The crackdown by police on the coded Sky ECC communications app has led to a host of new arrests across the Balkans, most notably that of the notorious drug boss Darko Saric and the former head of Montenegro's Supreme Court.
When a French-Dutch-led police operation unlocked the code at Sky ECC in February 2021, investigators gained access to a treasure trove of real-time evidence against a host of international criminal gangs.
Thousands of people have been arrested worldwide based on the removal of the Sky ECC; in the Balkans, Saric is the greatest, but he is not alone.
In Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Montenegro and Slovenia, almost 100 people have been arrested and charged as a result of evidence obtained by Sky ECC communications and broadcast by the French and Dutch, for crimes involving drug trafficking, murder and abduction. On the same day that Saric was arrested in the Serbian capital, police in neighboring Croatia arrested 10 in a joint operation with police in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Spain.
Legal experts, meanwhile, warn of concerns about the legality of how data is submitted and stored - by Sky ECC and a similar EncroChat breach in 2020, which threatens their admissibility in court.
"In the case of EncroChat, for example, it was not clear exactly where the raw data came from and whether the raw data was changed in any way after it was collected by the service," said Professor Dennis-Kenji Kipker, a member of the European Academy. for Freedom of Information and Data Protection, EAID.