The 2020 EncroChat hack led by French and Dutch police is facing growing legal challenges across Europe and the fallout could have global implications for E2EE
Matt Burgess / Wired : Tweets: @wired Tweets: @wired : “What we're seeing is that policing authorities and law enforcement authorities are effectively normalizing a policing practice that sets a really dangerous precedent in terms of surveillance.” https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When French and Dutch police revealed in July 2020 that they had infiltrated EncroChat and read millions of messages for months, the operation looked like an unqualified policing win — a network built for organized crime dismantled from the inside. The results compounded: police now credit the cracked encryption with more than 115 million intercepted communications and 6,558 arrests, and a parallel infiltration of Sky ECC showed the technique was repeatable rather than one-off.
First-order effects
- Defendants across Europe are now contesting the legality of evidence drawn from the hack, directly challenging the position the UK Court of Appeal took in 2021 that prosecutors may use intercepted EncroChat messages — meaning convictions already secured on this evidence face reopening.
Second-order effects
- If courts in some jurisdictions exclude EncroChat-derived evidence while others admit it, cross-border prosecutions of the same networks fracture along national lines, forcing police cooperation frameworks like the French-Dutch model to defend their methods in each legal system separately.
Third-order effects
- A ruling that the intrusion was unlawful would hand encrypted-phone operators and their customers a documented case that device-level compromise can be judicially repudiated, while critics' warning that authorities are normalizing a dangerous surveillance precedent pushes the legitimacy of hacking-as-evidence toward formal regulation rather than operational discretion.
The trend: Law enforcement's shift from asking companies for access to breaking encryption directly is colliding with courts, making judicial rulings — not police capability — the binding constraint on the future of end-to-end encryption.