This Idaho police department uses software to unlock phones and AI to obtain their data
The Nampa Police Department will soon use technology to unlock cell phones and quickly sort through personal phone data.
The Nampa City Council authorized the department to buy nearly $79,000 worth of technology from Cellebrite, an Israeli company that sells tools to unlock phones and obtain their data for police and government agencies.
Nampa Police Capt. Eric Skoglund said police have been using technology to unlock people’s phones without their passwords during police investigations for years. The technology from Cellebrite is called Pathfinder, and it uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to sort and analyze data.
The new software will help “filter information, organize information more efficiently as it is being downloaded so that the officer that’s doing the examination of that can do that more efficiently,” Skoglund told the Idaho Statesman by phone. “It will sort that information based on what (the officer is) looking for. So they may not have to spend as much time going through everything on the phone”
The department still must either have a search warrant from a judge or the phone owner’s consent, Skoglund said.
After this story published, a spokesperson for Cellebrite sent an email explaining that Cellbrite is operating “legally” and “ethically.”
“We enable our law enforcement to collect and review, analyze, and manage data in a lawful and auditable manner – when subpoenaed by a judge after a crime occurs– and provide them with solutions to do this ethically while protecting privacy,” said Leah Lazarz, the spokesperson.
TechCrunch found in August that a Cellebrite employee who was training law enforcement on its tools told the trainees to keep the technology and the fact that they used it to solve a crime “as hush-hush as possible.”
That troubled both criminal defense attorneys and digital rights groups, according to TechCrunch. Hanni Fakhoury, a criminal defense attorney, told the website “the reason why that stuff needs to be disclosed, is the defense needs to be able to figure out ‘was there a legal problem in how this evidence was obtained? Do I have the ability to challenge that?’”
Skoglund said he felt comfortable talking about when the department would use the technology, but to protect Cellebrite’s licensing and AI technology, he wouldn’t get into how it works.
When asked if Skoglund thought Cellebrite wouldn’t want people to know that this capability exists and is being used by law enforcement, he said he thinks there could be a “desire not to advertise” the capability.
But he said he thinks the public has an understanding that a phone is similar to someone’s vehicle or residence. “If you have illegal things within your residence or in your car or on your person that you’re not supposed to have, the police can search and obtain that stuff.”
The Idaho Attorney General’s Office and Idaho State Police also use Cellebrite technology, according to Transparent Idaho, the state controller’s office spending database.
Phil Skinner, chief of staff for Attorney General Raúl Labrador, told the Statesman in an email that “Cellebrite is a forensic tool used by law enforcement to extract and organize data from cellphones.”
The Idaho State Police did not return an emailed request for comment about how it uses the company’s tools.
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