Hardened phones were ingenious, but these networks had some inherent security flaws: the clustering of a criminal clientele made them a tempting target for police officers in many countries. It was as if all the villains had holed up in a castle with twenty-foot-thick walls and dared invaders to attack with catapults and battering rams. No European police force had better siege engines, or more reason to use them, than the Dutch. In the Netherlands, so many criminals used encrypted devices that they became known as boeventelefoons: “crook phones.”
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The failure of Ennetcom should have alerted security-conscious criminals to treat encrypted phones with caution. In 2020, Erik Van De Sandt, a member of the Dutch National High-Tech Crime Unit, told students at Cambridge University that the central weakness of private networks was that their encryption protocols were developed in secret, often by cryptographers who were not as good as their promises. “You have to look at the anthropology,” Van De Sandt told the students. Because encrypted-service providers focus “on an exclusively criminal community,” he explained, “they apply confidentiality over their own business process. . . . You can never really test that security until it’s too late.” He continued, “That’s a real problem for all criminals. . . . You end up with a really bad product because there’s no transparency. Lucky us!”
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Whatever the outcome of such legal wrangles, the Great Decrypt has unquestionably provided a bounty of intelligence. It has never before been possible to see so vividly how many thousands of criminals talk to one another when they think nobody is listening. Europol, which coordinated joint international investigations, has become a hub for analyzing decrypted phone intelligence. The agency’s trove is vast; it has examined about a billion messages from Sky E.C.C. alone. Officers working on these operations say the decrypted messages have reshaped their views of how organized crime works: its scale, its cunning, its ruthlessness.
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After Sky E.C.C. was infiltrated, the balance of power suddenly swung toward reporters in Montenegro, where the network had been popular. Europol analyzed the billion messages that it had harvested from the bust using software, developed by the agency, that scoured texts for key words and phrases. The word “liquidate,” in several languages, prompted an alert; so did “sleep” and “crack”—code words for murder. In mid-2021, Europol sent the first of many intelligence packages to Montenegrin prosecutors detailing major crimes and graft that implicated top officials in state institutions. The contents of the packages were secret, but at least one source in Montenegro, worried that the intelligence might be buried by corrupt prosecutors, leaked the documents to journalists. This fear was justified: a special prosecutor, Saša Čađjenović, was arrested this past December for having failed to act on Europol intelligence packages that were damning both to senior figures in the Kavač gang and to police officers covering up the gang’s activities. (Čađjenović is in jail awaiting trial.)
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The phone intelligence underscores how central cocaine has become to organized crime in Europe. In the past two decades, the cocaine business on the Continent has far outpaced the heroin and synthetic-drug markets. A comprehensive 2021 investigation by the think tank InSight Crime revealed that Colombian cocaine cartels had shifted their focus to Europe after losing control of American distribution to Mexican groups. As a result, the cocaine business is now primarily a shipping business.
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Violence is endemic to the drug trade, but in much of northern Europe it has been possible to imagine that drug-related brutality is a problem that occurs elsewhere: in Mexico, in America, in southern Europe. The phone intelligence, along with a slew of grisly headlines, has dispelled that myth. In June, 2022, after a wave of shootings, the mayors of Amsterdam and Rotterdam wrote to the Dutch Parliament, warning of “a criminal culture of violence that is acquiring Italian features.” The mayors added, “It’s not just about conflicts erupting over control of the drugs trade, but we are also seeing violence as a display of power and with the intention of weakening our democratic legal system.”
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