ICE Adds $3M in Phone Hacking Tools

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has again made large-scale purchases of tools capable of unlocking smartphones and extracting data. ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) recently signed a contract of approximately 3 million USD with Magnet Forensics. The company product "GrayKey" can unlock iPhones and Android phones and extract photos, messages, and app records. ICE contract purpose: securing digital evidence to protect national security and public safety, analyzing multiple devices simultaneously, and creating necessary investigation reports. This is not the first time: last year ICE signed a 5M USD contract with the same company; in recent weeks additional contracts of 90,000 USD and 50,000 USD have been signed consecutively. GrayKey was originally made by startup Grayshift; merged with Magnet Forensics in 2023. The privacy implications: GrayKey is specifically designed to bypass device encryption -- the security protection that Apple and Google have marketed as protecting users from government overreach; the ICE procurement enables extraction of private communications, location history, and app data without requiring cloud provider cooperation; the scale of procurement suggests industrial-scale digital forensics capability being deployed for immigration enforcement rather than limited use for serious criminal investigations.