[3pt14159]

The real problem is that I'm not sure its really going to change anything. Do we really think that the Chinese can't hack our network gear? The SS7 hack was disclosed in 2008 and was ongoing until at least 2017, the last year I looked into it.

Nationalizing 5G or specifying a specific source of origin will help at the margins, but I'm coming to the conclusion that without a fundamental redesign of the internet security isn't possible. Even then, I'm not sure. Even if you somehow change the internet at the protocol level and magically make it secure form the legion of vectors the surveillance can just move somewhere else. Sell some rooted phones on eBay. Buy a security company or a social network. The Chinese bought 500px (a company I was CDS of for a year before I quit) for a hot minute before selling it back to the Americans (to Getty). With the RAWs they now have the sensor fingerprints of a ton of DSLRs tied to real email addresses, etc. Plus countless photos of naked people that were private.

Sure they could probably have gotten that data some other noisy way, but this is basically risk-free, and they probably made a profit on it by scaring Getty that the photo licensing business was about to get into a margins war with China.