I was at Davos last year in a cyber form, and one of the speakers was talking about Salt Typhoon. It was a closed door room of 60 cyber folks, and she said, wait, how many people know about this? It was five out of 60. What we learned was that China has infiltrated major telecommunications carriers in the U.S. For all intents and purposes purposes fully. So they can listen to the phone calls.

The lawful intercept plug-in points.

They have control of those, and they can just turn it along at any time and listen to, I mean, what do you do on your phone? You know, how much of your life runs on your phone? Basically all of it. And what we continue to learn is that that's true for everybody, everybody in the United States. rather than trying to ferret through the existing carriers on Guam and find all the China and try to get rid of it.

Let's just do a clean instant. rather than trying to ferret through the existing carriers on Guam

and find all the China and try to get rid of it,

let's just do a clean install of a telco on top of the existing physical infrastructure.

Just assume it's hostile.

This was literally three months before the salt typhoon and it was broken,

and we learned that China had compromised the X1 interface all these major telcos.

The more folks who are kind of bringing, connecting the dots speaking the same language,

I think the better off we all are from a national security and economic prosperity perspective.

In late 2024, the United States confirmed that Chinese hackers had infiltrated every major

American cellular carrier.

The operation, Salt Typhoon, gave China access to lawful intercept systems, live phone calls,

and the communications of senior government officials.

It was not a one-time breach.

It was the product of an industry-wide failure in cybersecurity.

Years before the story broke, a former Green Beret and Palantir executive had started building

a new kind of cell network, one designed to operate securely on top of compromised physical

infrastructure.

The Navy was an early partner, testing the technology on Guam before anyone outside the

intelligence community fully grasped the scale of the threat.

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