This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

But the NSA did not stop at Huawei. Shotgiant expanded into the hacking of two of China’s largest cellular networks, which were now riddled with NSA implants too. At the time our story broke in 2014, classified documents made clear that the NSA was still working on new implants and malware—tools that could sniff out voices of interest on Chinese cell networks, capture select cuts of their conversations, and siphon them back to Fort Meade, where teams of NSA translators, decoders, and analysts broke them down for critical intelligence. In short, the NSA was doing everything it accused Beijing of doing, and then some. By 2017 the agency’s voice recognition and selection tools had been widely deployed across Chinese mobile networks. And the United States was not just hacking into China. Hundreds of thousands of NSA implants were deeply embedded in other foreign networks, routers, switches, firewalls, computers, and phones around the globe. Many were actively siphoning texts, emails, and conversations back to the agency’s server farms every day. Many others were sleeper cells, dormant until called upon for a rainy day or some future shutdown—or all-out cyberwar.