Five Eyes countries have regularly and routinely sought, and gained, access to foreign telecommunications infrastructures to carry out their operations. The same is true of other well resourced countries, including China.
Salt Typhoon’s penetration of American telecommunications and email platforms is slowly coming into relief. The New York Times has an article that summarizes what is being publicly disclosed at this point in time:
- The full list of phone numbers that the Department of Justice had under surveillance in lawful interception systems has been exposed, with the effect of likely undermining American counter-intelligence operations aimed at Chinese operatives
- Phone calls, unencrypted SMS messages, and email providers have been compromised
- The FBI has heightened concerns that informants may have been exposed
- Apple’s services, as well as end to end encrypted systems, were not penetrated
American telecommunications networks were penetrated, in part, due to companies relying on decades old systems and equipment that do not meet modern security requirements. Fixing these deficiencies may require rip-and-replacing some old parts of the network with the effect of creating “painful network outages for consumers.” Some of the targeting of American telecommunications networks is driven by an understanding that American national security defenders have some restrictions on how they can operate on American-based systems.
The weaknesses of telecommunications networks and their associated systems are generally well known. And mobile systems are particularly vulnerable to exploitation as a result of archaic standards and an unwillingness by some carriers to activate the security-centric aspects of 4G and 5G standards.
Some of the Five Eyes, led by Canada, have been developing and deploying defensive sensor networks that are meant to shore up some defences of government and select non-government organizations. But these edge, network, and cloud based sensors can only do so much: telecommunications providers, themselves, need to prioritize ensuring their core networks are protected against the classes of adversaries trying to penetrate them.
At the same time, it is worth recognizing that end to end communications continued to be protected even in the face of Salt Typhoon’s actions. This speaks the urgent need to ensure that these forms of communications security continue to be available to all users. We often read that law enforcement needs select access to such communications and that they can be trusted to not abuse such exceptional access.
Setting aside the vast range of legal, normative, or geopolitical implications of weakening end to end encryption, cyber operations like the one perpetrated by Salt Typhoon speak to governments’ collective inabilities to protect their lawful access systems. There’s no reason to believe they’d be any more able to protect exceptional access measures that weakened, or otherwise gained access to, select content of end to end encrypted communications.
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