Cellebrite is a dream come true for police surveillance. Plug in any cellphone, even a locked one, and get a full report of every file on its hard drive. Cellebrite, along with its main competitor, Grayshift, is one of the few companies offering this service. No wonder the Baltimore Police Department, like 6,900 other law enforcement agencies, bought a subscription.
Where police saw a dream, however, courts saw a constitutional nightmare. In September 2022, the 5th Appellate Judicial Circuit in Maryland ruled that police must stop using "general and overbroad warrants" to scrape the entire content of people's cellphones. After the ruling, Baltimore police announced that they would suspend their use of Cellebrite and work with lawyers "to ensure the current search warrant template is in line with all requirements."
