ByteDance planned to use TikTok to surveil specific American citizens
forbes.com
forbes.com
But yeah, it's way better.
Obviously, I'd guess the demographics of Americans is more than a quarter here, but I (think) there are enough non-Americans that you can't really be certain that the individual you're speaking to is actually American.
The result speaks for itself. The desire to dominate is identical, there's just more or less legal or culturally acceptable ways to going about getting there.
It appears that we can be encouraged to desire almost anything, or at least an incredible amount of things…
I'd like to note that corporations do want the same thing. I believe all power structures converge to this, no matter their origins - an abusive partner, a out of control corporation, a totalitarian government, a fanatic cult, law enforcement when given too much power.
So what remains? Forces that keep the system in balance, "checks and balances" as they say. I don't know the recipe and I don't believe anyone does. What I'd just like to point out is that corporations, as they are, are not exempt from abuses of power.
Both individualism and collectivism have positive and negative sides. With individualism, the positive is e.g. self-expression, creativity, innovation, while the negative is e.g. selfishness and disconnection. With collectivism, the positives are e.g. connection and supporting others, while the negative is e.g. imitation and lack of diversity. Ironically, when pushed to extremes the negatives of individualism and collectivism seem to kind of equate with each other (though it may not look that way at first glance from the outside).
All this to say that yes I mostly agree with you, though it’s complicated since the pros and cons are often quite different. And I think this is often misunderstood (since people may, for example, for their own more individualist country focus on the positives of individualism while for another more collectivist country focus on the negatives of collectivism—-or vice versa).
One datapoint: Looking at the "Human rights protection" index, US stands at -0.17, and China at -1.2.
In Germany, chancellor Scholz is actively trying to enable the sale of a third of Hamburg’s port (one of the largest in Europe) to Chinese investors by blocking a chamber vote about it. All security services and ministries sound alarm, yet if no vote is completed or investigation into the matter started by the end of the month, the contract passes by default.
Germany has not even encountered the worst effects of the energy crisis brought on by the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Yet the highest ranked executive politician tries to ensure that whenever China decides to follow Russias example, Germany’s economy will be destroyed in an instant.
It’s lunacy. It doesn’t even make headlines. What is going on regarding China? Is everyone with economic interests still simply blinded by the volume of the potential Chinese market? Does the Chinese government have career-ending dirt on all of them? I don’t get it. This is not regular, rational behavior for a head of state within Europe.
Trade is normal, selling out your countries’ critical infrastructure to a country holding very different values is plain unconscionable.
> TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior."
> But the material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance's Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes. Forbes is not disclosing the nature and purpose of the planned surveillance referenced in the materials in order to protect sources. TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit has specifically targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.
Right at the beginning. I thought the rest of the article would make this interesting, but instead it talked about what Uber did and what Facebook did (I assume to fill space), then told a story about people feeling suspicious and nothing interesting happening.
Forbes is a shitty outlet, like the International Business Times, where you float dubious stories, then get an army of bots and enraged nationalists to tweet links to them, then the NYT and WaPo both write stories about the Forbes story so they don't have to sign any claims it makes, but they can still spread them. Then I assume the FBI will open an investigation into the NYT story about the tweets about the Forbes story about nothing, and somebody on the floor of Congress will demand to know why we're treating China with kid gloves when at this very moment the FBI is investigating the NYT reporting on the tweets about the Forbes story about how TikTok collects location data just like everybody else.
This story should be taken as of a similar quality to the rest of Forbes' journalism (however little of it there is.)
> In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties. At the time, Uber acknowledged that it had run the program, called “greyball,” but said it was used to deny ride requests to “opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers,” among other groups.
This says more about Uber's callous disregard for legal regulations, labor rights and the hyper-aggressive-venture-capitalist-funded environment that it exists in as a corporation than anything about data mining.
Basically "f the government, we do as we please" by Uber.
Though obviously the data collection itself is terrible as well.
Uber's practices are what happens when you take a bunch of young aggressive business school grads who think Ayn Rand is the best thing since sliced bread and give them hundreds of millions of dollars to hire engineering employees.
