While close to 150 world leaders prepared to descend on Manhattan for the U.N. General Assembly, the U.S. Secret Service was quietly dismantling a massive hidden telecom network across the New York area - a system investigators say could have crippled cell towers, jammed 911 calls and flooded networks with chaos at the very moment the city was most vulnerable. The cache, made up of more than 300 SIM servers packed with over 100,000 SIM cards and clustered within 35 miles of the United Nations, represents one of the most sweeping communications threats uncovered on U.S. soil.
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 cellphone. And if you coupled that with some sort of other event associated with [the UN general assembly], you know, use your imagination there it could be catastrophic to the city.