While law enforcement is supposed to get a warrant to tap your phone, it doesn't mean those systems aren't in place and ready to listen in whenever a warrant is issued.
Which makes it all the more concerning that reports are coming out that China hacked Verizon, AT&T, and CenturyLink, specifically targeting the communication giants' wiretapping systems, and not recently either. They've been in those systems for awhile.
'A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of US broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests,' the Wall Street Journal wrote. 'For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful US requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter.'
These 'attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic Internet traffic,' according to the WSJ's sources. The attack is being attributed to a Chinese hacking group called Salt Typhoon.
According to these reports, the FBI has set up a war room at a Verizon facility in Ashburn, Virginia, and is actively assaying the damage wrought by the attack.
'Whether the hackers got access to actual lists of federal surveillance targets or their communications — or what they might have taken — is not clear,' officials said. 'It is also not clear whether the subjects of the surveillance at issue were targeted in domestic criminal investigations or in national security cases, such as espionage, terrorism, or cybersecurity.'
Of course, China has denied not just any involvement in the attack, but that the attack happened at all, suggesting that the FBI and communications companies are working together to weave an untrue narrative.
I can't help but wonder how much safer we'd be from foreign attacks like this if our own government didn't have all these backdoors into our privacy.
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