This massive and pervasive hacking by China of US telecom companies is significant. Your colleague Mark Warner said, it's most significant breach he has ever seen in his entire time on the committee. Do you know if China has been able to access the audio of Americans phone calls?
Well, I'm not going to comment on what they access, but I agree with Mark Warner's statement, it is an egregious, outrageous, and dangerous breach of our telecommunications systems across multiple companies. I'll leave it at that. I think as time goes on, we're going to learn more about it. Some of it will be made public. I think there's more that's still
being gathered. It's a very serious situation that we face, and I think one that is quite threatening, maybe not directly to the election per se, but certainly to the national security of our country moving forward. It's a vulnerability that no one imagined or anticipated, but here it is.
It's interesting that he put it in the context of the election. That is the problem. We're so focused on the election. This China Chinese hack of AT and T and Verizon and and again, as you just heard, there maybe the biggest hack that we've had in our nation's history. It's all being run through the prism of the election. Did they get anything on Trump or Harris that will affect the election? And blah blah blah, and otherwise ignoring the fact that Brennan asked at one point, were they
actually listening to our phone calls of American citizens? And Mark Rubia said, well, I'm not going to comment on that. What what that seems like a big story.
Josh Rogan wrote a terrific piece in The Washington Post about this. Josh is the columnist for the Global Opinion section of the Post, author of a terrific book, Chaos under Heaven. Trump she in the Battle for the twenty first century, among other things, and Josh joins us. Now, Josh, this seems like the all time champion great significance to little attention story of all time, or close to it.
Right in any sane world, this would be the most important thing on the news right now. But the timing of the election is actually kind of unfortunate because it's overshadowing what one of my sources said is the biggest intelligence breach in US history.
Wow.
And after that, Marco Ribo wanted to give but couldn't because it's classified information. But I'm going to tell you anyway, is that yes, they're listening to the audio real time phone calls and watching the text messages in real time of hundreds, if not thousands, of American citizens. That they've been doing it for a year, and they're embedded in the telecom systems in a way that even our own
intelligence community doesn't fully understand. They don't know how to get them out, they don't know if they can get them out. And this is a problem that's just so big and so hard to wrap your head around that the US companies doesn't want to talk about it because it's embarrassing. They don't have any answers, and if people really knew what was going on, they would freak out. And the bottom line is that the telecoms don't want to tell anybody either, because it's their systems that got hacked.
But I think what you heard from Warner and from Rubio in that clip is that this is real, This is big, and this is not going away. It's only going to get worse.
Wow. So the Chinese have been into our biggest phone companies for a year and they don't know how to get them out, or if they can get them.
Out, it's even worse than that because they not only did they get are they into the phone companies, they got through in the system that the phone company is built for the FBI to do wire tapping on criminals and spies and people talking with criminals.
Wow.
FBI can only do that theoretically with a legal warrant, but the Chinese intelligence services don't care about that. So they have all the access maybe not only to our phones, into our text but also to all of the federal investigations that are underway and all the counter intelligence operations that are underway, which could be completely compromised everywhere around the world. And how you deal with that is a whole other problem.
Boy, to say this is devastating. I need to invent a new word to correctly convey the seriousness. Astounding kind of clip Well, that seems like a good word, And Josh, I hate to leap to the libertarian you know angle of this immediately, but the idea that the government and the phone companies assured us that no, these portals into your private communications will only be used for the most important of investigations and get very serious, very safe rather
has has always been you know, exposed as a lie. Right, There'll be.
There'll be a time for the politics of all of this, But I have to agree that it proves that when you build back doors for the government into encrypted systems, things go wrong because those back doors are vulnerabilities and they get the bad guys as well as the good
guys can figure out how to get into them. And there's another political angle too, which is the PISO warrant issue, because if you're anywhere in Donald Trump's orbit, you have a thing against PISO warrants because they were used to spy on the Trump campaign in twenty sixteen, and that's that's the same system. It's not the same issue, but it's the same system. So there's a lot of crazy
tangents that will come out of this. But the first thing is just for in my opinion, of Americans to know that they're vulnerable so that they could do something about it, so they can change their practices, and for the telecom community and for the intelligence community to tell us what's going on, because that's what they're supposed to do when something like this happened.
What's your worst case scenario for what China could do with some of this information that they've gathered.
Well, I mean again, I think the worst case scenario, hopefully that we want to see is that they use it to interfere in our politics in a direct way. That's kind of what the Russians or the Iritians would do. What it seems more likely is that they'll just save it all and use it in intelligence ways for blackmail, disinformation, deep fakes, you know, collecting on any American they want for any time. So it's kind of like there's a lot of worst case scenarios, and you know, there's no
way to sort of plan for all of them. But it seems that the primary worst case scenario, which is that our telecommunications network are compromised, that's already here. That's a pretty bad case scenario already.
Right. I completely understand the concept of if they know all of our secrets, the worst case scenario is that they will use them whenever they need to for the next one hundred years. But at the same time, I'm sorry, I'm just so flabbergasted by the notion that they have access to a great deal of our counter intelligence.
I mean, that is just so disastrous, right, So we have you know, not just counter intelligence, criminal investigation, any wire tap or surveillance that the FBI or any other federal law enforcement is doing.
