Trump Says He’s Approved Oracle Deal for U.S. TikTok Operations
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
With Oracle being in charge of all the backend operations in the US and being a 10% shareholder I can feel confident that they will ensure that the CCP won't have the ability to just pick up a phone and gain access to all of our WeChat information.
But with all that being said, I still have a problem with the idea of any Government having the ability to access our private conversations willy, nilly and without any real oversight over the NSA to ensure their investigations are legit and not spying for profit.
That's why we need to start demanding that end to end encryption becomes an option we can at least pay for the option to use on all of the major social apps we use like FB, Twitter, etc.
Idk, at first I thought Trump was probably overstepping his "conservative" position by trying to step in and regulate the free market in a way where he is now "picking winners and losers", rather than letting the consumers being the ones who get to make this decision (which is something I passionately believe Government should never empower itself to do).
But then after looking into the situation a little deeper, I saw that they actually have two seperate versions of TikTok. One called Douyin which is specifically for Chinese users and then TikTok which is for everybody else.
After realizing that they were already operating from a walled off garden that keeps their people seperated from us and vice versa, I started to see very little point in having both apps operate from China.
Objections to how data is used can be solved by law, with needing to do it by fiat of the Executive Branch. If we don't like how data is going to be used, make laws the dictate the desired restrictions. Then use the rule of law, not the rule of man. Formal legal processes, not vague appeals to national security, would guide any determination on breaches of those laws & appropriate escalating penalties. It would also have the benefit of not escalating a user data issue into a major geo-political incident.
China National Intelligence Law
Article 7: Any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep the secrets of the national intelligence work known to the public. The State protects individuals and organizations that support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work
https://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1800/sources/2017_PRC_Natio...
We have irrefutable gag orders which force compliance with the NSA [1].
FISA warrants are a joke, a rubber stamp at best. Only every 12 in about 33,000 are denied [2].
[1]: https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intell...
However with that being said, I'm not totally against the idea of the NSA having the power to conduct surveillance to the degree at which it does.
It's one of those things where I am not happy about it, but then again I'm not so pissed off that im going to lead the charge that somebody deserves to be thrown overboard because of it.
2) US law, however evilly applied, requires a modicum of specificity and a fig leaf of justification. China law has no such need and can appropriate at scale to its bureaucratic desire (e.g, all IP addresses in Washington, D.C.)
If we don't want consumer corporations owned through other countries sharing our data with their government's intelligence agencies, we need laws, not a shoot-from-the-hip approach that deals only with the high-profile panic of the moment example.
We're a "rule of law" nation. Absent extreme circumstances it should be laws that deal with actions we decide are improper. Otherwise we're no longer a nation of laws, we're a nation with a series of individuals who seek to enforce their will rather than the law.
I should also point out that Congress has passed a bill which bans TikTok (and I assume similar Chinese owned communications apps, I havent read the bill) from Government owned devices. So it's not like Congress is at odds within itself when it comes to understanding the overall potential security threat TikTok imposes on it's users when the CCP is allowed direct and unimpeeded access to user's data.
I also think that trying to pursue legislative routes when implementing policies that aim to protect not just America's but our allies best interests when conducting business with China is too slow and too political of a process when it comes to trade negotiations.
That is one of main compelling reasons why I believe the founding fathers decided they needed to have a powerful executive despite the fact that they didn't want one.
Negotiations are difficult enough as it is when it's the Government trying to get their government to act in it's own best interest. It would be virtually impossible to try and have our legislative branch negotiate with every other nation's legislature/executives directly.
It would be too difficult to offer terms you couldn't guarantee are concrete.
For these reasons I think it's fair if the President uses national defense as an argument to use aggressive tactics during trade negotiations.
It's important to note that as the People it's easier for us to reverse policy the popular majority of the nation as a whole doesn't like because the executive is the only branch of Government everybody gets a say in who gets to run it.
This allows us to avoid situations in the legislature where the people we vote into Congress make concessions across the aisle on things we elected them to be against. Or when the individual parties themselves can't come to a common concession on issues.
This is also why you also need an executive to act as commander in chief.
The legislature should be deciding who to declare war on but if you tried to make every single individual strategic move conducted in war something that first had to be passed as legislation, our government wouldn't be able to defend itself because it can't keep up with the fast paced, rapidly changing dynamics of war.
Trade and warfare are very similar in this respect.
Not only that, it's a solution that deals with one single high-profile offender only, it did not create a set of statutes that could be readily applied to other such issues.
I don't understand your assumption that Congress would need to negotiate with other countries' legislatures. We don't need to negotiate with China to make our own laws regarding use of user data. Should that in some way cause friction with other countries, we do have a branch of government already tasked with performing individual nation-level negotiations: It's diplomacy, and we have 13,000 Foreign Service officers stationed around the world to perform the function, with many thousands more in the State Department working to support those efforts.
- https://www.fox5ny.com/news/trump-gives-blessing-to-proposed...
- $5billion Educational fund.
- 20% ownership by Oracle and Walmart.
- Access to codebase by Oracle.
- Opportunity for Oracle and Walmart to increase stake by further 20% pre-IPO.
- New HQ in Texas, US.
I know that people in the US likes to criticize Trump a lot but he sure has his merits and this is one of them.
Today it’s TikTok, tomorrow it will be Telegram.
The problem is that those people exist on every social media platform, not just TikTok.
Little kids on TikTok are much more vicious than Twitter users. And they are little kids. Tiktok does a decent job with facial recognition to suppress their videos but that doesn’t stop a mass horde of them from stumbling on a couple of videos of mine and turning it into a cesspool.
Now of course that’s not worth the eradication of the app, but it’s not very inspiring to see the next generation being encouraged to act in the worst ways of online discourse.
Google (and the NSA by extension, via PRISM) has magnitudes more information on you.