I'm afraid this is heading the direction of 'let's define a backdoor'. What remains true is that China targeted a system built for the FBI to get unencrypted access to GMail systems and customer data that did not require 'front door' access. Many people here would call a service run for the FBI without oversight or a lengthy and transparent approval process with the requirement for a warrant a backdoor. We don't have to call it that if you don't like - I think the terminology is not so important for the point.

I will leave the semantic discussion to whether such a system constituted a 'front door' or a 'back door' to folks who enjoy such deliberations.

Ultimately I hope that readers see how hacking of 'side systems' built for intelligence agencies to make full data requests have been used to gain access to the larger systems they connect - in the spirit of the original thread.