More on Ubey and "greyball", which has been extensively covered in the US press: https://www.google.com/search?&q=uber+greyball
As just about anyone who has done business in an entirely cash-based economy where things are done verbally and on handshakes with little or no electronic or paper based record keeping will know all too well.
get user; if user.flags contains ["grayball"] then load controller1; else load controller2
All the other articles I see also have the same forbes.com/sites/author/article-specific url structure.
I don't use TikTok, but it seems to be video entertainment. It gets access to your location, and it knows a ton about what videos you like, but is that really all that useful? TFA cites "phone numbers, birthdays and draft videos" -- the first two are hardly secret, and the latter is specifically stuff that you were planning to make not-secret.
Sure, it's not great that they're following you, but TikTok is hardly alone in that. Your location is also a terrible secret.
I can see objecting to TikTok as a propaganda machine (even if the US is hardly in any position to be complaining about others' propaganda machines). But I'm unclear on just what kind of surveillance they think is going on here, or why the Chinese government would find it especially useful.
Or only changes IPs to another address in a very small /24 to /26 sized block that's assigned to a router in one very specific geographic area.
Or you have a case like a bunch of customers all behind one cgnat exit point to the internet that also does not change in geographic scope/scale of how many cgnatted customers are behind it. As commonly seen on LTE networks.
Even if you have not granted GPS location permission to an app there is a very high likelihood that other people in the same small netblock have, which greatly improves a third party's correlation of netblock-to-lat/long.
> Location of residence and work, correlating different IP addresses such as if your client device often appears from a certain 'home' IP address during non work hours, and another set of IP addresses during work hours.
> Location of where you go on vacation, and for how long (based on entirely new IP address in some other geographical location)
> Facial recognition data, likely good enough over long term use with enough angles of your face to develop a high confidence model of your uniqueness as a human in the world. Getting even better all the time as front-facing cameras on phones improve in video quality.
> Facial recognition data of any other persons who appear in your videos and where they are in your social graph of contacts.
> Object recognition and categorization of what things appear in the background of your videos, consumer electronics, art, religious symbols, furniture, vehicles, electrical outlet shape (can be used to distinguish geographical location).
> Time of day use/usage patterns
> Social graph of who you're friends with, whose other tiktok clients login from the same netblocks (likely to be in the same residence, etc). Who do you like/follow and who follows you
> Telemetry data from device itself for unique ios or android device fingerprinting
> What content you watch that might be even slightly politically, economically or religiously related and how that content is perceived by Beijing.
> Who and how many and which other people in your social graph watch anything political/business/religious related and all the other data gathered about them.
> How many and which one of your friends have client devices that appear from known VPN exit endpoints or IP addresses that look "suspicious" to data sets used in the back end of the domestic China great firewall. I'd be shocked if they don't collect data when a large % of somebody's friends and social media graph are apparent VPN users.
I could go on.
Who's going to grant permission location for a video app?
> Facial recognition data
seems plausible, but only if you're producing content, in which case everything you record is already public and tiktok gathering data is the least of your problems. also, at least on ios surreptitiously capturing facial data with front camera is risky because there's a recording indicator displayed by the OS.
> Facial recognition data of any other persons who appear in your videos and where they are in your social graph of contacts.
> Object recognition and categorization of what things appear in the background of your videos, consumer electronics, art, religious symbols, furniture, vehicles, electrical outlet shape (can be used to distinguish geographical location).
Again, only applicable if you're posting content, and if you're posting it, it's presumably public and tiktok is the least of your problems.
> Telemetry data from device itself for unique ios or android device fingerprinting
Given that iphones are basically identical, the only thing you'll be able to extract is "this guy is using an iphone 14 pro", which isn't exactly revealing
> Location of where you go on vacation, and for how long (based on entirely new IP address in some other geographical location)
> Time of day use/usage patterns
> Social graph of who you're friends with, whose other tiktok clients login from the same netblocks (likely to be in the same residence, etc). Who do you like/follow and who follows you
I'm having trouble imagining how these can be used in a nefarious way, or can't otherwise be acquired through other sources.
