Russia allegedly broke into and extracted data from the iPhone of Russian activist Andrei Pivovarov using a hacking tool made by the Israeli company Cellebrite, according to a report by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. The researchers described the incident as political persecution. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab who led the report, said, "Cellebrite technology fuels political persecution and repression around the world," adding that the case shows "the power that device extraction tools like Cellebrite’s give the security services of dictators."