European police crack phone network, should we be concerned?

Law enforcement agencies in France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom on Thursday announced hundreds of arrests of alleged drug dealers and other
criminals in a major bust made possible by cracking an encrypted phone network.

European police officials said they broke into the platform of EncroChat, a bespoke encrypted messaging service, in April and had been quietly reading
the messages ever since. They did not reveal the technique they used to breach EncroChat.

This, I think is the beginning of a big time problem. If you don’t say how you broke in to the network, how are we to believe you did ti legally or illegally? And, if you did break in illegally, you should be held accountable for the fact you did it illegally. Police should be allowed access where waranted, but this debate of whether encryption is good or not continues.

EncroChat had promised its users anonymity by never storing decryption keys on its servers. A “kill code’” allowed phones to be wiped remotely, according
the U.K.’s National Crime Agency. But now those servers have been shut down, NCA officials said. They claimed the messaging service had 60,000 users worldwide
and some 10,000 in the U.K.

So you’re telling me that these phones and this network were encrypted with the highest encryption possible, and it was broken? Or was the network not fully encrypted whereby the article indicates that there may not be full implementation so it was weaker in some cases? I want to know more about what algorithm was used and whether it was used across the board. Something tells me that this is not the case, otherwise we’d hear more about this.

I do like Cyberscoop’s coverage on this, don’t get me wrong, but I fear there are still questions that need to be answered. Want to read more? European police crack encrypted phone network, arrest hundreds of alleged criminals is the article. While I’m glad that the criminals are arrested, I’m questioning the legality of whether the cases when gone to trial will stand. What were the charges? I don’t remember the article even stating what the charges were of these illeged criminals that were arrested that were using this network. Your thoughts are welcome!