They'd probably be able to co-operate anyway, but it'd require manual intervention by telco employees. What makes these US-mandated lawful intercept backdoors p

They'd probably be able to co-operate anyway, but it'd require manual intervention by telco employees. What makes these US-mandated lawful intercept backdoors particularly nasty is that they provide an automatic way of exfiltrating data that is designed to conceal its use from employees - in essence, a built-in rootkit that compromises the integrity of telecoms systems even in countries that don't actually want this kind of backdoor. This isn't a hypothetical issue; the US has reactivated this feature to spy on politicians in countries that didn't actually want or need it on their exchanges in the first place.