> Social graph of who you're friends with, whose other tiktok clients login from the same netblocks (likely to be in the same residence, etc). Who do you like/follow and who follows you
> How many and which one of your friends have client devices that appear from known VPN exit endpoints or IP addresses that look "suspicious" to data sets used in the back end of the domestic China great firewall. I'd be shocked if they don't collect data when a large % of somebody's friends and social media graph are apparent VPN users.
okay, and then what? so the next time you visit china they throw you in an reeducation camp? At best this information can be used for determining how much support/opposition the CCP has abroad, but you can just use opinion polls for that. It's not like americans are shy about expressing their hate for the CCP.
The app was regularly accessing the iOS clipboard (multiple times per minute), at least until iOS started telling users every time an app did that.
> But I'm unclear on just what kind of surveillance they think is going on here, or why the Chinese government would find it especially useful.
It doesn't have to be useful or make sense to be objectionable.
If the government wanted to know what color socks I'm wearing and designed a surveillance apparatus to collect that information without my consent, I would still object to it when I found out, even though that information seems utterly useless.
Let’s say you’re an individual that the Chinese government doesn’t like too much - perhaps you protest too loudly about things like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, or Tibet.
Perhaps you’re also originally from China but are now a naturalized citizen (or perhaps your spouse is).
Perhaps the Chinese would like a word with you and want you to come down to the local police station [0] for a friendly chat [1]
It sure would be nice for the government to be able to locate you easily.
Perhaps though you’re aware of the privacy issues with TikTok and you avoid it.
Problem solved - except for your kid who has it installed on her phone so now they know where you live.
So Just ban your kid from using TikTok - problem solved (hah), except they’re also monitoring social graphs so now you need to make sure none of your kids friends use it either.
It’s not difficult to see how such a system could present a problem to certain individuals.
For most people this kind of surveillance isn’t going to mean anything.
But for those certain people of interest it could be a real problem.
Maybe you’ll never cross the line between random individual vs person of interest, but do you know where the line is and how it changes and expands as all systems like this do?
inb4 “but US-based social media companies track you like this too”. Yes they do, and it will become a growing problem depending on how much you trust the government of the day.
0: https://www.newsweek.com/china-overseas-police-service-cente...
1: https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/chinese-diplomat-admits-...
The US has literally assassinated people based on exactly that siphoned data you describe.
https://www.techdirt.com/2013/10/16/latest-snowden-leak-show...
I should just wander the country starting half-assed clones of popular apps for clueless non-tech companies. I'll bet the CTO of Wal-Mart's video app division is doing pretty well for himself, a lot better than I am as a FAANG code monkey..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hong-kong-spac-agrees-acquire...
I'm not saying make snap judgements based on emotion and corporate ownership (like say by Chinese firms), I'm just asking questions? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Back in the day Snowden basically gave up his life to expose the same horrific crimes against humanity committed by the NSA. Now it’s the Chinese, an enemy to the U.S. and still no one does anything.
Even worse, pop culture glorifies the starlets produced by the app. Bottom of the barrel stupid content gets shoved in our kids faces and people just ignore all the issues at hand.
Why does nobody care anymore?
And now hiding in a county doing such crimes, that “horrific crimes by the NSA” looks like a child’s play in comparison.
Oh the irony.
Social media apps are cancer, i get it, but why this organized wish to solely focus on tiktok?
It's super fishy, considering:
"Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok" -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
And how Google uses their monopoly position to promote Instagram over Tiktok
Google search > khaby.lame
And see what pops up first ;)
Facebook does this.
Google does this.
Apple sells hardware to do this to whoever you want.
Amazon is building an Alexa Spy Dystopia.
Uber had/has multiple campaigns to individually track and divert regulator types.
Equifax, even after hacks that resulted in nearly every citizen exposed, still exists and brags about selling wage data to companies.
Our data security, data privacy, and anonymity potential is farcical here in the USA. Someone please explain why yet this tracking should matter to me... past the "iTs a ChiNesE ComPAnY" excuse. Most of my data's out of the wet paper bag.
It is the one app that I would never allow near one of my devices. Yet, whenever I mention the threat anywhere or to anybody, I get "you are too paranoid" or "but Facebook does it too". Most of the time I just get ignored / downvoted.
Am I missing something? Does the app really have enough redeeming features to warrant the risk of using it?
