India bypasses own rules to buy Israeli phone-hacking tech

What the report says

India has allowed a major exemption from its own procurement rules to let government agencies buy Israeli phone-extraction and surveillance products, according to Al Jazeera’s report from New Delhi. The article says Home Minister Amit Shah approved waivers to the country’s “make in India” preference rules, opening the door for at least 422 foreign forensic and surveillance items to be purchased by agencies including the National Investigation Agency and police units.

The report focuses on technology from Cellebrite, an Israeli digital-forensics company whose tools can reportedly extract data from locked phones and, in some cases, access information from cloud services. Al Jazeera says tender documents reviewed for the story also described capabilities sought by Indian authorities that go beyond phone cloning, including recovery of browser history, deleted files, encrypted backups and data from messaging apps, as well as access to services such as Google, Apple, WhatsApp, Instagram and dating platforms. The article notes that opposition-run states, including Himachal Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka, also bought similar tools.

Rights advocates and digital-security experts quoted in the piece warned that India’s surveillance framework appears to be expanding with limited legal safeguards. They argued the available rules leave a grey zone for intrusive data extraction and broader monitoring.

The article also points to recent complaints from journalists and protesters who believe their phones may have been accessed after police seizures, while noting that such claims could not be independently verified. Al Jazeera frames the development as significant because it suggests a widening and deepening of state surveillance capacity in India, raising privacy and accountability concerns.