[vlovich123]

Firstly E2E doesn’t protect the metadata. So a compromised backbone would still give you insight into who’s talking to whom which is what the NSA doubled down instead of trying to sift through raw data (they still do but social network monitoring is easier and can give more insights).

Secondly, if you made the infrastructure, you’re more likely to have attack capabilities that can take it down more easily. Probably helped US and Israel that Iran was using tech from Siemens which was easy for them to acquire and work on since it’s from an ally country. In the fog of war, being able to sow chaos into the home front is useful for disrupting the war operation. The actual message content is probably less valuable.

But the truth is we don’t actually know. There hasn’t been a war between major powers in the telecom age. From that perspective, it’s wiser to keep infrastructure decoupled to avoid surprises and mitigate risk because it looks like conflict may come sooner rather than later given how both sides have been building up and conflicts have been escalating globally.