> reportedly exploiting the system U.S. authorities use to wiretap Americans in criminal cases
There is no such thing as a single purpose, single user backdoor, which is why people have been trying to defend end-to-end encryption. Even if the intention is that the backdoor is meant to be used by 'the good guys' for 'law enforcement', the backdoor is an intentional weakening of the system than anyone can try to access.
Blame the hackers if you want, but the policy of forcing backdoors in comms systems by the U.S. government was the first (and main) problem.
I can’t believe that this has not been discussed openly by the Biden administration. This is a huge black mark on the surveillance programs of America, another exoneration of Snowden (yes I realize this may not be the same prism program), a call for real consequences for cybersecurity issues, and yet another massive breach of trust with China. When will American politicians step up and hammer China with aggressive asymmetric warfare and also direct force? I expect aggressive tariffs and outright bans of Chinese imports would risk the CCP’s stability given their economy is on the ropes now anyways, but we should also be a lot more interventionist in their other interests (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Bhutan, etc). There is no reason to tolerate any of this.
Somehow annoying that Senator Warner gave the story to NYT and WaPo, even though WSJ broke the story:
"The hackers behind the infiltration of U.S. telecom infrastructure are known to Western intelligence agencies as Salt Typhoon, and this particular breach of U.S. equipment was first reported in early October by the Wall Street Journal. But Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, spoke with the Washington Post and New York Times this week to warn the public that this is so much worse than we initially thought, dubbing it “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history.” And those articles based on Warner’s warnings were published late Thursday."
WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-t...