Chinese Hackers Snoop on US Law Enforcement, Telecom Consumers

​A disturbing new report from the Wall Street Journal reveals the staggering extent to which a Chinese hacker group recently gained access to US critical infrastructure, including systems belonging to AT&T, Lumen, and Verizon that the federal government uses for wiretapping investigations. It’s a wakeup call, and a reminder that commercial encryption free of backdoor government access is increasingly paramount given the apparent susceptibility of the surveillance state to outside intrusion.
 
According to WSJ, “[t]he surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations.” The hack, per the paper’s sources, appears “to be geared towards intelligence collection….” In other words, it’s a way to snoop on those in our government who doing the snooping on foreign adversaries like China.
 
The fact that China-backed hackers can access our own investigative channels should make the hair on the back your neck stand up. But it’s an unfortunate inevitability when governments demand backdoors into encrypted commercial communications. As we wrote back in August:
 
“Congress should … resist the persistent requests from the Department of Justice to compel backdoors for commercial encryption, beginning with Apple’s iPhone. The National Public Data hack reveals that the forced creation of backdoors for encryption would create new pathways for even more hacks, as well as warrantless government snooping.”
 
A recent article at BGR puts a finer point on it, noting that, “[p]lacing a backdoor in any product … [invites] even more scrutiny from the hacking community. First, you [won’t] be able to keep it a secret. Second, if there’s a locked door to something, someone can always find the keys.”
 
Outside of the national security implications at play here, the hack also implicates the data privacy of millions of Internet customers, which is already at enough risk domestically. (Reminder to the Senate: pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act.)
 
Apple and all other telecom companies should stand strong in resisting federal efforts to gain access to their encrypted systems. And both law enforcement and policymakers should think again about creating backdoors that only bad actors can access.