But if you want something to worry about as an individual, consider China's increasing global reach and whether the CCP could at any point use their massive reach to systematically make life less pleasant for you if you express views contrary to the party's.
2. They push you to engage with that content, leaving comments and sending messages.
3. They have the capability to make you watch content that they know you'll like with the express goal of getting you to react to it.
4. TikTok videos are often recorded in personal spaces, giving insight into individuals' lives and leaking personal information (partners, children, pets, etc.).
5. The app itself can collect information about you and your device, including any information it may have access to you through overly-broad permission collection.
2+3. Why should I worry that a company is serving me stuff I actually like in hopes I'll interact with it? Isn't that the social contract of digital advertising, except TT is actually delivering value to the consumer?
4+5. That's just table stakes for the industry.
"Table stakes" and "a tool for surveillance" are not at all mutually exclusive. Which is all the more reason to be concerned about Mudge's suggestions that foreign bad actors were employed at Twitter. Make no mistake: social media is a tool that can be used for malicious purposes.
Monitors are horizontal. Televisions are horizontal. People's EYES are horizontal. All of those garbage tiktok videos are vertical.
No. Under no circumstance - NO.
smartphones are vertical
Also if a video is showing a single person (standup comedy?) vertical can show them closer, as people (mostly) are vertical.
But yes, for a full movie, where you have horizontal camera movement, a vertical screen gives too little orientation for following the movement.
In painting and photography horizontal and vertical coexist for millenia. Based on the motive and purpose.
I won't use it and have no interest in it. It just seems like another noisy app filled with misinformation but also poses a real risk at a geopolitical scale. But on the other hand, I get why people just want to connect with other humans and see a skateboarding dog.
If you are, the CCP kidnaps them to take them home for putting a toe out of line.
And by you and I participating in the CCP’s surveillance apparatus, we make it easier for them to pounce on those who are trying to steer clear of the CCP, sadly, the ones who the CCP likes to kidnap and bring home to torture.
The cat is out of the box. It must be resolved through a cat exterminator at the highest levels of Gov, forcing Apple and Google to delist this stuff.
Even the best and highly educated citizenry is not immune to this; let alone the rest of USA and the west. Micro actions from individuals wouldn’t be sufficient. No harm meant to cats or any of our furry friends.
P.S: I am not saying they are sufficient.
I also get "But all the big US tech companies do it too.."
Frankly I would much rather that all my private data/whatever go to the hands of the NSA and/or CSE, GCHQ than the Ministry of State Security in Beijing.
At least I have a moderate level of confidence in my actual free speech rights, civil rights and legal rights in the US and Canadian legal systems.
Every domestic Chinese company with "cloud" based whatever is legally obligated to set up a database replication export to the MSS. With active engineering cooperation to make it work correctly.
CCP can’t do that.
Surveillance by police that have jurisdiction over you is more dangerous than those who do not.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-19/china-operations-to-f...
“But the CIA” is not “discuss[ing] it further” either. I’d be happy to discuss it properly. But reddit-like pithy stuff like this is not that.
Oh and China just assaulted and kidnapped protesters in the UK. Like, within the last couple of hours.
China just assaulted and kidnapped HK protesters in the UK.
They can they just don’t need to. They can just disappear you. There’s documented evidence of the Chinese gov torturing, defiling, political dissidents but you’re worried about parallel construction from the NSA.
As a reminder, for parallel construction to work you need to have actually done something illegal, which the NSA then backtracks to build a case against you. For the Chinese gov to throw you into an unmarked van and press you into slave labor all they need is to tell someone to do it.
These aren’t even close to the same.
You are incorrect.
However, they can absolutely use the threat of disclosure of sensitive information to blackmail or otherwise coerce someone. The threat (real or perceived) many times is worse than the reality.
I’d say they each have the capability to cause harm, but the incentives/motivations/safeguards that might drive (or inhibit) them to do so are drastically different.
This is just as much a problem in the US.
The PRC has a bit different motivations/incentives and theirs are not aligned with a perceived U.S. national security interest.
Whether you and I agree with the US national security apparatus's mission, in my opinion, it is at least more oriented towards safeguarding/promoting the US’ self-interest.
