Security News > 2020 > November > EncroChat hack evidence wasn't obtained illegally, High Court of England and Wales rules – trial judges will decide whether to admit it
The contents of messages from encrypted chat service EncroChat may be admissible as evidence in English criminal trials, the High Court in London, England has ruled.
The ruling, issued late last month, has profound implications for a number of criminal trials brought over evidence obtained from EncroChat messages.
A three year operation by the French and Dutch police and courts, codenamed Operation Emma, resulted in the French imaging an EncroChat server in Roubaix and finding a way to man-in-the-middle traffic passing across the EncroChat network by deploying malware to it, as reported this summer.
Had the judicial review succeeded the whole of the EncroChat evidence could have been ruled inadmissible in criminal trials across England and Wales, ruining prosecutors' hopes of relying on it and potentially tightening the law on speculative dragnet surveillance by police agencies to boot.
Therefore we cannot link to or explicitly mention any of the dozens of police and National Crime Agency press releases of arrests and charges brought as a result of the EncroChat hack, though the court itself noted that arrests alone are now "Over 1,000" in number.