Baltimore PD Said It Would Stop Scraping Phones With Cellebrite Following A Court Ruling But It Kinda Looks Like It Never Really Did
Showing yet again that you can lead a cop to a court order but you can’t make them follow it, Matthew Petti reports for Reason that the Baltimore PD apparently barely paused its scraping of seized cell phones following a court order telling it to get its warrant particularity house in order.
Less than a year after the ruling, Baltimore cops re-upped their Cellebrite subscription, Reason has learned. In response to a Maryland Public Information Act sent through the website MuckRock, the Baltimore Police Department disclosed a $112,940 contract for Cellebrite services from March 2023 to March 2024, and another $6,100 contract from September 2023 to September 2024.
The Baltimore Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The records obtained by Philip Glaser (referenced in Petti’s report) seem to indicate the PD was never serious about complying with the court order.
But it’s not as though the court order was vague. And it certainly wasn’t as vague as the warrants being crafted by PD investigators. The coverage of this decision starts far too optimistically before it gets to the specifics of the order itself.
Baltimore Police have stopped extracting information from cellphones, a powerful investigative tool, while the department evaluates how to ensure its search warrants meet the requirements of a consequential opinion rendered this week by Maryland’s highest court.
The Court of Appeals’ ruling mandates police in Maryland be more specific when applying for warrants to search people’s cellphones and recommends law enforcement agencies adopt protocols to pull data from the devices under more narrow parameters.
Authored by Judge Jonathan Biran, of the 5th Appellate Judicial Circuit, the opinion released Monday builds on a principle that has percolated through the federal courts: A recognition that smartphones store some of society’s most sensitive information — from a person’s bank records to their personal photographs — and that the government shouldn’t have unfettered access to those private contents.
Well, there’s no telling if the Baltimore PD actually did stop “extracting information from cellphones.” According to the contract dates, there may have been a slight pause. There’s also a similar chance there was no interruption at all.
That order was issued in September 2022. The contract with Cellebrite began (again) in March 2023. What happened in between is open to speculation. There’s nothing in the documents that suggests any existing contract with Cellebrite was terminated prior to its expiration. And the quote contained in the documents may suggest a new contract was written up, but it also just may be a normal part of the contract extension process.
Whatever actually happened here, it appears it’s been business as usual at the Baltimore PD since March 2023. Whether or not it has improved its warrant affidavits is unknown. One would hope that it has. The alternative is that the courts under this appellate circuit paid no attention to this ruling and allowed the PD to submit the same deficient warrants it had been using since its first acquired Cellebrite’s tech.
Since the PD won’t comment on this, we’re left with the impression nothing much changed despite receiving direct instructions from a court. And since cops don’t like to talk about this tech if they can avoid it (and that includes while in court), the few details we get to work with are those that leak out around the edges, like this small set of documents handed to Philip Glaser.
One would hope the Baltimore PD is getting better at crafting targeted warrants before searching phones. But if any entity is capable of dashing that hope, it’s a law enforcement agency with a history of hiding surveillance tech deployments from the public when not absolutely awash in internal corruption.