In mid-December 2025, police located and arrested a convicted drug trafficker at a convenience store in Westbrook, Maine for breaching his parole conditions. When the cops seized and searched the rental car he’d been using, they found four iPhones inside.

In fall 2024, Apple released a security feature that automatically reboots an iPhone when it’s been locked for 72 hours or more. Typically, that means cops are in a race against the clock to get as much information from suspects’ phones before the timer runs out.

But in this case, the local police had access to a surveillance device that can stop that 72-hour timer. The Graykey Preserve tool gives cops more time to get a warrant, enabling them to ensure they can still search an iPhone for chats, images, videos and web browsing data beyond the three-day cutoff.

Through court and contract records, as well as public information requests, Forbes has learned local and federal cops across at least six U.S. states are now using the Graykey Preserve tool: Georgia, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, New York and Rhode Island. Most recently, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) acquired Graykey Preserve technology.

GrayKey Preserve “supercharges the existing issues with ICE’s instinct to search devices first and ask questions later.” Maria Villegas Bravo, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center

Graykey Preserve is made by Magnet Forensics, bought by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $1.3 billion in 2023. Founded by former cop Jad Saliba in Canada in 2010, Magnet became the chief rival to market leader Cellebrite, Israel’s $3 billion police forensics giant, when it merged with Atlanta-based Grayshift, the original maker of the iPhone cracking tool , as part of the Thoma Bravo deal.

Neither Apple nor Magnet Forensics responded to requests for comment. Two Graykey customers, St Louis County Police Department in Missouri and Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office in New York, told Forbes they could not respond to Forbes ’ FOIA questions about the technology and its features because Magnet asked them to sign non-disclosure agreements.

According to Forbes ’ review of court and public records, the biggest known user of GrayKey Preserve by far is the Onondaga County Department of Law in Syracuse, New York. Its Center for Forensic Sciences told Forbes via a public records request that its Preserve tech had been used 71 times to date. The agency did not break down how many of those uses resulted in successful preservation of evidence.

Det. Sgt. Maurice Drouin from the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office says the device is so useful that it’s employed weekly. Search warrants reviewed by Forbes show the agency’s Preserve devices are regularly used in narcotics trafficking investigations.

Drouin, who also serves on an FBI task force covering violent crimes against children, says he’s unaware of any legal issue with using the device to break Apple’s security countdown. “Preserve is preventing the destruction of evidence,” he adds. “By preserving the device, we are not gaining any additional information on the device. No data is extracted by the Preserve tool. The only thing it is allowing is for the state of the device to not change pending extraction of data.”

Orin Kerr, a lawyer and legal professor at Stanford, says that the use of a Preserve device should be entirely lawful as long as the police have probable cause for the initial seizure and they’re working to get a warrant. Federal law, he notes, allows police to take steps to preserve evidence.

Still, privacy activists are concerned about how ICE could use the technology. Maria Villegas Bravo, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, tells Forbes its acquisition of the Preserve “supercharges the existing issues with ICE’s instinct to search devices first and ask questions later.”

“It’s concerning that this kind of scope creep, mission creep, and general expansion of what they’re able to do, and being able to preserve that, gives them a longer time to investigate people,” she says.

GrayKey Preserve isn’t the only Apple-cracking tech in town. Cellebrite recently announced a rival tool in its Inseyets data extraction app that also promises to pause Apple’s countdown. Users of that app include Customs Border Protection and the Pentagon.