# Mass Extraction — The Widespread Power of U.S. Law Enforcement to Search Mobile Phones (Upturn, 2020) > *This is the executive summary of Upturn's 2020 report "Mass Extraction," the most comprehensive public accounting of how U.S. state and local law enforcement use mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs) — the category that includes Cellebrite's UFED and Physical Analyzer. Based on more than 110 public records requests, Upturn documented over 2,000 agencies across all 50 states and D.C. that purchased these tools and "hundreds of thousands" of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant and for minor offenses. It matters to the Arkansas surveillance investigation because it establishes the national baseline scale and the documented pattern of low-level, often warrantless domestic deployment against which Arkansas agencies' MDFT adoption can be measured. This is a tier-3 NGO/research source.* ## Source metadata - **Publisher:** Upturn (nonprofit focused on technology, justice and equity); report authors include Logan Koepke, Emma Weil, Urmila Janardan, Tinuola Dada, Harlan Yu - **URL:** https://www.upturn.org/work/mass-extraction/ - **Archived:** 2026-06-07 via firecrawl_scrape (markdown) - **Tier:** 3 (NGO/research) ## Extract — verbatim (lightly cleaned) ### Executive Summary "Every day, law enforcement agencies across the country search thousands of cellphones, typically incident to arrest. To search phones, law enforcement agencies use mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), a powerful technology that allows police to extract a full copy of data from a cellphone — all emails, texts, photos, location, app data, and more — which can then be programmatically searched. As one expert puts it, with the amount of sensitive information stored on smartphones today, the tools provide a 'window into the soul.'" "This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement in the United States. Based on 110 public records requests to state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, our research documents more than 2,000 agencies that have purchased these tools, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We found that state and local law enforcement agencies have performed hundreds of thousands of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such records have been widely disclosed." "Every American is at risk of having their phone forensically searched by law enforcement." "Law enforcement use these tools to investigate not only cases involving major harm, but also for graffiti, shoplifting, marijuana possession, prostitution, vandalism, car crashes, parole violations, petty theft, public intoxication, and the full gamut of drug-related offenses. Given how routine these searches are today, together with racist policing policies and practices, it's more than likely that these technologies disparately affect and are used against communities of color." "The emergence of these tools represents a dangerous expansion in law enforcement's investigatory powers. In 2011, only 35% of Americans owned a smartphone. Today, it's at least 81% of Americans. Moreover, many Americans — especially people of color and people with lower incomes — rely solely on their cellphones to connect to the internet." "We believe that MDFTs are simply too powerful in the hands of law enforcement and should not be used. But recognizing that MDFTs are already in widespread use across the country, we offer a set of preliminary recommendations that we believe can, in the short-term, help reduce the use of MDFTs. These include: - banning the use of consent searches of mobile devices, - abolishing the plain view exception for digital searches, - requiring easy-to-understand audit logs, - enacting robust data deletion and sealing requirements, and - requiring clear public logging of law enforcement use." ### Report section headings (table of contents, verbatim) "Widespread Law Enforcement Adoption Across the United States — Almost Every Major Law Enforcement Agency Has These Tools — Many Smaller Agencies Can Afford Them — Federal Grants Drive Acquisition — Agencies Share Their Tools With One Another — A Pervasive Tool for Even the Most Common Offenses — Tens of Thousands of Device Extractions Each Year — Graffiti, Shoplifting, Drugs, and Other Minor Cases — Officers Often Rely on Consent, Not Warrants — A Routine and Growing Practice — Few Constraints and Little Oversight — Many Agencies Have No Specific Policies in Place — Overbroad Searches and the Lack of Particularity — Police Databases and Unrelated Investigations — Expanding Searches From a Phone Into the Cloud — Rare Public Oversight."