Home Minister cleared NIA's Make in India waiver to buy Cellebrite's top phone-cracking tool, IFF finds

India's National Investigation Agency bought the most powerful phone-cracking product sold by Israeli forensics firm Cellebrite after Union Home Minister Amit Shah approved a one-time exemption from the government's Make in India procurement rules, according to an investigation published by the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital rights group. IFF cites a Ministry of Home Affairs letter dated 20 January 2026 which records that the Minister approved the proposal on a note dated 17 January 2026, for one Cellebrite Premium Tool with a three-year licence. IFF says it has not seen the note itself and has sought it under the RTI Act.

The paper trail runs onto the government's own marketplace. IFF reports that the NIA published bid GEM/2026/B/7172473 on GeM seventeen days after the letter, and that the bid's field for the authority who waived the Make in India preference names the Home Minister. The contract has since been awarded for Rs 4,97,99,515. IFF counts fifteen procurement listings naming Cellebrite products published by Indian agencies in 2026 alone, spread across eleven tenders, with buyers including the NIA, the Serious Fraud Investigation Office, the Department of Military Affairs and police and forensic departments in Kerala, Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh. It adds that the Delhi Police has held Cellebrite tools since at least 2020.

The technical specification attached to the NIA bid shows what the tool is meant to do. According to IFF, it asks for passcode brute force on a long list of Samsung and Huawei Android phones and on iPhones from the A8 to the A13 chip, and for full file-system extraction from the iPhone 11 to the iPhone 14 once a phone has been unlocked at least once since it was switched on. It also asks the tool to open the private areas phone makers offer, such as Samsung Secure Folder, Huawei Private Space and Xiaomi Second Space, and to pull data app by app. A full file-system extraction copies chats, photos, contacts, call logs, location history and app data, and the copy remains after the phone is returned.

The concern IFF raises is the absence of rules. It says India has no statute, rule or published protocol governing the forensic extraction of a phone, including how long copies may be kept, who they can be shared with and when they must be deleted. Gujarat Samachar, reporting on the findings, notes that the constitutional validity of Section 69 of the IT Act, which covers interception and decryption, is under challenge in the Supreme Court, including in a petition filed by IFF. The Wire has also published the investigation.

For anyone who carries a phone, the practical point is that devices seized during an investigation can be copied in full, and the legal limits on what happens to that copy are not written down. The findings rest on official procurement documents as read by IFF. The Ministry of Home Affairs and the NIA have not publicly responded to the report in the sources reviewed here.