Phone-cracking tools are in high demand from the FBI and police departments. But according to a recent report on Gizmodo, there’s another growing market for them as well... school administrators.

According to the article, a number of schools have purchased forensic tools, such as those made by the company Cellebrite, that can help them access iPhones belonging to pupils and faculty.

The Tools of Student Surveillance

Gizmodo cites eight school districts---seven of them in Texas---which have paid up to $11,582 for these mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs). Such tools can help access data such as texts, images, and apps on the devices in question.

Their presence in these school districts mean that they could have been used to search the phones of thousands of students.

The report was based on a random sample of 5,000 public schools or school district websites across the US. Because this is a minority of the estimated 13,506 school districts in operation, the number using these surveillance tools could be significantly higher.

There’s also a chance that many other school districts do not report purchasing of this technology as line items in their public budgets.

Cooper Quentin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Gizmodo:

Cellebrites and Stingrays started out in the provenance of the U.S. military or federal law enforcement, and then made their way into state and local law enforcement, and also eventually make their way into the hands of criminals or petty tyrants like school administrators. This is the inevitable trajectory of any sort of surveillance technology or any sort of weapon.

The report additionally notes that the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the second-largest school district in the United states, has a Cellebrite device which it uses in certain investigations involving employee misconduct complaints.

Apple Fights on the Side of Privacy

Companies like Cellebrite have been in the news since at least 2016 when the FBI had a standoff with Apple over the latter’s refusal to help crack the recovered iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter. Cellebrite are one of a growing number of companies offering various security solutions for helping crack protected devices.

Apple makes privacy a core part of its product offerings, with various features built into its tools and product offerings to keep users' data private. This ideology has sometimes positioned Apple on the opposite side to law enforcement which wants a backdoor they can use to access devices.

Related: iPhone Security Settings and Tweaks You Need to Know

However, stories such as this one show that it’s not just wanted criminal suspects whose iPhones could be cracked as part of investigations---but, potentially, students and faculty members as well.

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