India bypasses own rules to buy Israeli phone-hacking tech
Summary
India’s Home Minister Amit Shah approved exemptions from domestic procurement rules that allowed government agencies to consider buying foreign forensic technology, including products from Israeli firm Cellebrite. Documents reviewed by a digital-rights group and Al Jazeera describe tools that can extract data from phones and access accounts on cloud services, prompting concerns about surveillance safeguards.Key Facts
- A January 7 Ministry of Home Affairs letter approved a one-year exemption covering at least 422 foreign forensic items.
- A January 20 letter allowed the National Investigation Agency to buy Cellebrite’s Premium Tool under a three-year licence for about 50 million rupees, or $529,947.
- The exemption list included 118 digital and multimedia forensics items, among them Cellebrite products.
- Government tender specifications called for software able to use login tokens from seized devices to access more than 100 cloud services.
- The reviewed documents describe tools that can obtain data from social media accounts and connected devices.
- Governments led by both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Indian National Congress have purchased similar phone-extraction technology, the report said.
- Digital-rights experts said India’s laws lack safeguards against excessive surveillance and that some data extractions fall into a legal grey area.
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