the Citizen Lab wrote to Cellebrite’s chief executive on 14 February 2026 asking what human rights due diligence it had carried out on its Kenyan sales and whether it would publish the assessment, the company replied, as it has in every documented case, that it does not comment on specific customers. Amnesty has asked the company to compensate the Serbian victims and to build technical limits into the tools themselves. Access Now has asked governments to treat forensic extraction tools as export-controlled goods, to deny licences to buyers with a record of abuse, and to require human rights due diligence before purchase. None of this has happened in India, where the question of whether a buyer has a record of abuse is not asked at all, and where the only test the Home Ministry applied before approving the NIA’s purchase was whether any other company made a product with the same name.
Action
This investigation into this software will continue, and we are filing RTI applications with the Delhi Police and the Ministry of Home Affairs. From the Delhi Police, we are seeking the seizure memos and Section 105 recordings for every phone taken between 10 and 12 October; the extraction or examination logs of every forensic workstation that handled those phones; the licences, user logs and access records for every Cellebrite product the force holds; and any order under Section 69 of the IT Act relied on to decrypt a seized device. From the Home Ministry, we are seeking the full file 80016/2026/ADMIN NIA-HQ, including the Home Minister’s note of 17 January 2026, the award letter and licence agreement for the Premium tool, and any protocol governing how the data it produces is stored, shared and deleted. The NIA is listed in the Second Schedule of the RTI Act and is required to answer only on allegations of corruption and human rights violations, which is why these requests are addressed to the Home Ministry.
This is not the first time we have questioned the Delhi Police about the technology it uses on the public. Our applications on its signal jammers and its facial recognition systems have drawn refusals without reasons, referrals from one unit to another, and claims of national security. Our first appeals in those matters are pending.
We will also write to international bodies that have documented the misuse of these tools elsewhere, including Amnesty International’s Security Lab, the Citizen Lab and Access Now, and to the UN Special Rapporteurs on freedom of expression and on the right to privacy. We will ask them to intervene, to help examine the phones of people whose devices were taken during the October protests, and to press Cellebrite to state whether its Indian customers meet the human rights conditions it claims to apply to every sale.
We call on the Delhi Police and the Ministry of Home Affairs to:
Disclose whether any phone taken during the October protests, including the phones of Dhruv Rathee, his parents and the Newslaundry reporters, was connected to Cellebrite or any other extraction tool;
Return every device still held, and certify the deletion of any data copied from a person who has not been charged with an offence;
Suspend the use of these tools on the phones of people held in preventive detention, journalists and lawyers until binding rules are in place; and
Place before the Supreme Court, in the Foundation for Media Professionals case, the guidelines the Centre promised in December 2023.
If your phone was taken during the October protests, please do not reset it. Keep it as it is and write to us at legal@internetfreedom.in. If you would like to support this work, become an IFF member.
Important documents
Ministry of Home Affairs, Police Modernisation Division letter dated 20 January 2026, file 80016/2026/ADMIN NIA-HQ, conveying the Hon’ble Home Minister’s approval of a one-time Make in India exemption for the NIA’s Cellebrite Premium Tool (link)
NIA bid GEM/2026/B/7172473 dated 6 February 2026, naming Shri Amit Shah, Hon’ble Home Minister of India, as the competent authority for the Make in India exemption (link)
NIA Proprietary Article Certificate under Rule 166 of GFR 2017, naming M/s Cellebrite DI Ltd., Petah Tikva, Israel (link)
NIA technical specification, Cellebrite Premium Tool for Unlimited Actions with 3 Year License (link)
SFIO contract GEMC-511687772082761 dated 25 March 2026 for Cellebrite Digital Collector and Inspector, country of origin Israel (link)
Ministry of Home Affairs order E.No.14013/06/2024-UTP-I dated 20 March 2025, exempting 19 forensic products for the Delhi Police Crime Branch from the Make in India clause (link)
Delhi Police Crime Branch bid GEM/2025/B/6087335 dated 25 March 2025, forensic software and gadgets for the Cyber Lab (link)
Delhi Police Crime Branch request for proposal for 11 forensic tools for the Cyber Lab, with annexures (link)
Doxxing and threats have not stopped us, and we are still here, doing this work. IFF is a small team that relies on people like you to keep fighting for your digital rights. If this analysis was useful, please chip in and help us grow.
