> “The Chinese government's espionage operation deeply penetrated networks of at least nine U.S. telecom companies, including AT&T and Verizon,” said Sen. Cantwell. “They exploited the wiretapping system that our law enforcement agencies rely on under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act -- known as CALEA. These systems became an open door for Chinese intelligence. Salt Typhoon allowed the Chinese operation to track millions of Americans’ locations in real time, record phone calls at will and read our text messages.”

A US senator is using it for political grandstanding. She is an ineffective twit with no power and no principles, no right under law to receive what she demanded, and she made sure to run to the press with it "see! look, I'm a principled, powerful senator holding those evil corporations feet to the fire!"

The problem is that the vulnerability exploited by salt typhoon is a systemic flaw implemented at the demand of Cantwell and other of our legislative morons.

You cannot have an "only the good guys" backdoor. That doesn't work. People are bad, and stupid, and fallible. You can't make policy or exceptions that depend on people being good, and smart, and infallible.

She's using the inevitable consequence of a system she helped create for her own political benefit. She voted for the backdoor back in 94 against the strenuous and principled objections by people who actually know what they're talking about.

Bobblehead talking points should not serve as the basis for technical policy and governance, but here we are.

Decentralized systems don't have the same faults.

Just because you want to force a structure or paradigm doesn't absolve it of responsibility for the problem.

Hand waving the proglem away because a company is bad at management or scale doesn't change anything.

This really buries the lede. Telecoms are reluctant to do it because 'doing' it isn't aligned with their priorities.

Why would a telecom risk bankruptcy by investing heavily into a system that their competitors aren't?

If you want a back-door to exist (questionable) then the government either needs to have strong regulatory compliance where poor implementations receive a heavy fine such that telecoms who don't invest into a secure implementation get fined in excess of the investment cost or the government needs to fund the implementation itself.