This is a wildly sensationalized headline, bordering on just false.
The real story is that US government employees regularly misspell email addresses using the top-level domain .ml (Mali) instead of .mil (The US Military). This means that the domain administrator can read those emails. For now the administrator is some Dutch guy; the Malian government cannot read the emails.
I guess even the BBC is throwing out its last shreds of journalistic integrity at this point…
This means that the domain administrator can read those emails
Not even that.
Unless Mali has explicitly set up bogus domains paralleling US ones to try to exploit this -- which would be pretty visible -- normally what's going to happen is a DNS query for MX on a domain to determine the mail server to which the email should go. That will fail, and the mail sending attempt will fail on US servers.
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