The encryption network, hacked in 2020 by police, was a place of communication for criminals who dealt with weapons, drugs and frankly speaking about murders or kidnappings. However, not only were there many arrests, but also many cases of lawsuits brought by the criminals themselves because they considered such a hack illegal.
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An offence that law enforcement forces secretly installed on an encrypted system exposed more than a million messages that showed the intelligence of the underworld.
In October 2020, Germany lawyer Christian Lodden spoke to potential clients only about one thing: his clients, against whom the criminal prosecution was initiated, claimed to use EncroChat and were worried their devices were broken and would potentially reveal evidence of crimes.
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He had twenty meetings, a man says. They realized that a natural disaster came.
There were thousands of kilograms of drugs being seized. Many EncroChat users in Europe, such as British, Germany, France, Netherlands and the UK, are already in prison, with many trials still pending.
It’s likely that the police are hacked. Lawyers argue that hacked messages shouldn’t be used in a court and say that the rules for sharing data were violated, and the suspects won’t get fair trial.
The german court has now appointed another criminal defense prosecutor. At the end of 2022, some cases in Germany were referred to the highest court of Europe, and if an appeal is made to those who are against the suspects, it can become a result of a huge investigation. Experts say that has a detrimental effect on the end-to-end encryption around the world.
Those bad people are all rights. We don’t protect criminals. We protect the rights of the accused, says Lodden.
EncroChat Hack
EncroChat was founded in 2016, and when it was designed to hack in 2020 it had over 60 000 registered users.
Users paid millions of dollars to use a special customized Android phone to guarantee anonymity. One can sign and sign on your phone as well as send and send your message. All that’s on your phone and full-time customer support.
The police likely didn’t break the networks encryption, but compromised the EncroChat server in Roubaix in France and finally downloaded malware on that device. Although little information is available about how the hack happened or what type of malware was used, 61 per cent of these 122 countries were affected.
In many countries of the EU, courts have ordered that EncroChat messages be found to be used as evidence. Nevertheless, these decisions are being challenged today. Every country has its own legal system with different rules of application and processes for the prosecution. For example, in the UK, it is generally forbidden to use an intercepted evidence in court.
Courts in higher court appeals.
The Berlin Regional Court pushed in the EncroChat case in October into the Supreme Court of the European Union (CJEU), a world class tribunal. The authorities have to decide in 14 o’clock how the data was used across Europe and how it was used in the criminal field.
Lodden, who wasn’t involved in the case brought to the CJEU, he was coordinating with a dozen other lawyers, says judges offered lucrative deals and commuted a plea sentence in one of the first cases.
The lawyer used a number of ways of defense: often questions on how the legal framework was used to justify collecting data from people’s devices and the analysis of the data itself.
You don’t know how French got the information. The fact that it isn’t complete data, is that there are gaps and the information isn’t completely deciphered, says the lawyer.
The date for the decision to hear the case by the EU Court of Justice hasn’t yet been set. In another highly-profile lawsuit, two British EncroChat users have filed an appeal for the highest European court of human rights. In October also, the Court of Cassation questioned the past courts’ views over EncroChat and said they should be reviewed.
What EncroChat Users Did?
The data obtained after the hack became a real treasure for the police. In the United Kingdom, arrests of organized criminals rose 17 per cent and at least 2,800 were arrested in the United Kingdom.
In the Netherlands, six people were arrested after seven transport containers converted into torture chambers, but didn’t have time to use because of the hacking of the criminals’ mobile phones.
Last June, the authorities arrested several possible organizers of the EncroChat network.
Jan Oort, who spoke with Europol, says the investigation was carried out as part of the Joint Investigation Teams’s work.
The data collected are based on the rules of France and with legal permission, in line with international judicial and law enforcement cooperation.
Encryption Hunters
EncroChat is the only encrypted telephone network that has been stolen by the police. The law enforcement group operated against Ennetcom, Sky ECC and Anom – the latter were secretly presupposed by the FBI and operated the network – highlighting that it is important to understand encryption.
Police have complained encryption is preventing data access, and laws are being proposed in Europe and the USA that could weaken this, are in effect. The question of protecting telephone networks that are considered encrypted and highly secure (some might be legal or more shady) raises questions over law enforcement tactics and transparency.
We are seeing law enforcement actually normalize practices that set a dangerous precedent for surveillance, says Laure Bodrigae-Gerard, a leading lawyer of a non-profit criminal justice organization in Europe.
A court in Finland already said that Anom is the evidence that the FBI can use the alleged crimes the severity of the accused crime has not enabled the access of the data, local reports said. The Italian Supreme Court said that the methods used to access Sky ECC messages should be disclosed.
More than 100 Dutch lawyers warned the police are slippery slopes by using hacks and hiding their methods. In a closed letter, activist for the rights of humanity noted that Signal and WhatsApp could become targets in the future:
These services are under suspicion, because only one powerful encryption and one’s own privacy protection is a problem.
Source: Wired, BBC.