Post Falls Police | Phone unlocking software

Most of the surveillance in a county’s record arrives because someone had to ask for money. This one arrived because a form said it had to be shown to somebody.

On 2 June 2026 the Post Falls City Council was asked to let the Mayor sign a certification so the city could draw $12,600 of federal grant money. The application had gone in six weeks earlier. The staff report is unusually direct about why the item was on the agenda at all: “Although the application has already been submitted, access to award funds is only allowed after the ‘Certification and Assurances by the Chief Executive of the Applicant Government’ form is signed. One of the provisions of the form is that the application is submitted for review to the governing body of the local government and that the application is made public.”^[1]

The money is for GrayKey, which “assists the Police Department in lawfully accessing locked and encrypted mobile devices for criminal investigations”. The grant would “sustain funding for the technology as well as increase the licensing capacity, which allows for more unlocked devices than their current licensing agreement”.^[1]

The same staff report says: “No presentation is planned on this item.”^[1]

What the tool is

A phone is the densest record most people carry: messages, photographs, location history, the contents of every account they are signed into. Modern phones are encrypted, and a passcode is the only way in. GrayKey is one of a small number of commercial products sold to police forces to get past that, and the department has one already; the grant is to make the license cover more devices.

Nothing about that is unlawful, and the city’s own words say the access is lawful, which in practice means a warrant. What the record does not carry is any account of how the department decides to use it, what it does with the contents of a phone once it has them, or how many phones it has opened. The payables list in the same packet records a GrayKey license payment of $1,075.00, which is the only other mention of the tool in the city record we read.^[1]

The shape of the item

This is the third thing in Kootenai County to reach an elected body under another item’s title. A camera registry arrived inside a records management renewal. A federal drug agency’s interface to plate reader data arrived on a consent calendar between citation software and a surplus auction. A phone unlocking license arrived as a signature on a grant certification, with no presentation planned.

None of those is concealment. Every one of them was published, in a packet, on time, in a document anyone could download. But an agenda is how a public finds out what its government is deciding, and the consent calendar line that carried this one names a Department of Justice grant certification and nothing about what the grant buys. The information was three clicks and forty pages away, and the difference between that and the front page is most of the difference between a decision the public can weigh in on and one it cannot.