The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) owns sophisticated hacking tools that can breach iPhones, and has used them hundreds of times over the last several years, according to USPIS records.
Law enforcement’s use of hacking tools such as Cellebrite and GrayKey has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly following reports that the FBI used the Israeli-based Cellebrite to help access the iPhone belonging to San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook—though there has since been reporting to the contrary. More recently, records obtained by Vice Motherboard last year revealed how police departments use GrayKey.
The use of such tools by the USPIS, the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service, is disclosed in its 2019 and 2020 annual reports, but has gone largely unpublicized until now. The Epoch Times has also reviewed an internal Postal Service letter, which shows that one technician in the USPIS digital evidence unit used GrayKey to crack more than 150 iOS devices—iOS being the mobile operating system for the iPhone.
Altogether, the records suggest that the USPIS has cracked hundreds of iPhones—generally thought to be one of the most secure commercial phones on the market—as well as other devices.
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