Human heroism is celebrated in profoundly personal ways in this extraordinary tale of a mind-boggling investigation into massive criminal organisations. It’s part The Wire, part The Imitation Game
We begin with the audio of a horrifying call made to the French police in 2020. Two men are driving home when their car is attacked. The police ask for the caller’s name as bullets ricochet around the vehicle. “Who cares what we’re called?” the man shouts. “I’m going to die!” Seconds later, his companion is dead. This killing (of a mechanic called Houcine Hakkar) was planned and discussed in detail on an app called Sky ECC. The police were at the tip of an enormous iceberg.
Showing modern law enforcement on screen can be a challenge: in the online era, it’s less cops and robbers; more zeros and ones. So it’s a surprise to be confronted with something as thrilling as The Narco Hack. This three-part documentary explores an extraordinary investigation by French, Belgian and Dutch police, during which they undermined several massive criminal organisations via methods at once impressively logical and completely mind-boggling by compromising Sky ECC’s encryption software.
Sky ECC was developed by a company called Sky Global, apparently with lawyers and journalists in mind. The app was designed to strip phones of all their normal features, leaving just itself. When the app was shut down, the phones deactivated. Oh, and the phones could be wiped remotely, which was a handy feature. “At Sky, they knew very well that it wasn’t going to be choirboys buying it,” says “Albert”, a drug dealer. “You weren’t going to be talking to your mum on Sky.” Thomas Herdman, who worked for the company, is interviewed and offers an unconvincing defence constructed around the idea that a luxury hotelier wouldn’t ask their guests how they could afford to stay at the hotel.
And so begins an epic tale of brave detective work and tech wizardry. This kind of material is undeniably hard to render visually – but while The Narco Hack does feature an awful lot of scrolling computer text and close-ups of smartphones being turned on, it also hears at length from the cops involved. From shrewd, single-minded prosecutor Johanna Brousse to eccentric cybercrime whiz “Bertillon” (his name is protected and he appears via a series of AI-rendered face-swaps), they’re an engaging bunch.
Furthermore, the investigation grips hard, and the stakes are extremely high. As Bertillon walks us through the decryption process (server locations, cryptographic keys: you’re glazing over already, aren’t you?), most viewers almost certainly won’t fully understand. However, what unfolds on the ground is approximately The Wire meets The Imitation Game. The various police jurisdictions involved aren’t singing from the same charge sheet – the Belgians want to stop the drugs and guns moving, while the French want to identify suspects and follow them.
Then there’s the issue of how much to reveal to their quarries. As the detectives realise they’re looking over the shoulders of drug kingpins, they also understand that if they act hastily, they’ll only land small fry. How much further could access take them? This dilemma is sharpened by the sheer horror of what is being revealed as indigestible chunks of gibberish text become comprehensible. Sexual torture. Skin flayed with scorching hot skillets. An innocuous-looking pink house in Serbia which turns out to contain meat grinders into which informants are fed. Surely, at some point, the police have to stop intelligence-gathering and start smashing down front doors?
Soon enough, they do. They uncover billions of euros (mainly laundered and Dubai-resident drug lords calling themselves things like Saddam Hussein, Putin and Hitler. It’s hugely satisfying to witness but feels like a sisyphean task all the same. Underpinning everything is perhaps the crucial conversation of our era. About the thin line between innovation and crime. About who polices tech companies and how. And about where responsibility ultimately lies
This documentary is specific in its field of interest but it’s more widely thought-provoking, prompting consideration of everything from social media companies that enable the creation of child sexual abuse material to AI companies and their laissez-faire attitude to intellectual and creative theft. Sky ECC is what happens when tech finds its ideal users and, for reasons of commercial expediency, simply shrugs its shoulders.
Still, there’s a very human heroism being celebrated here. The consequences of the hack were significant in all sorts of smaller, more profoundly personal ways too. In the wake of Houcine Hakkar’s horrible fate, there were mutterings about the unlikeliness of smoke without fire. In revealing the conversations around his killing, the hack unequivocally cleared his name. His murder had been a terrible mistake. The look on his sister’s face as she talks about her brother suggests that’s no small consolation.
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