Note: On June 24, 2026,
Cellebrite responded, denying the allegations made in our
joint letter
. Cellebrite claims it “
stopped all sales and services to the Russian Federation in March 2021, terminating existing licenses, and […] unwinding all legal contracts.” The company maintains
that any “legacy technology” still in Russia is obsolete and “
ineffective today,”
and that any continued use
since March 2021 is “entirely unauthorized.”
The company says that it does not “transact
with countries sanctioned by the US, EU, UK or Israeli governments or on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklist.”
This response fails to adequately address the consistent documentation from the Citizen Lab, from
Israeli
and
Russian
investigative media, and from
legal organizations
, about Russian authorities’ deployment of Cellebrite tools following the company’s exit from Russia. We call on the company to engage with our recommendations listed below to prevent human rights abuses.
A new investigation by the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto (“the
Citizen Lab
”) has
confirmed evidence
that Russian authorities used Israeli surveillance firm
Cellebrite
’s Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) to hack into an iPhone of Andrey Pivovarov, a prominent Russian activist and former political prisoner. Notably, a forensic report provided to Pivovarov by the Russian government states that authorities used UFED to infiltrate several of his devices three months after the company
said it was ending sales to Russia “immediately
.” The Citizen Lab’s investigation confirms with high confidence the use of the forensic extraction tool on at least one of the devices after Russia was allegedly cut off.
Cellebrite has a
long history
of selling its technologies to repressive regimes and facilitating human rights abuses, from
Venezuela to Myanmar
. What’s more, authoritarian governments with poor human rights records have previo
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