https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-inverted-panopticon
"The four trillion dollars in institutional capital positioned for stable
UK-China relations rests on an assumption that died in a Chengdu server room
sometime around 2019. The assumption is that espionage between major powers
operates within understood boundaries, that telecommunications infrastructure
is contested but not compromised, that the surveillance systems Western
governments built to watch their citizens cannot be turned around to watch
them. The assumption has been falsified. What follows is the complete mechanism
of how China’s Ministry of State Security achieved persistent access to the
private communications of three British Prime Ministers’ closest advisers, the
phones of a US President-elect, and the wiretap systems that were supposed to
catch them doing it. The positioning implications are immediate. The framework
is permanent.
On January 26, 2026,
The Telegraph disclosed that Chinese hackers had
penetrated right into the heart of Downing Street, compromising mobile
communications of senior officials across the Johnson, Truss, and Sunak
administrations. The story was buried on page seven, treated as a technology
curiosity. It was, in fact, a solvency event for the Western intelligence
alliance. Not because phones were hacked, which happens, but because of how
they were hacked: by weaponizing the very surveillance infrastructure that
Western governments mandated for their own intelligence agencies. The
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in the United States and
the
Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom require telecommunications
carriers to build backdoors into their networks for court-ordered wiretapping.
Chinese state hackers found those backdoors. And walked through them.
The intelligence value is almost impossible to overstate. For approximately
four years, operators linked to the MSS’s Chengdu bureau had the capability to
see not just who British officials were calling, but whom the FBI was
investigating, which Chinese operatives were under surveillance, what the
United States knew about Beijing’s activities, and when counterintelligence was
getting close. They could geolocate millions of individuals. They could record
phone calls at will. They compromised the surveillance of their own
surveillers, achieving the counterintelligence equivalent of reading the other
side’s playbook while the game was in progress.
What follows is the institutional playbook. The positions are already being
built."
Via Bruce Schneier in
The RISKS Digest Volume 34 Issue 86:
https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/34/86#subj9
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
