WSJ: U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack ⇥ wsj.com
Sarah Krouse, Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha, and Robert McMillan, Wall Street Journal (probably paywalled; sorry):
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.
Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:
The 30-year-old law that set the stage for recent backdoor abuse is the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which became law in 1994 at a time when cell phones were a rarity and the internet was still in its infancy.
CALEA requires that any “communications provider,” such as a phone company or internet provider, must provide the government all necessary assistance to access a customer’s information when presented with a lawful order. In other words, if there is a means to access a customer’s data, the phone companies and internet providers must provide it.
For years, the security community has pushed back against these backdoors, pointing out that the technical capability cannot differentiate between good guys and bad guys. And here is one more example of a backdoor access mechanism being targeted by the “wrong” eavesdroppers.
It is not the ‘90s anymore, when CALEA got enacted, the law requiring telecom wiretappability for law enforcement. China and Russia and DPRK are formidable cyber foes now. DOJ, FBI, etc. want to change CALEA so that encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp aren’t exempt from it anymore. But this hack shows that if anything, the law needs to change in the *other* direction. The hack needs to be a wake-up call to law enforcement that as long as they keep opposing encryption for communications, they’re enabling China to smack us in the face with our own hand while saying “stop hitting yourself!”
According to a 2016 paper from Public Safety Canada, “Australia, the U.S., the UK and many other European nations require CSPs [Communications Service Providers] to have an interception capability”; it also notes Canada does not. Such a requirement is understandable from an investigative perspective. But, as Pfefferkorn says, capabilities like these have been exploited before, and it will happen again. These are big targets and there are no safe backdoors.
That brings me — for the second time today — to the need for comprehensive privacy legislation basically everywhere but, in particular, in the United States, the hub of the world’s communications. Protecting private data would dramatically curtail this kind of access violation by removing backdoors, restrict one aspect of TikTok panic, and reduce the exploitation of our behavioural data by creepy ad tech businesses. It is not a panacea and I am sure there are worrisome side effects for law enforcement, but it would likely be more effective than tackling these problems on an individual basis.