[bifrost]

Having done a reasonable amount of network debugging/tapping, IMHO its actually the hardest to tap copper networking equipment since its fairly signal sensitive.

You can tap fiber passively by "simply" cutting some of the jacket off and bending the fiber or installing a fiber tap.

From what I understand about 5G, there's some amount of encryption between the phone and tower, and tower and the PSTN so it could technically be safer from a surveillance POV. But in the end the 5G tower will be fed by fiber anyways.

If someone is tapping the physical media instead of having CALEA, you've got a bigger problem than how its tapped...