Oakland leaders approved a $140,000 contract last week between OPD and an Israeli surveillance company, Cellebrite, which provides tools that can unlock cellphones and extract and analyze their data. 

Oakland police have used Cellebrite since 2014 for criminal investigations and to monitor how officers are using department-issued devices. Two years ago, the council approved a newer version of Cellebrite that “dramatically expanded” OPD’s digital evidence capabilities, according to a staff report recently shared with the council. City officials agreed to approve a one-year extension of this version of Cellebrite. The existing contract is supposed to expire in June. 

The council waived some of Oakland’s contracting rules to approve the contract, including competitive bidding. 

But city officials did not seek a waiver for Oakland’s “Sanctuary City Contracting and Investment Ordinance.” Since 2019, this law has barred Oakland from doing business with companies that work with federal immigration agencies by providing “services or goods for data collection or immigration detention facilities.” This applies to new contracts as well as amendments or extensions to existing contracts. The ordinance also requires contractors to certify that they do not provide prohibited services to immigration agencies.  

It’s unclear if Oakland has waived the law to work with a company. Last year, city officials pulled a proposed security services contract with Allied Universal after The Oaklandside reported that one of the company’s subsidiary firms has contracts with ICE to provide armed detention officers transportation services.” 

In response to questions from The Oaklandside, OPD officials said the city attorney had reviewed the contract and determined that Oakland’s sanctuary city law does not apply. The ordinance restricts the city from contracting with companies that provide services related to extreme vetting, data brokering, and detention facilities. 

“OPD is not aware that Cellebrite provides any of these services to ICE,” an OPD spokesperson said in an email. “OPD is committed to following all of the City’s contracting protocols, and will of course revisit its determinations if any new, relevant information comes to our attention.” 

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have at least one active contract with Cellebrite worth $11 million to “support investigations and operations requiring advanced digital forensic capabilities,” according to the federal publicly searchable government’s contracting database. And ICE has purchased Cellebrite equipment and software for years, spending $9.6 million last year, and $6.2 million from 2023 to 2024. 

Media reports have documented how ICE agents have used Cellebrite to unlock phones and collect data, including apps, location history, call records, text messages, and even communications from encrypted apps. In 2017, ICE inked a $2 million contract with Cellebrite for its “universal forensic extraction devices,” which can pull massive amounts of data from cellphones. The purchase was part of a federal spending spree to meet Trump’s demand for “extreme vetting” of people traveling to the U.S. from Muslim-majority countries, according to a report by Forbes. In 2019, the advocacy group Privacy International reported that Cellebrite was marketing itself to border control agencies by touting how its technology can be used to vet asylum seekers. 

The Department of Homeland Security also recently announced its intent to purchase up to $100 million worth of Cellebrite products and services for its cybercrime center. Customs and Border Protection, which has also used Cellebrite for many years, announced its intention last year to award a roughly $2 million contract to the company to support extracting data from phones. 

China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other governments accused of human rights abuses have used Cellebrite’s technology

Some Oakland residents who protested the deal at last week’s council meeting expressed concerns about the role Cellebrite has played in helping repressive governments target journalists and political dissidents. Many were also opposed to a deal with a company headquartered in Israel, citing Israel’s invasion and destruction of wide swaths of Gaza, which many authorities and civil society groups, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem, have classified as a genocide. Like other Israeli military and police technologies, Cellebrite has been used extensively to conduct surveillance on Palestinians and their allies in other countries.

“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.,” Zahra Billo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a press release after the council vote. 

“That decision should never have been made without meaningful engagement with the communities most likely to be impacted by expanded surveillance and discriminatory policing, including Muslim, Palestinian, Middle Eastern, immigrant, and activist communities. International affairs and policing are not separate issues,” Billoo added. 

Councilmembers Carroll Fife and Janani Ramachandran were the only “no” votes against the contract. Fife called Cellebrite a “horrible, horrible” company and said it has been used to perpetrate human rights abuses around the world. She also questioned why OPD hasn’t provided more details about why the department needs this technology. 

“I want to know, why do all of the public safety tools that come before this body have such a terrible human rights record?” 

OPD officials explained that there are only a handful of companies that are capable of doing data extraction at the level of Cellebrite, and that the Israeli company is the only one that can reliably unlock Android phones. 

According to OPD, the department conducted over 1,000 extractions since 2024 using Cellebrite, which has helped identify suspects and solve violent crimes. But staff were unable to provide councilmembers with a tally of how many cases were solved with Cellebrite, arguing that this was functionally impossible given how many different technological and human components go into investigating a crime. 

Interim Chief James Beere said OPD can return to council at the end of the new Cellebrite contract with a list of different potential vendors. But he argued that the technology offered by Cellebrite is vital for addressing crime in Oakland. 

“Sometimes this is the only voice for our victims,” Beere said. 

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