Israel To Give India The Technology To Unlock Any Phone

India will soon have access to the technology that can unlock any mobile phone, as reported by the Economic Times. Even devices equipped with top-notch encryption will be vulnerable to a break-in with this technology.

India’s premier forensic institute, Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL), will be buying this technology from an Israeli company called Cellebrite. The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had sought Cellebrite’s assistance to break into the iPhone of one of the two shooters responsible for killing 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

On receiving the technology, a senior FSL official told Economic Times:

The official reportedly said that this technology can help India crack even into iPhones with operating systems iOS 8 and above, which are notoriously hard to crack. With several failed attempts at a passcode on an iPhone, the data on the phone either gets deleted or turns gibberish.

Access to such a technology inevitably raises privacy concerns. Apple’s chief executive officer Tim Cook found himself in a moral dilemma early this year when the FBI demanded Apple help them break into an iPhone. Cook had then, in a letter, decided to stand for privacy. The fear concerning the use of such technology is that it could be used secretly, and unethically, to access data of regular, unsuspecting mobile phone users. It’s a legitimate question as to why that should be allowed to happen.

On the other hand, there is a climate of crime and terrorism across the globe that warrants the adoption and use of such technology. Like in the case of the San Bernardino shooter, if a case comes up that requires breaking into a phone to uncover priceless information – say, about an existing terror network or to identify other hidden players – such a technology would prove invaluable.

This is an important debate to have. But for now, the FSL in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, will have access to this technology in a month’s time. Other forensic institutes in the country can request access and will reportedly have to pay a fee to use it.