Let's not overstate it. The US government hacks telecom for the benefit of the US government. Now having said that, as someone above mentioned, the intelligence

Let's not overstate it. The US government hacks telecom for the benefit of the US government. Now having said that, as someone above mentioned, the intelligence agencies of the top 50 national governments are obviously all keen to use those hacks for their own benefit. And the flip side of that is that the US government is very interested in stopping these other national governments from succeeding. Clearly, the counter-intel part of the US government effort has been less successful than the surveillance and intelligence gathering effort. But that doesn't mean that the US government wants all those other nations to be able to gather data from these systems. Our government wants nothing more than to be the only national government capable of gathering data from these systems.