Even as the Israeli cell phone hacking company Cellebrite tries to go public next week, and said it 

withdrew from China and Hong Kong, an Intercept investigation has found that police in Mainland 

China continued to buy the company’s Universal Forensic Extraction Device, or UFED, products, 

which allow officers to break into phones in their possession and siphon off data. It said while 

Cellebrite did deregister its Chinese subsidiary earlier this year, it appears to have done little about 

the brokers that peddle its hacking technology. Chinese government procurement award notices 

and posts on resellers’ websites show that police have continued to purchase powerful Cellebrite 

software, while resellers have continued to provide updates for the software. In one case, a reseller 

reported delivering the Israeli company’s software to border guards in Tibet and demonstrating 

how it could be used to search people’s WeChat accounts. The Intercept claims the findings follow 

reports of abuses involving Cellebrite technology elsewhere in the world — including in Bahrain, 

Botswana, Indonesia, India, and Saudi Arabia — that the company has not meaningfully addressed. 

Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel for AccessNow, said “Cellebrite hasn’t demonstrated that they have made serious efforts to investigate the misuse of their technology,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech 

legal counsel for AccessNow