Secret Service dismantles telecom threat around UN capable of crippling cell service in NYC

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U.S. Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Matt McCool, center, looks at live video surveillance feeds in the agency's New York Field Office, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

NEW YORK – 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 N