That’s not to say I agree with all of its actions, just trying to explain what I mean when I say there is difference in motivations and incentives.
First, please do not read anything that follows as me accepting TikTok in any way, shape, or fashion.
As a non-Chinese citizen, what exactly can the MSS do to you with all of that data? I would be much more concerned with the gov't that had authority over me having that data. I'm guessing a Chinese citizen doesn't care one wit about what the NSA/GCHQ/etc knows about them either.
- Use compromising info about you to provide China IP from your employer, and/or betray your country
- Use compromising info about a family member to force you to provide China IP from your employer, and/or betray your country
- Use compromising info about you to force a family member to provide China IP from their employer, and/or betray their country
- Use info about you to force your employer to fire you in case you have held anti-China views
- Use info about you, if you've held anti-China views, to prohibit companies from getting into contract with your company
- .... and the list goes on and on.
If the thought of stalking my social graph, whereabouts and interests didn't outright creep me out (regardless of who is stalking), I would be more comfortable with something Chinese than American.
I am not a person of interest to China - even if I do have anti-CCP sentiments, I have zero influence on them so it's not worth their time nor resources to enact extrajudicial punishment on me. Xi doesn't give a shit what some random schmuck in a Western country thinks about him. I'd have to be very influential for them to give a shit about me, at which point I'd have many reasons not to use social media (whether American or Chinese) anyway.
I would be more of a person of interest to my local government (which - as most Western governments - are a puppet to America) because if anything, I have at least some influence/leverage on them in the form of voting and generally being involved in the local community/industry, and they would need much less resources to punish/intimidate me if they so desire.
I get annoyed with the "but facebook does it too" argument as well. I don't really like throwing around the "foreign country disinformation campaign" accusations, but whenever tiktok comes up on this site it's hard to imagine regular people saying some of the things that are said about why it's "no less trustworthy" than american social media companies.
Even with this article, people will respond with "well, they probably weren't surveilling me because I don't have anything to hide." And then I show them the story about the cops that used social media to track a woman who went across state lines to get an abortion, and they get really mad.
In my experience (sometimes depending on how it's stated but not always) people see these kinds of comments as a commentary on _them_ specifically. It often doesn't matter what your intention is, they just feel somewhat defensive/challenged, like you're accusing them of poor judgement. So they blow the comment off or even push back to make themselves feel better about their decision.
I understand this comment could be seen as pretentious but I sincerely understand why someone would feel defensive. It's very easy to see it as commentary on their judgment and values, especially in a country like the US that is so focused on being individualistic/protecting individual rights. Most people don't want to be accused of not caring about their privacy. It makes them feel shallow and talked down to, once again, regardless of intent.
Tiktok has better content, the fyp learns what you like and so it surprises and delights. I think american social media has been overly focused on the top 1% of content producers and advertisers, so the consumer experience has languished at their expense.
TT is really a consumer-first design, and users get visibility even without followers - it actually connects people so it feels a lot less like shouting into the void. It's cool to find a good post from a stranger that nobody has liked or commented on yet - liking that feels impactful to that person. American social media pretty much only shows you stuff from who you follow or advertisers, so any interaction you have is easy to get lost in the noise.
(Also, for whatever reason, I see a lot less angry shouting on TT, whereas twitter feels increasingly like the 2 minutes of hate from 1984)
The ease of posting leads to the content being much less polished: instagram feels like my friends are doing PR to convince the people they know that they are cool/beautiful/successful sometimes - just feels fake and distant to me.
Through TT I've found a bunch of people with the same interests and sense of humor as me, and I enjoy getting little glimpses into their lives and vice versa.
I think some amount of the 'tiktok is evil' meme is propaganda rooted in sinophobia, tech company PR counterprogramming, and american quasi-journalist influencers fearing their platforms are dissolving. About 2/3 of the criticism I've read seems hypocritical (based on industry standards) and alarmist, so it makes me more skeptical of the remaining 1/3.
Facebook and google being cozy with the feds that have power over me scares me a lot more than the CCP - who can do little to impact me directly.
There is an oddly specific reason for this: just about everything that might be controversial is likely filtered away into bubbles.
