Knowing how absurdly insecure any civilian consumer system is (laptop, smart phone, home assistant, self driving car), with zero day fire-and-not-a-drill-at-all advisories, pretty much every month, I don’t get how this sort of thing happens.

I also fail to see how a decision like this could be made:

  The CIA had imported the system 
  from its Middle East operations...

To China? The degree of technical differences between those two regions is so intuitively disparate, that without having been to either, I’d still never estimate that a game plan for one would work in the other.

Cell phones make sense in desert territories with good satellite coverage, and attacking, as much as operating those same cell phones makes sense too, in a volatile atmosphere.

Meanwhile, in China, with world class supercomputing facilities operated at scientific research institutions, one can only safely assume that no amount of cryptography or electronic transmission is safe. Not even one-time pads.

Each seems like it’s own game, with it’s own rules. What a mistake to not approach them differently. It’s like trying to steal cars from a suburban driveway at dinner time, versus a city parking garage during rush hour. A car is not simply a thing with wheels, that rolls away as soon as you can hop inside.