TOLEBI DISTRICT, TURKISTAN REGION — Bagdat Togysbayev, an activist from the Tolebi district in the Turkistan Region of Kazakhstan, was detained for five days by police after publicly calling for the release of the rights movement Atazhurt. Upon his release, Togysbayev said he discovered that authorities had accessed and altered settings on his smartphone while it was in their custody during the detention.

Togysbayev, who is known for criticizing the government on social media, left his Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 smartphone with authorities while he was held. When he returned home and turned on the device, the phone made an automated call to his younger sister upon being initiated — behavior he had not configured before his detention. "When I learned this, I immediately thought, 'they opened my phone.' Otherwise, my phone was locked and set to 'airplane' mode," he said.

He described finding additional changes to the device's settings after further examination. "A few days later, I returned home, I opened my phone and accessed the 2gis map. I found they had enabled the function that shows my location to others. They had set it up so that information would be automatically broadcast whenever I connected to the Internet."

Since discovering the changes, the activist has often left his smartphone at home for days or weeks and turned it on only briefly as a precaution. Kazakh authorities did not comment on his claims when asked for comment.

Kazakh authorities possess tools capable of bypassing passwords on smartphones and laptops. Among those tools is UFED, an Israeli-made forensic system produced by Cellebrite that can retrieve messages, photos, browser histories, and deleted data from mobile devices. The system can only be used if authorities have physical access to the device.

The UFED systems used in Kazakhstan were purchased from Georgian Digital Forensics, a regional representative of Cellebrite. According to ImportGenius records, the companies AskomMET and IRPLAB imported UFED systems from Georgia three times in 2022–2023. In many countries, UFED is used legally only by law enforcement with judicial approval.

According to Cellebrite, its Digital Intelligence solutions are designed for post-event investigations rather than preemptive surveillance and are governed by strict licensing policies. The company has said it vets customers based on human rights records and can disable access to its technology for violations. Cellebrite has said it positions itself as a partner to law enforcement operating within legal and ethical frameworks.