People will spell gay as gae, use accent marks and spaces, all sorts of things because not doing so will kill your upload pretty much. Tiktok will remove users from being featured if they look abnormal or ugly or low quality, afaik.
Also, not sure how attractiveness correlates to tone.
But TikTok? I removed it after the first security concerns were raised years ago and have never even considered reinstalling it. It's such a obvious way for the CCP to get their hooks into the US population. Even if they don't gaf about you in particular, it can be used to monitor those around you, or assist in other spying activities like government or corporate espionage by giving detailed info on the digital devices around you. The risk to me personally is minimal, but I have no desire to help the Chinese government steal corporate secrets, locate dissidents or monitor Chinese expats living abroad - all things I'm sure are being done.
Whereas anti TikTok is a recent (and much needed) development. That app is fast tracking through every single pitfall Facebook hit, starting with making users' attention spans less than five seconds, filtering out content based on beauty, giving schoolchildren tics, and all the trust and safety issues.
I think there is less cognitive dissonance than you think. There is still some belief that the US populace has a hand in the US govt's constitution and governance. If they are unhappy, changes can be effected.
But in the case of a foreign government, an authoritarian one at that, not only are any values and priorities not aligned, there is almost no way for US persons to effect any changes to the CCCP's constitution and governance.
I think the EU has taken significant steps such as with the GDPR to protect its citizen's rights.
We should expect end-to-end encryption and strong privacy from all applications, reducing the attack surface for malicious applications like TikTok or Google.
It hasn’t been subject to US law or accountability for a long time.
The only time they realize is when it is too late.
People think Al Qaeda, ISIS etc are a huge threat, and yes they're very concerning... But you know who's even better and motivated at killing Americans? Other Americans.
This has been a known thing since long before Timothy McVeigh, a Ryder truck and Oklahoma City in the mid 1990s. It has not been adequately addressed in domestic law enforcement.
While I agree with you about those specific outlets, I also have no doubt that any powers introduced to restrict them would eventually be turned against the liberal-leaning media as well.
Doesn't mean it's incorrect, though. Doing something is tricky, for sure, but doing nothing is fatal.
Once you have the state deciding and enforcing what is and isn't true, any hope for a liberal democracy is gone.
Once you give the state the power to arrest people for spreading "verifiable lies", you now have to determine what "verifiable" means and who does the verifying. It's inevitably going to change a lot depending on the political beliefs of those in power.
It's the halting problem, "who watches the watchers?", etc. There's no way to have the state determining what's true and what's a lie, even in the most seemingly obvious cases, while maintaining freedom of speech and a free society more generally.
Apologies though if you feel I've misrepresented your position.
This is after all why programs keep getting higher latency even though chips have gotten faster for decades. If we could solve more than one problem in a way that's concurrent with each of the problems (computing "parallelly"? dunno), we wouldn't have this problem.
In conclusion, we must solve a problem that isn't the topic of this article before we address the topic of this article.
(Note: I'm hungry, so I won't be able to respond to this thread for an indeterminate amount of time...)
Edit: clarification made before I started to deal with my hunger problem (obviously)
“SPECIFIC AMERICANS”
It took a while but this will be the end of TT.
For anyone who has used TT, you can understand very quickly how this is a military grade weapon.
Yeah, China spies with TikTok, the US spies with Instagram, Facebook email providers, telephone records.
It's all shite.
Don't elect politicians who agree with espionage and then complain that other countries are doing the same.
Most countries in the Latin America have seen democratic governments being overthrown by coupes backed by the US with CIA help. The CCP doesn't do this.
Their atrocities continue. And that's only what they allow to be seen.
here's the first hit on google so you can get up to speed: https://mercatornet.com/ccp-100th-anniversary-genocide/73145...
- the downstream effects of dollar hegemony
- US imperialism
So they ban our social media sites inside of their country, yet we don't ban theirs inside of our country. Why do you think that is?
Are you suggesting that it is a wise idea for a country to cease espionage? Wouldn't that just severely disadvantage that country and only benefit protentional enemy nations? Makes me think "Everyone else is cheating on the test and it will be graded on a curve, but I refuse to cheat" at which point you fail the test. Only the test in this case has an extremely high cost if failed.