Public Records Show FBI Secretly Extracted Data From ICE Protesters' Phones

[Nevilledog]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/06/cellebrite-phone-protest-ice-dhs-spokane-fbi-conspiracy-surveillance-privacy/

On the evening of June 11, 2025, Shailynn Bray-Waters joined hundreds of other protesters at a demonstration outside an ICE field office in Spokane, Washington. She’d learned through social media that two of her former ESL students—Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, both lawful asylum seekers from Venezuela—had been detained during a routine immigration check-in. Former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart, who was sponsoring Alvarez Perez through a government humanitarian program, put out a call to action on Facebook: “I am going to sit in front of the bus. Feel free to join me.”

Bray-Waters did not sit in front of the ICE transport van. Nevertheless, public records show the Spokane police arrested her that night on a misdemeanor “failure to disperse” charge, confiscated her cellphone, and sent it over to the FBI for investigation.

Bray-Waters was one of 23 people whose phones were seized during a mass arrest that night. She wouldn’t see her device again until mid-August. On June 20, Spokane news outlet RANGE detailed the confusion swirling around the seized devices with the headline: “Where are the protesters’ phones?”

Now, an investigation by Mother Jones confirms that the FBI used software from the Israeli firm Cellebrite to secretly extract data from the phones of Bray-Waters and at least a dozen other protesters. A month later, one of those protesters, Thalia Ramirez, would be indicted as part of the Spokane 9 case, in which the federal government charged nine people with “conspiracy to impede or injure” officers at the June 11 protest. Every other protester whose phone was extracted in June had their misdemeanor charges promptly dismissed in city and county courts.

*snip*

[orthoclad]

1. Lawless, with guns and badges

Of course, there's nothing new about this.

It looks like they use arrests for weak and fake charges for espionage. This goes above the level of surveillance and into the realm of espionage by "jack-booted thugs". Gee, I wonder where all the "freedom lovers" are? I don't hear any outrage from them. I guess it's okay if the "God-Emperor" does it.

And of course bad actors from Israel enable it all. That's been happening for many years.

[Igel]

2. That's what the claim sets out to get us to believe.

But the text of the article undermines the main goal--if that's really the goal.

The FBI needed search warrants to extract data from the devices in June, according to Laura Moraff, staff attorney at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. But it’s difficult to determine whether those warrants were obtained and what they said. The government is not required to notify people if their devices have been searched in an investigation—that information is normally only revealed through the discovery process in court. But 12 of the 13 protesters whose phones were extracted were never indicted.

“Warrant procedures are ex parte—it’s the government going in and saying, ‘We need to do this,”’ said Moraff. “The defendant doesn’t have an opportunity to challenge that until they’re made aware of it, which is usually in a criminal case.”

If they got warrants and the claims made as the basis for those warrants are reasonable, than what they did is 100% lawful.

If those two were charged and it goes to trial and the basis for the warrants was fraudulent or if there were no warrants, then that evidence will be tossed and quite likely the charges dismissed with prejudice.

[orthoclad]

3. They're not trying for convictions

This phone spying was an intelligence operation, like the CIA would conduct on an adversary.

Arrests accomplish much more than convictions. They terrorize, they impoverish, and they give intelligence opportunities. The FBI won't care if they capture LEGAL intelligence, which would be useful, but not essential. They want to feed the data into their AI to illuminate networks of opposition. Then they attribute the captured intelligence to "confidential sources" when they use it to prosecute other protestors.

Smart phones are Big Brother's favorite toys.

[canetoad]

4. Huge datacentres

Needed to store and process the seemingly trivial data on individuals so that AI can pinpoint the enemies of the state.