Italian Supreme Court calls for prosecutors to disclose information on Sky ECC hacking operation
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Loading... - Aria Scavo
- 11 Oct 2022
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The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that encrypted messages obtained by an international police operation to hack a secure phone network used by organised crime groups cannot be used in a pre-trial hearing unless prosecutors explain how the evidence was obtained.
Italy’s Corte di Cassazione found that a defendant should not only have the ability to ask questions about the contents of messages police obtained from the Sky ECC encrypted phone network, but also to question how the investigative process was carried out.
The decision, which follows the refusal of Italian prosecutors and those in other countries to disclose details of the hacking operation, could force prosecutors to reveal information about how police obtained messages from the supposedly secure phone network.
Dutch defence lawyer Justus Reisigner said he now planned to raise the issue with the Supreme Court in Holland, where prosecutors have also refused to release information on how Dutch police obtained decrypted messages from the Sky ECC phone network.
Hundreds of millions of messages decrypted
Police in Belgium, France and Holland, collaborated in an operation to infiltrate the Sky ECC secure telephone network and succeeded in decrypting hundreds of millions of messages from phones used by organised criminals.
Police investigations, which began in Belgium, identified 170,000 people worldwide using Sky ECC phones, which were supplied by the technology company Sky Global, using computer servers based in a French datacentre. Hundreds of arrests of members of drugs crime groups followed in 2021.
According to the Italian Supreme Court verdict, first reported by Crimesite in Holland, Italian prosecutors refused to disclose information from Europol about the police interception and decryption operation against Sky ECC to Italy. Read More...
