Mindlessly ‘Deregulating’ U.S. Telecom Contributed to The Worst Hack In U.S. History

Policy

from the when-the-check-comes-due dept

For the better part of thirty years telecom giants (and the consultants, think tanks, and lobbyists paid to defend them) have fought against every effort at coherent federal oversight. It didn’t matter whether it was modest privacy standards or basic pricing transparency, the argument that was if you stripped away coherent state and federal government oversight of telecom, free market magic would happen.

Not only is U.S. broadband uncompetitive, patchy, expensive, with bad customer service as a result, lax oversight and privacy/security standards has resulted in a steady parade of hacks and leaks, culminating recently in the worst hacking intrusions the U.S. has ever seen. Chinese hackers deeply infiltrated nine major U.S. ISPs to spy on high profile targets, and the government and U.S. telecoms are still trying to assess the damage months later. (Why, it’s almost as if corruption is a national security risk.)

Because the “Salt Typhoon” hackers were very careful about wiping logs it’s been difficult to assess the full scale of the intrusion or whether intruders are still in sensitive systems. Officials believe intruders could still be rooting around the networks of the nine compromised ISPs. They also state the hack was because telecoms “failed to implement rudimentary cybersecurity measures across their IT infrastructure.”

The U.S. reporting on the hack has been…interesting.

The story has seen a fraction of the press attention reserved for the TikTok moral panic. And very few news outlets are willing to draw a direct line between the telecom industry’s relentless “deregulatory” lobbying (read: corruption) and the intrusion, despite U.S. officials making it very clear in statements:

“When I talked with our U.K. colleagues and I asked, ‘do you believe your regulations would have prevented the Salt Typhoon attack?’, their comment to me was, ‘we would have found it faster. We would have contained it faster, [and] it wouldn’t have spread as widely and had the impact and been as undiscovered for as long,’ had those regulations been in place,” [White House Cybersecurity chief] Anne Neuberger said. “That’s a powerful message.” 

The FCC is poised to hold meetings next month to address whether it should shore up its cybersecurity oversight of telecoms. But at the helm of those conversations will be new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, who has never stood up to major telecoms on any issue of importance, ever. And the looming Trump-court-backed defeat of net neutrality also curtails the FCC’s authority on cybersecurity.

Again, the U.S. Congress has repeatedly proven too corrupt to pass meaningful telecom reform. Regulators are routinely stocked with revolving door careerists too worried about their next career move to stand up to telecoms. And the corrupt U.S. Supreme Court just neutered what’s left of regulatory independence, ceding most reforms to a Congress too corrupt to act.

The Salt Typhoon hack comes after years and years of officials freaking out about the security risks of Chinese-made Huawei telecom hardware. Though when the worst hack in U.S. history finally arrived it was courtesy of lax domestic oversight, domestic deregulation, domestic corruption, domestic laziness, and outdated administrative passwords.

Filed Under: broadband, deregulation, fcc, privacy, salt typhoon, security, telecom