Corbin K. Barthold
It’s a crisis that almost no one is talking about. The Chinese Communist Party is now the world’s preeminent practitioner of cyber warfare. Once notoriously loud and clumsy, the CCP’s hackers have become stealthy and sophisticated. They’re intercepting the calls and texts of our leaders and infiltrating servers at our ports, power plants, and water-treatment facilities. Yet hardly anyone seems to care. When Congress held hearings on cybersecurity late last year, only a handful of journalists bothered to cover them.
In September, the Wall Street Journal revealed to the public a Chinese hacking operation known to American authorities (thanks to the naming conventions of wonks at Microsoft) as Salt Typhoon. Since mid-2023, if not earlier, the group has been assaulting our telecom firms, compromising at least nine of them. It has focused on breaking into wireless networks in and around Washington, D.C. The campaign has won the CCP access to revealing data, such as call, text, and IP logs, on more than 1 million targets. Beijing appears, at minimum, to have gained a thorough understanding of when and how senior American officials communicate with each other, but in many instances, it has obtained the content of calls or texts, as well. The haul likely includes conversations featuring Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, top congressional staffers, and members of the intelligence agencies.
To stop the bleeding, the FBI has instructed federal employees to use end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal, an abrupt and ironic about-face from an agency that has long pressed for backdoor access to such services. It will be some time before FBI officials can again argue for more backdoors with a straight face—especially given that Salt Typhoon has also exploited existing ones that our government uses for domestic snooping. The flaws in these wiretap systems have presumably gifted the CCP invaluable insights into which of its spies we know about and which we don’t.
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