The authorities said that by hacking into the network, the police were able to monitor criminal activity and communication as it was happening, allowing them to stop drug deals and even to prevent murder.
Officials said in a statement that “millions” of messages were read in “real time, over the shoulder of the unsuspecting senders,” leading to arrests in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe.“It was as though we were sitting at the table where the criminals were chatting among themselves, really,” said Jannine van den Berg, chief constable of the central police unit in the Netherlands, at a news conference in The Hague. “What makes this investigation unique is that at a large scale we managed to read all of these criminal messages live,” she said.
