Home Ministry documents show Amit Shah approved a one-year exemption covering at least 422 items, including Cellebrite products, allowing government forensic institutions to buy outside India’s domestic procurement preference.
India’s Home Minister Amit Shah approved a one-year waiver allowing government forensic institutions to buy at least 422 foreign-technology items, including products from Israeli phone-extraction company Cellebrite. The permission appears in Home Ministry documents investigated by the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital-rights group, and reviewed by Al Jazeera.
India’s Make in India procurement rules give eligible Indian manufacturers preference over foreign suppliers. The rules also allow the minister responsible for a purchasing department to approve exemptions. The waiver opens a route to procurement; it does not establish that an agency bought a particular product.
The Internet Freedom Foundation identified 118 digital and multimedia forensics entries on the exemption list, including Cellebrite products. These tools concern the examination and extraction of digital data.
A separate Home Ministry letter permitted, but did not document, the National Investigation Agency’s purchase of a three-year license for Cellebrite’s Premium Tool for about 50 million rupees. Al Jazeera identified the broad waiver letter as dated 7 January and the agency-specific letter as dated 20 January, without giving their years.
A Delhi Police bid request reviewed by Al Jazeera sought software for the National Cyber Forensic Laboratory, which is under the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, a Home Ministry initiative; the software could bypass passwords and screen locks, copy an entire file system, decrypt backups and recover deleted files and messaging information. Delhi Police reports to Shah’s Home Ministry.
The Internet Freedom Foundation says India lacks a statute or protocol specifically authorizing or regulating forced phone unlocking and full data extraction. The group says existing seizure powers do not explicitly address bypassing passcodes, harvesting tokens to access cloud accounts, or retaining and deleting extracted data.
India’s Supreme Court recognized privacy as a fundamental constitutional right in 2017. Its judgment required state intrusions into privacy to have a legal basis, pursue a legitimate state aim and be proportionate to that aim.
Vrinda Bhandari, a Supreme Court lawyer working on digital rights and privacy, said India has only internal executive review and lacks meaningful legislative, parliamentary or judicial oversight. She said people may struggle to challenge surveillance because they do not know it is happening.
The Indian government has denied allegations of unauthorized surveillance. The Home Ministry, National Investigation Agency and home departments of Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Keralam had not answered Al Jazeera’s requests for comment by publication.
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