Chinese Access To AT&T/Verizon Wiretap System Shows Why We Cannot Backdoor Encryption

Creating surveillance backdoors for law enforcement is just asking for trouble. They inevitably become targets for hackers and foreign adversaries. Case in point: the US just discovered its wiretapping system has been compromised for who knows how long. This should end the encryption backdoor debate once and for all.

The law enforcement world has been pushing for backdoors to encryption for quite some time now, using their preferred term for it: “lawful access.” Whenever experts point out that backdooring encryption breaks the encryption entirely and makes everyone less safe and less secure, you’ll often hear law enforcement say that it’s really no different than wiretapping phones, and note that that hasn’t been a problem.

Leaving aside the fact that it’s not even that much like wiretapping phones, this story should be thrown back in the faces of all of law enforcement folks believing that backdooring “lawful access” into encryption is nothing to worry about. Chinese hackers have apparently had access to the major US wiretapping system “for months or longer.”

A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.

For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.

According to the reporting, the hackers, known as “Salt Typhoon,” a known Chinese state-sponsored hacking effort, were able to breach the networks of telco giants Verizon and AT&T.

The Wall Street Journal says that officials are freaking out about this, saying that the “widespread compromise is considered a potentially catastrophic security breach.”

Here’s the thing: whenever you set up a system that allows law enforcement to spy on private communications, it’s going to become a massive target for all sorts of sophisticated players, from organized crime to nation states. So, this shouldn’t be a huge surprise.

But it should also make it clear why backdoors to encryption should never, ever be considered a rational decision. Supporters say it’s necessary for law enforcement to get access to certain information, but as we keep seeing, law enforcement has more ways than ever to get access to all sorts of information useful for solving crimes.

Putting backdoors into encryption, though, makes us all less safe. It opens up so many private communications to the risk of hackers getting in and accessing them.

And again, for all the times that law enforcement has argued for backdoors to encryption being just like wiretaps, it seems like this paragraph should destroy that argument forever.

The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.

It’s also worth highlighting how this breach was only just discovered and has been in place for months “or longer” (meaning years, I assume). Can we not learn from this, and decide not to make encryption systems vulnerable to such an attack by effectively granting a backdoor that hackers will figure out a way to get into?

On an unrelated note, for all the talk of how TikTok is a “threat from China,” it seems like maybe we should have been more focused on stopping these kinds of actual hacks?