Oakland Approves Police Contract With Cellebrite to Search Phones

Activists opposed Oakland’s contract this week with an Israeli cellphone data extraction company, which they say has been used in Israeli military operations in Gaza, and to surveil journalists and activists across the world.

The Oakland Police Department has contracted with digital intelligence company Cellebrite since 2014.

“By approving this contract, Oakland has chosen to bring in technology tied directly to Israeli occupation forces, the surveillance of Palestinians, and immigration enforcement here in the U.S.,” said Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the Bay Area’s office of the Council of American-Islamic Relations. “That decision should never have been made without meaningful engagement with the communities most likely to be impacted by expanded surveillance and discriminatory policing.”

While Oakland’s police department has used some version of Cellebrite’s technology to download cellphone data, according to OPD Sgt. Yun Zhou, the most updated version, which OPD has used since about 2024, allows it to access data from cell phones without a passcode.

According to city records, the technology is used in both internal audits of OPD members’ work phones, and to aid in criminal investigations.

Zhou said last year, the department used Cellebrite to search more than 200 devices obtained through search warrants and is thought to be involved in robberies, homicides and other crimes.

On Wednesday, the City Council voted 6-2 to approve OPD’s contract with Cellebrite through June 2027, for a price of $140,000. Councilmembers Janani Ramachandran and Carroll Fife opposed the contract.

According to Fife, Cellebrite’s technology has been used against journalists in Myanmar and Botswana, and activists in Serbia, whose phones were “secretly” unlocked. CAIR also said the technology has been used to collect data from Palestinians who have been detained in Gaza.

And last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed a contract to obtain Cellebrite’s tools.

“I just don’t want Oakland to be part of that list of bad actors who continuously violate human rights,” Fife said. Zhou said that Oakland’s data is stored locally through evidence.com, and that Cellebrite does not “touch” it.

According to the police department’s 2024 annual report, “OPD has not shared any Cellebrite extraction data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security or U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

During Wednesday’s meeting, more than 20 people spoke in opposition to the contract, many echoing Fife’s and CAIR’s concerns about human rights violations.

“The tools provide access to phones, messages, location data, photos, deleted files and obviously that’s immensely intrusive,” said Musa Tariq, CAIR-SFBA’s policy coordinator. “This company is kind of part of a broader ecosystem of surveillance where these tools that are developed in militarized or occupation contexts are being exported globally. That’s raising concerns about the normalization of these practices, both abroad and then over here at home.”

Zhou said the department “does understand the optics of this company,” but hasn’t been able to identify a comparable alternative for extracting data from Android devices.

“We are tied to it because of necessity,” he told the councilmembers. “If there is a viable replacement, just because of cost alone, I think most of us would switch over.” He said the department has tested alternative technologies, including one in the midst of a 30-day trial.

So far, Zhou told the council, the alternative tool has been used to try to unlock eight phones, and failed each test. By contrast, he said, Cellebrite has worked to access seven of the eight.

Councilmember Charlene Wang, who chairs the public safety committee, said it was “undeniable” that Cellebrite had been used by authoritarian regimes to surveil people without consent, but that it’s also used in democratic nations to investigate violent organized crime and human trafficking.

She said not approving the contract would hurt OPD’s ability to solve violent crimes.

“We do have trade-offs to make,” she said. “We have an obligation to protect our citizens, and to use this technology wisely here in the city of Oakland.”

Wang said next year, she would like to see a competitive bidding process for the phone-extraction contract — a usual process for city contracts that was waived in this case.

Fife asked the department to conduct a review of other vendors that might be available to offer similar technology, as well as an independent legal analysis assessing Cellebrite’s access to the city’s data.

She also asked that the department publicly report concrete statistics of how the data extraction technology is leading to a decrease in crimes.

“We keep having to approve contracts that have been shown around the world to have proven violations of people’s human rights,” Fife said. “I don’t support the use of this vendor. Israel is a genocide state. They are utilizing their power and their control and their monopolies in the public safety sector to monopolize law enforcement agencies around the world.”