Well, you may have already heard that Justice has decided to look into a cable being laid across the Pacific to Hong Kong by Google, Facebook Inc. and a Chinese partner. It is a little surprising since I raised this issue in my first book, The Chinese Information War, almost 10 years ago. Chinese Telcoms have been putting cables in to a lot of places without any notice what-so-ever for longer than that. My concern then was the number of communications terminal points being controlled by China. Those points were decrypting bulk transmissions and had access to almost any traffic that came through them. Or, they could simply divert traffic as they are famous for doing "accidentally" .
Now, seemingly out of the blue, comes this concern for these partners and their cable. They should have started looking at this years ago, and better late than never is not a good response to the problem. The US does not pay enough attention to what traffic flows over those cables and it should. Contractors use them; government agencies use them. China redirects traffic from other networks to cables and terminals they control. I don't think this late coming action is going to help resolve the problems that have developed over the last 10 years.
