Lost in the noise of the story is that Salt Typhoon has proved that the decades of warnings by the internet security community were correct. No mandated secret or proprietary access to technology products is likely to remain undiscovered or used only by “the good guys” – and efforts to require them are likely to backfire.

So it’s somewhat ironic that one of the countermeasures recommended by the government to guard against Salt Typhoon spying is to use strongly encrypted services for phone calls and text messages – encryption capabilities that it has spent decades trying to undermine so that only “the good guys” can use it.

The hilarity of all of this is that this week the US government started warning citizens to use these platforms now because even the backdoors that were created for law enforcement to monitor suspects have been compromised, and now the telephone networks are absolutely infested with foreign hackers and the cost and effort to get them out may be too high and take too long.