SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
The FBI is looking at the cellphone of a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man in hopes of figuring out why he tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump last weekend. That made us wonder, how does law enforcement access phones that suspects are unwilling or unable to unlock? Let's ask David Gee. He's chief marketing officer at the company Cellebrite, which sells tools that can access locked smartphones. The FBI is one of its customers. Good morning, David.
DAVID GEE: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
PFEIFFER: Companies like Apple and Google tout their high levels of security, so what kind of tech does your company provide that lets law enforcement crack into phones anyway?
GEE: Well, let's start with the current situation, where you have an assailant who has been apprehended by the FBI, and they need help in terms of accessing the data that's on that phone. And Cellebrite as a company has been in this business almost 20 years, and we have tens of thousands of years of man's research that enable law enforcement, specifically under the jurisdiction of the courts, lawfully to enable law enforcement to extract data from those phones, and that can be done a number of different ways, none of which are public information that we would want to talk about here today.
PFEIFFER: I figured you would say that. I'm wondering if, in some ways, it's as simple yet as complicated as coming up with rapid ways to keep trying different passcodes. Is that the general idea?
GEE: So that's one of the ways to do it, and in this industry, it's a game of cat and mouse. Obviously, the large mobile phone operators, in terms of their operating systems, and equipment manufacturers, their chipsets, the operating systems, it's a game of cat and mouse. There's always upgrades and updates that come through the manufacturers and the providers of those systems, and we work to continually provide capabilities to law enforcement specifically, to enable them to access and extract information from those phones.
PFEIFFER: Clearly, you don't want to share trade secrets. I totally get that. Your company - you referred to the jurisdiction of the courts, and your company says it sells to, quote, "authorized institutions." Are there any types of customers you won't work with; anyone you won't sell your products to?
GEE: There are many opportunities that we simply will not do - and organizations - we will not do business with, and to be very clear, we operate only with law enforcement - let's take the U.S. as an example - and the only use cases for our products are through the courts and through a legally obtained warrant.
PFEIFFER: Once law enforcement does access a locked phone, can it essentially access anything and everything, including encrypted messaging apps like Signal?
GEE: So once law enforcement has legal access to the phone, the process is, you can access it. We can enable law enforcement, and they can then extract that data, and that data comes out as a large blob of data. It can be 128 gig; it can be 256. Even the most modern phones today have many times the memory of earlier phones. Once that happens, it goes into a decoding engine, and that decoding engine can then extract and understand photos, images, messages, including secure messages and the like. And that's critically important in a police investigation and a criminal investigation, and there are many examples where that has been profoundly important. For example, in the recent Murdaugh murder trial, the ability to be able to place the location data from the phone with the messages that were sent at the time of the murder were instrumental in securing that prosecution.
PFEIFFER: That is David Gee with Cellebrite, a company that sells tools to law enforcement to unlock smartphones. Thank you.
GEE: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
