In the wake of Salt Typhoon, what does the future of secure telecom look like?

To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed John Doyle, a former Green Beret who spent a decade building Palantir’s national security practice before founding Cape, which calls itself “America’s privacy-first mobile carrier”. Also joining the conversation is Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman and co-founder of Silverado Policy Accelerator, founder of CrowdStrike, and an angel investor into Cape.

We discuss…

• Why telecom data is so valuable to adversaries, and what China discovered in the Salt Typhoon campaign,

• Cape’s founding thesis, including what makes Cape’s cell network so much more secure than major providers like AT&T,

• How wars are run on commercial cell networks, and how Russia and Ukraine’s reliance on that has been exploited over the course of the war,

• Other instances of telecom data weaponization, including by Hezbollah, Israel, and Mexican drug cartels,

• Taiwan’s plan for dealing with undersea cable sabotage,

• What it takes to cultivate engineering talent in telecoms, and why Huawei has stayed innovative while US providers stagnated.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Thank you to Cape for sponsoring the episode.

Why War Runs on Commercial Cell Networks

Jordan Schneider: Dmitri, why don’t you kick us off — what was Salt Typhoon all about?

Dmitri Alperovitch: Salt Typhoon came to the fore in late 2024, maybe a little bit earlier, when the government discovered there was a huge compromise of major telcos — AT&T, Verizon, and others — by China. Specifically, a Chinese contractor in Sichuan that they ultimately sanctioned for this effort. They were breaking into telcos to get access to call records, sensitive information that telcos have to facilitate law enforcement operations, and voicemails of key political figures. There were revelations that they targeted the Trump campaign in particular during last year’s election.

At the time, I was serving on the Cyber Safety Review Board, which was tasked with investigating Salt Typhoon. The Cyber Safety Review Board is an executive order-created board within the government that combines private sector members with government members to investigate major national security-impacted cyber intrusions. I was actually shocked in the course of our work that the government was shocked. If you know anything about signals intelligence agencies, the first thing you would do is go after telcos. That’s where the crown jewels are. John knows this well from his military career — it’s