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As nearly 150 world leaders prepared to arrive in Manhattan for the U.N. General Assembly, the U.S. Secret Service quietly shut down a hidden telecom network investigators say had the potential to cripple cell service, jam 911 calls and spread chaos across New York City.
Agents discovered more than 300 SIM servers holding over 100,000 SIM cards within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations, according to officials. They said the network, one of the most extensive of its kind found in the U.S., could have blacked out cellular service in a city that depends on it for daily life, emergency response and counterterrorism.
“It can’t be understated what this system is capable of doing,” said Matt McCool, the special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s New York field office.
“It can take down cell towers, so then no longer can people communicate, right? … You can’t text message, you can’t use your cell phone. And if you coupled that with some sort of other event associated with UNGA, you know, use your imagination there, it could be catastrophic to the city,” he added.
Investigators said they have not found evidence of a direct plot targeting the U.N. General Assembly and that there are no known credible threats to New York.
The network was discovered through a broader investigation into telecommunications threats aimed at senior U.S. officials. Agents said the servers acted as banks of mock phones, able to generate mass calls and texts, overload local systems and mask encrypted communications between nation-state actors, criminal organizations and terrorist groups.
“Forensics on 100,000 cell phones — all the phone calls, all the text messages, anything to do with communications — that’s what we’re looking at now,” McCool said, adding the analysis will take time.
When agents entered the sites, they found racks of servers and shelves stacked with SIM cards, many of which were already active, while others were waiting for deployment. Investigators said the system could send up to 30 million text messages a minute, suggesting operators were preparing to expand capacity.
Officials estimated the enterprise cost millions of dollars in hardware and SIM cards, describing it as highly organized and well-funded.
McCool compared the potential fallout to cellular blackouts seen after the Sept. 11 attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing, when networks failed under pressure. The difference, he said, is that this network could have intentionally triggered such outages at any time.