Chances that foreign intelligence agencies are exploiting a cellular network flaw in order to spy on members of Congress are high, one member said this week. Even though American intelligence agencies are aware of that situation, they haven’t notified lawmakers, and it isn’t clear why.
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“I don’t know what the rules are for whether certain intelligence agencies believe they couldn’t share information for classification reasons, but in terms of members of Congress, all of us have security clearances, so it is profoundly odd to me that apparently most of us, or maybe all of us, were not briefed about this flaw,” Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, told the Washington Examiner.
He was referring to a vulnerability in the Signaling System No. 7 network, which is used by more than 800 telecommunications carriers worldwide. Discovered by German researchers in 2014, the flaw allows anyone who accesses the network to listen in on phone calls, read text messages and monitor location data stored on a connected cellular device anywhere in the world.
“The SS7 flaw is particularly useful to foreign governments, because they have the key to SS7. So I find it strange that members of Congress were not alerted to this, not just earlier, but at all,” Lieu said. “Even now, I have not seen a single alert being sent out to any member of Congress, saying by the way, China could listen to your cell phone if they got your number.”
China is just one of many nations that presumably have access to the network. “I’m not on the intelligence committee, but my basic view … is that it would be a really stupid, stupid intelligence agency if they didn’t know how to access this network,” said Lieu, who serves on the House Oversight Subcommittee on Information Technology.
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“Pretty much any country has access to this network. Russia has access, China does, a lot of [adversaries] have access to this network, and to think they aren’t exploiting this flaw is not realistic. I would be dumbfounded if these countries had not been listening in on people’s cell phones,” Lieu said.
Lieu is calling for a congressional investigation to search for solutions to the problem. Telecom providers are set to transition away from the SS7 network over the next decade, but experts say that even newer technology is going to be similarly hackable.
