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.

What You Need To Know

The U.S. Secret Service has dismantled a massive hidden telecom network in New York

Investigators say the system could have crippled cell towers and jammed 911 calls

The cache included over 300 SIM servers with more than 100,000 SIM cards

It was located within 35 miles of the United Nations

The network could have blacked out cellular service, especially during the United Nations General Assembly

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