Photo by Mylo Kaye on Unsplash

The Greater Manchester Police force has confirmed its procurement of the Cellebrite Inseyets spyware suite in a tender lasting until at least 2026.

Cellebrite is a universal forensics extraction device (UFED) used by law enforcement, military and intelligence units to extract encrypted personal data from mobile phones. The software is developed by Israeli company Cellebrite Limited. Its largest shareholder is the Japanese Sun Corporation, which also makes Nintendo games.

The decision to award the Israeli company with the GMP contract was sealed in December last year, and will run for a maximum of four years with an expected value of £3.4m.

The Greater Manchester Police has said that it currently “utilises a suite of tools and applications to conduct the units BAU, however GMP are looking to expand the capacity and set up 8 regional hubs to facilitate this change”.

The GM’s digital forensics procurement avoided an open tender “as there is only a single provider of the products and tools required.”

The Protocol filed a freedom of information request in March following the publication of the tender, however the GMP neither confirmed nor denied its usage of the spyware.

The GMP has conducted business with Cellebrite since at least 2016, and a range of other public entities have similar partnerships with the Israeli spyware firm including the Foreign Office, Home Office, Ministry of Defence, alongside at least 25 other police forces.

Militarised tech contracts have been populating the British public sector procurement pipeline for years and – despite the state’s tradition of war crimes – Israeli tech companies have been increasingly “fast-tracked” into British infrastructure, as Corporate Watch put it.

The link between Cellebrite and British public institutions is embodied by the company’s former director. Haim Shani was on the board at Cellebrite between 2019 and 2024. The former Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Finance is also the current chairman of the UK-Israel Tech Hub, and previously received an OBE for delivering tech partnerships between the two states. 

Cellebrite’s UK distributor reported a turnover of £24m in 2024 – the bulk of this came from deals with “law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies”.

There is also the glaring ethical question of using Israeli military products. In Israel, cyber-intelligence technology must be authorised, and is often supported, by the Israeli Ministry of Defence. Cellebrite is used to “harvest data from the phones of thousands of Palestinians who were captured and kidnapped from Gaza”, according to the American Friends Service Committee, a worrying example of Israeli MoD tech being tested in violence against Palestinians before export to the international community.

British taxpayers are funding not just digital authoritarianism against themselves, but against the Palestinians too. As such the Greater Manchester Police’s decision to acquire Cellebrite’s Inseyets suite should not be taken lightly.

Last year, Amnesty International published a report detailing the use of Cellebrite to hack a journalist’s phone in Serbia, which subsequently saw the company terminate its business in the country. Likewise, the Police Service of Northern Ireland used the UFED to hack into two journalists’ phones in 2018 – an act that was ruled as unlawful by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal last year.

The Greater Manchester Police force did not respond to a request for comment.