European cops collected data from encrypted chat services for weeks prior to cocaine bust
Breached encrypted messaging tools increasingly seem to provide European law enforcement agencies with a kind of roadmap to high profile drug busts. Belgium’s Federal Police force on Monday said they had seized nearly 28 tons of cocaine with a street value of 1.4 billion euros ($1.65 billion) after officials accessed an encrypted messaging service, as CNN first reported. The activity came after police said in March they had decrypted half a billion messages sent via the Sky ECC service, and arrested 48 people. The cocaine seizure appears to be the result of that initial investigation, as officials say they spent weeks tracking messages and gathering information about cocaine shipments before intercepting packages at the port of Antwerp. It was only the latest example of European police accessing hard-to-crack technology to collect evidence about suspected criminals, though. Dutch police working with French officials last year broke into another messaging service, EncroChat, […]
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