US court records: US agencies are increasingly accessing parts of the 500M encrypted message haul retrieved from the hack of encrypted phone company Sky in 2021
European cops hacked the encrypted phone provider Sky in 2021. More and more cases in the U.S. are using that mass of collected messages. Mastodon: @josephcox@infosec.exchange Mastodon: Joseph Cox / @josephcox@infosec.exchange : New from 404 Media: U.S. feds are quietly tapping into a half-billion encrypted messaging goldmine. European cops hacked an encrypted phone company called Sky in 2021. Now, more and more cases in the U.S. are using the hacked messages as evidence https://www.404media.co/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Sky collection originated in a 2021 European law-enforcement operation, following Belgian police’s infiltration of Sky ECC. Related coverage also places Sky alongside other encrypted-phone networks targeted by European agencies, including the wider infiltration campaign against EncroChat and Sky.
The new element is the collection’s growing use beyond the agencies that obtained it: U.S. federal bodies are accessing portions for domestic prosecutions. That turns a one-time network compromise into an evidence resource with cross-border value.
First-order effects
- U.S. agencies and prosecutors gain access to a large body of Sky communications that can be used in more domestic cases.
- Defendants in those cases face evidence derived from a European operation, making the provenance, handling, and admissibility of that material immediate case issues.
Second-order effects
- Repeated use in U.S. prosecutions gives agencies an incentive to formalize access and evidence-sharing workflows around the Sky material rather than treat it as exceptional intelligence.
- The expansion raises the practical stakes for encrypted-phone providers and their users: compromise of a service can create a long-lived evidentiary archive, not merely an operational disruption.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, cross-border access to data from major law-enforcement compromises could become a more durable feature of criminal investigations, concentrating investigative advantage with agencies able to obtain and process such collections.
- That dynamic may sharpen legal scrutiny of how foreign-obtained communications are shared and introduced in U.S. courts, especially as similar encrypted-network operations recur.
The trend: Encrypted-service takedowns are increasingly producing reusable, cross-border data troves rather than one-off investigative wins.