New York City barely averted a full-on digital blackout during the United Nations General Assembly, and almost no one noticed.
In fact, when motorcades snarled Manhattan and almost 150 world leaders converged on midtown hotels, the U.S. Secret Service was quietly shutting down an enormous secret telecom network that could have knocked the city out at any time, according to investigators.
Federal officials say they found over 300 secret SIM servers spread across the tristate area, stuffed with over 100,000 SIM cards. They were in place and ready to go, and even more were primed to double, then triple the network’s reach. With all of them active, the system could have inundated New York’s telecom infrastructure with as many as 30 million text messages per minute, scrambling cell towers, jamming 911 calls, and blacking out signals across the city. The SIM servers were also only 35 miles from the United Nations, set to go just as world leaders were convening for one of the busiest, most delicate weeks on the global calendar…