ecent news that surfaced the internet this weekend, talked about a hacker attack that was backed by China. The allegations mentioned that hackers have
compromised the wiretap system of multiple U.S. telecom and internet companies, probably in their trial of obtaining intelligence on America.
And, if you don’t understand the gravity of the problem, well, the wiretap system works under a 30-year-old U.S. federal law. Law, that made it possible for hackers to stage the recent backdoor explitment. Also known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or the CALEA, became a law in 1994, a time when mobile phones were a unicorn and acces to the internet in each home sounded like a dream.
A Standford Academic, Riana Pferfferkorn, talked about this incident saying “The law says your telecom must make your calls wiretappable (unless it encrypts them), creating a system that was always a target for bad actors” also adding that “This hack exposes the lie that the U.S. [government] needs to be able to read every message you send and listen to every call you make, for your own protection. This system is jeopardizing you, not protecting you.”.
Even more so, the wiretap system is one of the most sensitive parts of a telecom or internet provider’s network. Normally, the wiretap system gives acces to only a few employees and unrestricted acces to information about their customers and their private information, including even their internet traffic and history.
Yet, it is also worth mentioning that many technologists have for years tried to draw attention to those security issues and find solutions for this loophole. Many tech representatives had their “I told you so” moment when this event occurred, as nothing has been done to protect the backdoors.
A professor and expert on secure systems at Georgetown, Matt Blaze, said “I think it absolutely was inevitable,”. The first to report on the hacking event was the Wall Street Journal, which revealed that a Chinese Government hacking organization known under the name of Salt Typhoon broke into the three biggest U.S. internet providers even AT&T, Lumen, and Verizon.
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The hackers' actions resulted in a “vast collection of internet traffic” that has been seen by the telecom and internet giants. However, the desired outcome of those actions is still unknown, yet, the Wall Street Journal wrote that the event is “potentially catastrophic.”.
The suspected hacker organization, Salt Typhoon is not at their first Chinsese-backed breaches. The law that exists around the backdoor requirements, stipulates that any “communications provider” such as phone or internet service providers, must not gatekeep the government from all mandatory or necessary assistance in order to acces customer’s information when presented with a lawful order.
It is also worth mentioning that ever since the September 11 attacks in 2001, wiretapping has become more and more encountered, the CALEA law, keeping all the wiretapping companies alive.
The expansion of wiretapping laws and regulations worked in practice and was even kept a secret until 2013, when Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor leaked thousands of U.S. classified documents, exposing the government’s surveillance practices over the past decade.
The Snowden scandal has focused on the United States government and its close allies' obtained data on foreign intelligence targets. This meant collecting data on terrorists and even on adversarial governments.
So, as a result in the following years, tech giants started encrypting their data and customers' data as much as they could. Even more so, tech companies started to inform customers of the U.S. surveillance data they were required to and how many times in a certain period of time they were required to turn over in a given period of time.
On the other hand, phone and internet companies haven’t done that much to stop their customer’s data from being accessed. It’s also worth mentioning that the wish to have backdoors is not just a practice encountered in the US. In the European Union, member states are looking into ways of scanning communication in order to foresee and prevent child abuse material. But, this solution comes with risks, as “There’s no way to build a backdoor that only the ‘good guys’ can use” according to Meredith Whittaker, the signal president.
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