UK Court of Appeal rules that UK prosecutors can use messages uncovered when French and Dutch police hacked EncroChat as evidence against criminal defendants
Gareth Corfield / The Register :
Context & Ripple Effects
This ruling lands mid-arc: French and Dutch police cracked EncroChat's encryption in 2020, harvesting roughly 115 million messages that have since produced 6,558 arrests across Europe, and the operation now faces growing legal challenges across the continent. The UK Court of Appeal is the first major appellate test of whether that material can convict people in a domestic court.
The court's answer — yes, foreign-obtained hacked messages are admissible — sits uneasily beside its own record: it previously struck down mass digital surveillance powers under DRIPA as unlawful, and the UK Supreme Court later subjected GCHQ hacking to judicial review. The distinction being drawn is between domestic surveillance overreach and evidence lawfully gathered abroad, then imported.
First-order effects
- Criminal defendants in England and Wales whose cases rest on EncroChat material lose this appeal route, and UK prosecutors can keep using French- and Dutch-sourced hacked messages without needing a domestic warrant.
- Defence teams are pushed toward the challenges still running in European courts, where the operation's legality is contested rather than settled.
Second-order effects
- Prosecutors across Europe gain a template for importing evidence from foreign police hacks, while civil-rights challenges shift to the jurisdictions that ran the operation — France and the Netherlands — whose answers will bind everyone downstream.
- The IronChat decryption by Dutch police shows the market dynamic: every 'end-to-end encrypted' phone network that criminals migrate to becomes the next target, so the cat-and-mouse continues at the device layer rather than the protocol layer.
Third-order effects
- The structural lesson is that national borders are becoming the workaround for domestic surveillance limits — when one country's courts constrain hacking powers, another country's police do the hacking and share the take.
- For the E2EE industry, EncroChat confirms that the vulnerability to police is endpoint compromise and supply-chain infiltration, not broken cryptography — pushing the real privacy battleground toward device security and operational tradecraft.
The trend: Cross-border police hacking is becoming the standard route around domestic surveillance law, with admissibility rulings like this one deciding whether the evidence survives contact with national courts.