Bill Thompson

In other words, there was access built in for a foreign actor.

And then in other terms, other places with routers, with the ZTE stuff, there were just things that you would patch or that you would fix.

as a company who was trying to protect the consumer and create a product that would people you would use and they weren't doing it so they were creating persistent back doors either by actively placing code on there that would allow you know root access or they were leaving things open especially in africa like the work that you know i was working in africa the chinese were just owning africa they were just giving them communications infrastructure

And they were doing that because they wanted their resources and they wanted to know what these people were saying and what they were doing.

And so I'm as free market as a guy can get.

I want the best people building the best products and I want everyone to be able to compete.

But in that case, I would never own a Huawei or a ZTE or anything else.

On a consumer level, what were they doing with those phones?

Getting access to any number of people.

The Chinese really want access to everybody.

But you could start at the topical level of just saying, getting Joe Rogan to use his ZTE would be, that would be my wet dream as a guy who used to do this work back in the day because you're talking to the president or you're talking to this guy or that guy.

And I can build out a network of understanding who you're in contact with, who you're talking to, what's being talked about.

but then also finding out this person's phone number and now doing a deep dive on there.

So it's really about getting all of that data and constructing an analyst notebook, essentially, outline of who's talking to who, who do we need to implant.

But it's for business as well.

They would want this in the hands of somebody who's in charge of a business because they want their IP.

They would want this in soldiers' hands so they would know deployment dates or who's going where and who's doing what.

They want this in routers because...

So routers are usually the most unpatched piece of technology in that, you know, especially, you know, these days are more automated patching.

But back in the day, like you had to manually update a router.