This is not new. I worked for a Comcast subsidiary who owned and operated a multi-state "cable" company who owned all of their end to end transport and had a customer base of around 250k at the time. They installed all fiber and HFC networks in the ground, thus they also owned all the fiber transport gear. We had been in a bake off between Infinera (US based) and Huawei for long-haul transport until a three letter agency paid a visit and made the decision for us.

So... Either one of two things was true: the three letter agency was protecting US consumers or the three letter agency already had Infinera backdoored. My personal opinion in the matter was the former. Why? Because later that same year the data center was shut down one night and off limits for all changes and users. The next day a large, locked and tamper taped mobile rack was in the DC with 100Gb link into core routing. That led me to believe gaining access to siphoning traffic was not really the issue. But I could also be wrong because I wasn't in the know.

This was in 2010-2011, pre-Snowden.