The US Secret Service announced Tuesday that it had uncovered a covert cellular network in New York that could have disrupted communications near the UN headquarters, just as 150 global leaders arrived in the city for the opening of the high-level week of the General Assembly.
The caches of communications equipment were found within a roughly 35-mile radius of UN headquarters in Manhattan. They included more than 300 communication servers and 100,000 SIM cards. According to the Associated Press, investigators warned the system could have disabled cellular networks, disrupted emergency and counterterrorism responses, and interfered with daily life. Officials described it as one of the most serious communications threats ever detected in the US.
The hidden cellular network was uncovered as part of a broader Secret Service investigation into communications threats targeting government officials. Spread across multiple sites in the region, the servers were capable of mimicking regular mobile phones and operating them at scale: sending millions of calls and messages simultaneously, crashing local networks, and enabling criminal organizations, for example, to communicate in an encrypted, untraceable manner.
"This system's capabilities cannot be underestimated," said Matt McCall, the senior agent in charge of the Secret Service's New York office. "It can take down cell towers so people can no longer communicate… you won't be able to send text messages, you won't be able to use your phone. And if you combine that with some other incident tied to the UN gathering, let your imagination run, it could be catastrophic for the city."
The network is still under early investigation, but the Secret Service believes state actors used it to send encrypted messages to organized crime groups, cartels, and terrorist organizations, McCall said. Authorities have not yet identified any governments or criminal groups linked to it. Officials stressed they had found no evidence of a direct plot to disrupt the UN meetings and said there are no known credible threats to New York.
"We need to forensically investigate 100,000 cellphones—all the calls, all the texts, everything tied to communications, to see where those numbers lead," McCall said, adding that the process will take time. The system was capable of sending up to 30 million text messages per minute, he noted.
According to investigators, when agents entered the sites, they found rows of servers and shelves filled with SIM cards. More than 100,000 were already active, but large additional quantities were waiting to be brought online, a sign, McCall said, that the operators were preparing to double or even triple the network's size. He described it as a professionally organized, well-financed operation, costing millions of dollars in equipment and SIM cards alone.
"The Secret Service's role is prevention, and this investigation makes clear to anyone thinking of targeting the people we protect—we will find you, investigate you, and stop you immediately," said Secret Service Director Shawn Coren.
Officials also warned of the chaos the network could have caused had it remained active. McCall compared the potential disruption to the cellular outages that occurred after the September 11 attacks and after the Boston Marathon bombing, when networks collapsed under pressure. In this case, attackers could have forced such an outage at a time of their choosing.
"Could there be more networks like this?" McCall said. "It would be foolish to think none are being built in other US cities."
