Credit: I did not write this, it comes from an industry colleague I respect who published this on another platform. I felt it important to share.
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Putting a backdoor into the telco systems was originally a bad idea and contested by security and crypto experts.
It started by Bill Clinton as a compromise policy hack, rebutted by the EFF.
A Clipper Chip secure endpoint phone system with a built in LEAF or law enforcement access field that Matt Blaze quickly showed was insecure and allowed the same kind backdoor access that CALEA has currently offered to Salt Typhoon.
If the 3 letter agencies are going to spy on U.S. citizens and follow the rules, that's ok because there are privacy protections built in. They are not going to offer it on the dark web for sale.
They are willing to listen to their critics in Congress and follow the courts, up to a point, but they have a job to do.
If they don't follow the agreed upon rules of the FCC etc and pub;ic expectations (see Snowden) that's a policy, not a technical issue. East Germany made a point of gathering all the data of their citizens as a policy.
Allowing access to a hacking group from another country?
If you have issues with ByteDance and Tik Tok, this is on a whole different level.
There is actually some history here when Telco engineers uncovered unauthorized data migrations in Europe by allies.
Then contracting that the maintenance of the back door out to people who did not secure it according to best practices for the IP based world was probably inevitable.
Overall Telco equipment has migrated to Internet Protocol from what existed in the 1970's. It's a great deal, but the security could affect your business plan and privacy.
Some things were adopted from different telco protocols, some things were not.
The missing part is related to end to end point PKI related to your specific identity which recently CISA and FBI have advised to plug in using secure messaging protocols.
Do you have a personal x.509v3 certificate? Probably not. On the Internet you are in charge of your encryption and it's unlikely you have access to a trained cryptologic officer.
Remember back in the 1970's the telcos were delivering services via copper wires? They even provided the power.
The amoritization schedule for copper wires was essentially 50 years, which brings us up to 2020's, which is where we are today. 50 years is wrong when technology is rapidly changing. Now we are adopting the entire country equal U.S. to use endpoint encryption, voluntarily.
Today, because of the high maintenance costs of delivering services via copper, it has become almost non-existant in the original 1910 plan of hooking up a home or business via a connection to a central office.
Tapping a phone in that context meant literally tapping a phone line, either with a pen register to get call detail records at a fairly low bar, or actually listening in and recording coversations, which is a much more labor intensive operation and a judicially higher bar.