Quote: "Other countries in the Five Eyes espionage alliance have taken much stronger action in their private as well as public sectors."
So the backdoors are in place -- Bruce (Australia), Jeremy (UK) and some Chinese bureaucrat (courtesy of Huawei) all have their own way of reading traffic.
But what if the bad guys have already used THEIR OWN CIPHER before they send the message? This writer, an amateur programmer, has implemented a simple book cipher in 1200 lines of code. Encipher/decipher takes a few seconds for a short message. Why are the great and the good worrying about the Chinese.....what all these backdoors will see is something like the below. Let's see how weak this "amateur" cipher is:
0xq21TBt0V8p0Xj$13OC0Ny30caD0MgI0cHB0V6Q
0kxz0P5U1qF41FIs1fvC1A6$1qh61qIt0rll0Tb8
0AvJ1Kk31RPB1V6S0GPS0TH10D7o0VzT1OVs0Btw
1feX1L670rvO1YmV0KOq1dWf0IeZ0gXb08v$09I3
19UQ0qE71eaD13wC1XfU0xKe0Ns208ne1AOA17qM
1ml00cQ9033F064R1mrV0zJh0Fbt0mYX18n31VWT
0q5M0lE11EIq0fRR0spr0wSL1JvR0iyA0euv13um
0E1=0JtB18jL02o60G$W0G=s0zBP0uxw1I=T0rNY
10LM0KhR198B018$1XEj0cfa0ip11IaS0ufn0cbb
0dUP0Vyj10p30ItA1d4U0v860LDf1jrt1kG81T0N
0GQ$010b0RPA0zde0uGr1BmI0lxY1UMA1Ys70362
0rYK1fEb1i9$0JYX184N0t1i0ak60kFk031h1Tbl
0TRT1Nyt01WK0FnU12K11q4m0TAl04QA1U651CBS
0qJd16Er1JV312ty03km1RVn
-- Good luck!