Those records are kept somewhere. Now this is a kind of a part we don't know, to be clear, we don't know if they have that. What we do know is that they, excuse me, collect already collected audio on for example, former President Trump, jd Vance, Jared Kushner, Eric Trump, members of the Harris campaign, congressional staffers for Chuck Schumer, leading US business leaders, leading US government officials. We don't know their names. So those are the people they've already
spied on and already have got stuff on. And the list keeps growing every day. The FBI finds out more people, and eventually you have to think like, oh, maybe we should tell those people, right, And the FBI has been reluctant to do that because once they tell these people, these people tell other people, and all of a sudden, people like me start to figure out what's going on, and I'm like, oh, I got to tell the country, you know. But you know, eventually there's this problem where
people are getting spied on. They need to know it, okay, And if the government doesn't want to tell us because they're embarrassed about it. That's a that's its own problem.
You know, the more I Josh Rogan, Global Opinions, Calumnists or the Washington Post is online, Jack go ahead.
And the more I think about it, it makes such sense. I mean, it is small ball for she or whoever makes these decisions to try to affect the election. He's thinking bigger than that. I mean, he wants to influence policy on a major level, or understand it ahead of time or whatever over whoever ends up in the administry, maybe for years to come. So yeah, just you know, nudging the election one where or another's probably small compared to their thoughts.
Well, that's right. They'd rather preserve it for let's say, hypothetically, China invades Taiwan and then we try to do something about it, and then they shut down our telecomsystem. Not to mention whatever else they're in, because this is just a piece of a puzzle. The Chinese are also into our energy systems and our manufacturing and construction systems, and you know, our internet service providers. Do you can imagine that's a pretty big deterrent for us getting involved to
try to save Taiwan. If they're like, oh, we're just going to shut off your internet and your phones and then we're going to see what's what you know, So, yeah, they have their own interests. It's also not clear that the Chinese have a clear preference between Harris and Trump. The Russians want Harris, I'm sorry. The Russians want Trump, The Iranians want Harris. The Chinese could play it either way.
So they're preparing for both scenarios. That's why they're spying on both camps because they want to be ready either way.
Right, And it occurs to me that, you know, given the openness of our democrat system and the fact that the legislature weighs in on so many of the important policies and topics vis vir relationship with China going forward for the next twenty years, you know, decoupling the economies, the farm, big pharma, you know, tech, military technologies, chips, just all of it. All of that is going to
go through the legislative process. And if they can bring pressure to bear on one point six million people who they have dossiers on having just talked to their lover on the cell phone or texting their bookie or whatever. I mean, they are going to exert that pressure wherever they can. Oh my god, what a what a what a situation.
It's really bad.
You have got to be I mean, this was the reason of your piece. Just shocked that it's not getting more attention than it is.
Well, you know, I think, to be honest, guys, this is why people inside the system brought this story to me. One of them said, because they're taking a risk by you know, killing me Ali the questions information knowing that I'm going to tell the world, because they thought it
was that important. And one of them said to me, listen, Josh, this is bigger than the election, and we can't afford to let this get caught up in political and you know again sort of the blame game and how it's going to affect privacy and how it's going to you know, the debate over FAISA and the Russia Gate or whatever. My source said to me, listen, that's not but that's
not the most important thing right now. The people need to know because the response has to have a fire lit under it, because the telecom companies in the FBI and the intelligence community are bearing this thing now, are they burying it because of the election. No, they're probably bearing it because they don't know what they're do. You know, they don't know what to do, you know, And it's
it's real. It's just such a huge problem that you know, people are going to get freaked out, but better that they get freaked out by the truth and not. And I don't see any reason to wait election or no election to tell people that they're at risk.
Did I just have an acid flag? Did your source say to you, Josh, this is bigger than the election.
That's a direct quote, you know, Okay, and good.
Well, you're you're gonna be the Woodward and Bernstein of this story. Then we will keep an eye on your column and uh, you know, and your Twitter feed on this one, because this has got legs. I'm sure.
Oh my goodness.
I'll let you know when I get another piece of it, because this is going to get worse before it gets better.
Wow.
Thank you.
We have a link to Josh's whole piece at the top of hot Links, Armstrong and getty dot com. Josh always enlightening in a pleasure. Thanks a million, have good day. We are so Jack, Just real quick, I'm looking at the top of the most red opinion pieces in the UH the WAPO right now. Number one, who's going to win on election Day? Here are eight columnist predictions. Number two, women can send Trump packing? Number three can you guess who people will vote for? Try the squiz? Number four?
If Trump loses Pennsylvania, he'll have no one to blame but himself. Fifth, it's about abortion.
And I had at a lefty friend was always so into who was president and Trump and then this and that, and I could never get them into a conversation about China or anything, you know, big because they always go back to the election. That's way a lot of people are. And how about how about sources going to Josh Rogan because they know he's into this sort of stuff, saying, Okay, we got to give you some information. Print a piece about this. Nobody's paying attention. It's bigger than the election.
It's the biggest hack of our systems in US history by China, our number one enemy, and it's getting no coverage. And Margaret Brennan throws it in at the end after arguing about Trump and what he said about Liz Cheney. She throws around in at the very end after like an eight minute interview as an afterthought. As an afterthought, Yeah wow wow, well, Gully, how do we transition?
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God, we're so fat, soft and happy with our who's said, what, mean thing about whoever? And arguing about that for days and ignoring the fact that world history is not going to change. There's always a battle for who's in charge of what, and China wants to take over and they just had and they just you know, had a huge, huge, wintured go ahead. If you talk to a thousand people today, how many people would know this story?
And I'm picturing Shijhin Ping. They're in Beijing saying, oh my god, they discovered our hack. What are the Americans saying? And his advisers saying, nobody's really noticed. They're not talking about it at all. Other than the Armstrong and Getty show. We got a lot more on the way. Stay here, Armstrong and