How European police agencies infiltrated encrypted phone networks, like EncroChat and Sky ECC, that were popular with drug syndicates and other criminal groups
Ed Caesar / New Yorker : Tweets: @rupertmyers , @clairegeorgeseu , @kitchellel , @dduane , @newyorker , and @edcaesar Tweets: Rupert Myers / @rupertmyers : Crooks' Mistaken Bet on Encrypted Phones - a typically cracking read from @edcaesar full of astonishing details: torture rooms, crooks hiding in Trojan shipping containers, criminal hawala banking and super cartels. https://www.newyorker.com/... Claire Georges / @clairegeorgeseu : “The crooks talked as if nobody was listening. The police listened without being seen”. A fantastic, in-depth piece in the @NewYorker on @Europol's work against encrypted phones. A story which took months in the making. Journalism at its finest 👏 https://twitter.com/... Kit Chellel / @kitchellel : @edcaesar again proving he's one of the best in the game with this jawdropping piece on the drug cartels infiltrating Europe. Imagine him, notebook in hand, sitting with a Montenegrin gangster in the back of an autoshop for this charming exchange.. https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/... Diane Duane / @dduane : A fascinating read. https://www.newyorker.com/... @newyorker : By infiltrating encrypted-phone networks, European law enforcement was able to observe the communications of criminals in real time. “It was as if we were sitting at the table where criminals were chatting,” a chief constable of the Dutch police said. https://nyer.cm/d39ptyU Ed Caesar / @edcaesar : Since the mid-2010s, criminals have communicated on specially-modified encrypted phones as if nobody could read their texts. Big mistake. I wrote about the dazzling revelations of the biggest police breakthrough in a generation for @newyorker: https://www.newyorker.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The New Yorker piece closes a three-year arc that began with the FBI shutting down Phantom Secure, the privacy phone company that had drifted into serving the Sinaloa Cartel, and continued when French and Dutch police cracked EncroChat in 2020 and Belgian police breached Sky ECC the following year. Ed Caesar's reporting stitches those operations together into a single picture: European agencies, coordinated through Europol, were reading organized crime's messages in real time across multiple supposedly secure networks.
What makes the story more than a retrospective is the unresolved aftermath — the EncroChat operation is facing growing legal challenges across Europe over how the hacked material was obtained and used, with fallout that could reach end-to-end encryption policy well beyond the cases at hand.
First-order effects
- Thousands of people whose communications ran over EncroChat and Sky ECC are directly implicated: French and Dutch police credit the ~115M intercepted EncroChat messages with thousands of arrests, alongside large drug seizures.
- The remaining encrypted-phone market serving criminals collapses by attrition — each takedown (Phantom Secure, then EncroChat, then Sky ECC) removed the network its users migrated to next.
Second-order effects
- Europol's role as the coordination hub for these cross-border infiltrations is now central to how European police target organized crime, shifting capability away from national wiretap units toward shared technical operations.
- Prosecutors and defense lawyers across Europe are forced to litigate the provenance of hacked evidence, since convictions resting on millions of intercepted messages are vulnerable if courts question the legality of the intrusions themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the legal challenges succeed, they could constrain future pre-emptive hacking of communication platforms and force clearer judicial rules for state access to encrypted traffic; if they fail, covert platform compromise hardens into standard law-enforcement practice.
- Either way, the pattern erodes trust in any single 'secure' device vendor for high-risk users, pushing both criminals and legitimate privacy-sensitive customers toward architectures where no one operator can be flipped or breached wholesale.
The trend: State agencies are turning the covert compromise of entire encrypted communication platforms into a repeatable policing model, even as courts begin testing whether that model survives legal scrutiny.