 China targeted and might have held for months access to the infrastructure used to do wiretaps on the AT&T and Verizon networks. This is a huge "told you so" moment for the cryptographic community that has been saying that such infrastructure does present a huge risk to national security. China reportedly used this capability for intelligence collection, obviously without a warrant ... 18 comments
 @fj Hackers eh? If it’s not the Chinese, it’s the Russians, the North Koreans, the Iranians - it’s never NATO nations that Trump encouraged Russia to attack.    @fj Certainly off-topic, but I want to ask: Are there similar known compromises to services like Siri, Alexa, Google?  @mdarweesh @fj   @fj after only announcing twenty million different possible threats, the “community” finally got one that actually happens. That’s close to TSA levels of efficiency.
@fj Does this mean the systems can be used without Warrants (as in its not enforced as part of the wiretap process)? In terms of Observability, do we know what they were targeting, if we don't, does that also mean we don't know what the US targets with its wiretap tech. Did China observe who and what was being wiretapped? All interesting thoughts to ponder 🧐   @fj There don't seem to be any articles on this outside the WSJ (yet?), and the lead paragraphs visible over the paywall are heavily caveated with "potentially" and "might" so it is still unclear what was actually breached. This could be something serious, or it could just be Chinese teen hackers able to submit unverified wiretap requests for "Deez Nutz" which are ignored. It is currently the silly season for generating political drama, so use appropriate skepticism until more details emerge. @fj this whole incident just makes it obvious why those systems should not exist in the first place.  |
Gregory's Server
@fj
The WSJ is somewhat inaccessible to me.
Are the compromised systems at the Lawful Interception level or the NSA Room 614A level?