In 2019, a man robbed a Virginia bank at gunpoint and walked off with $195,000. The investigation went cold. Police went to Google. They served a geofence warrant — a legal instrument that compels the company to produce location data on every phone within a defined radius of a crime scene during a defined window. Nineteen accounts came back. One of them was Okello Chatrie. He is now serving nearly twelve years.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has confirmed to Congress that it is using commercial spyware capable of intercepting encrypted messages on target devices. The agency’s top official disclosed the program in a letter to lawmakers last week, framing it as a tool for fentanyl trafficking investigations.

The confirmation matters because it ends years of official ambiguity about whether U.S. domestic law enforcement was deploying the same category of tools — powerful enough to extract data from encrypted apps — that were previously associated with foreign intelligence operations and authoritarian governments.