The whole thing was a mistaken configuration made by a European company. If anything, the Chinese company is a victim who got a ton of unwanted traffic routed through them.
I agree it's more newsworthy when countries known for generally being enemies of human rights and privacy have traffic that isn't theirs routed through them, and just happen to publish prefixes.
They didn't just happen to publish anything, one of CT's _European_ customers leaked prefixes to them and CT didn't have filters in place to block it. Which is how peering has worked from day 1, you know the openness and doing things based on mutual trust that the Internet has been 'plagued' with since forever has also applies to peering relationships.
The notion that they did this on purpose to record traffic is just silly.
> China Telecom then announced these routes onto the global Internet redirecting large amounts of Internet traffic destined for some of the largest European mobile networks through China Telecom’s network.
How is China recording internet traffic silly given their expansive use of facial recognition, their crackdown on journalists, interdiction of VPN services, and use of apps to monitor ethnic minorities? Capturing a bit of foreign internet traffic isn't anything, and would be extensively useful to a police state.
If China wants to convince the rest of the world that every single BGP hijack and leak isn't intelligence gathering, then they can implement the same standards and safeguards everyone else does...
That part is not silly. But the way it happened in this case (and most cases like this) makes it silly to think they did it on purpose because they didn't actually do anything, no active choice or action on their part was required for it to happen. You could suggest that they are dragging their feet on implementing safeguards and just hoping that one of their customers leaks some routes to them so they can capture some random data, but I would call that silly as well. When they do it will be targeted and effective.
