FBI chief says TikTok 'screams' of US national security concerns

> "the Chinese/Russian/Turkish way of governing has won, freedoms are no more"

Banning foreign apps != allowing only state controlled apps.

>Do you know that it has been 2 weeks since Turkey banned country's most popular social media for no other reason that they suspect anti-government activity

After seeing how the Patriot Act was passed then abused, one should be very weary of any free speech limiting precedents being set.

> I'm very concerned that the US government will set a precedent for regulating what apps citizens are allowed to use.

Totally different topic, but it was said the same about covid regulations, how we were becoming like China, how lockdowns were supposed to limit our freedom etc.

We're basically back to the same old, and our freedom is "back".

I believe that the US government for the first time is really challenged by something and they don't know how to regulate it, because it goes fundamentally against the doctrine of freedom of speech etc. "The West is now blocking apps?"

EU regulations are nice and all, but GDPR is so easy to break, and from time to time you pay the fine, all good. In the meantime, tons of data about your citizens go away. Can you ask for that data back? It's gone. That's why this is so hard to regulate. And the right to be forgotten, well, prove it...especially in the cloud, if the application servers are hosted in a cloud provider owned by or government-friendly.

As I mentioned in a previous post, scandals concerning EU/US is just pure political BS to sell newspapers. Even if there are regulations, it's "acceptable" if from time to time a company breaches that "trust". It can even be convenient up to a certain point (but I don't work in governments etc., this is just the way I see it).

EDIT: the only time they probably did something similar was against piracy/p2p/blocking emule and all that :) but we all know money moves mountains

> I hope the US takes the EU approach and regulates what data is collected and transmitted where instead of walking the totalitarian route

Even if they do, how do you enforce it? The way I see it all paths of enforcement lead to a ban. I would bet a lot of money that tiktok is already in violation of several of the patchwork of laws that protect US online privacy.

And it's not just tiktok it's the thousands of shity games/apps owned partially by tencent.

> I'm very concerned that the US government will set a precedent for regulating what apps citizens are allowed to use.

This wouldn't be nearly as big of a problem if Apple & co. didn't have full remote control over what software you are or aren't allowed to run on your device that you paid for and supposedly own.

The technocrats in Belgium are really leading from the front across industries when it comes to rational, forward-thinking, and - most importantly - both pro-competitive and consumer friendly regulations.

Agree with other comments that GDPR isn't perfect, but at least its a start! I work in Finance, and their regulation around things like Open Banking (e.g. PSD2) is great. Of course they have their bad aspects, but overall they level the commercial playing field and protect consumer freedoms. I worry the US is letting legacy industry dominate the development of our financial (and other industries') infrastructure for short term incumbent gain but long term societal and commercial detriment.

My state's legislators are upset about the content of what appears on TikTok. While they complain about "security" in public, when they are in the chambers talking with other legislators, their dialog changes to them being offended at "youth today" posting content that makes them look bad.

Our state's legislation bans all traffic to TikTok on state networks - such as watching the videos via browser. This seems to be a non-issue until you realize that libraries, public schools and state universities are affected by this legislation.

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/23rs/sb20.html

> I hope the US takes the EU approach and regulates what data is collected

The US and the EU have different goals. EU's goal is to protect their control of propaganda within their borders. Ours is to control propaganda within our borders and protect our social media companies from foreign competitors. There is a reason why the government attacks on tiktok coincides with youtube shorts, facebook reels, instagram reels, etc. EU doesn't have a social media company to champion so they don't have that extra burden of protecting market share.

> I've been living in Turkey for some years now and I promise you, it's not fun.

Tiktok isn't going to go away. Too many companies have invested in tiktok for it to be simply banned. Tiktok is most likely going to be "confiscated". Tiktok parent will most likely be forced to sell tiktok to a US based company.

No country should allow foreign social media to spread propaganda within their borders. Every country should nationalize social media within their borders. It's insane that only the US, China and Russia seem to be protecting their social media space. I just don't get it. Social media can be used to brainwash, divide and destroy any country. It's almost like most of the world's leaders are incompetent.

> "the Chinese/Russian/Turkish way of governing has won, freedoms are no more".

Ever heard of PRISM ?

No more regulations like the EU please.

Instead we should just make a deal with China: You allow all of our apps in China and we'll do the same. If not, we'll ban your apps.

The first thing people should think about in trade is fairness. Let's not pile up more ungodly regulations hamstringing everyone and the problem still wouldn't be solved. Chinese apps will continue to skirt the loopholes of any law we can enact barring complete ban.

The US government already controls all these apps and websites all the way up to Wikipedia. Just follow all the exposures coming out now by the likes of Matt Taibbi etc. in fact they jailed CEOs who didn’t comply with the illegal demands of the government like the CEO of Quest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

Look up the Church commission or Edward Snowden. Or the Hamilton files or all the exposes now of how Big Tech was doing all the censorship for the US government both in the US and even abroad to manipulate elections and do election interference everywhere (just like they censored the Hunter Biden story before the US election).

And probably the real reason that they are upset with TikTok is that the FBI etc. doesn’t have as invasive access, control and censorship of TikTok as they do with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Wikipedia and all the others.

I’m not fully aware of Chinese and Turkish cases to comment on authorities there, but in case of Russia, some USA based social networks are banned not because they’re spreading the “truth and freedom”, but because when Russia implemented pretty much word to word laws as in EU about necessity to store personal data of Russian citizens of such networks inside Russia, the answer was basically “fuck you”. More of it, those networks were caught in suppressing one point of view but amplifying another, that suited interest of USA government in Russia. USA based social networks are for many years a propaganda tool and their hunt for Tiktok and other foreign services is just a clear example of censorship and intention to dominate social media to spread USA narratives and suppress any opposing voices.

Btw, right now we have a very good example in Georgia, where their parlament tried to implement a word for word copy of the law about foreign agents they got from USA or a softened version, and both USA and EU demanded this law to be rejected. And government there just wanted to let their citizens know what mass media or public figures are funded by foreign governments and NGO’s.

Not that I have any deep subject matter knowledge but I agree, it feels like app store McCarthyism

It's the Huawei story all over again.

TikTok is a threat in many ways:

* The extent to which TikTok tailors content, normalization of over-simplified content, ease of creating content and other factors make it great for radicalization. As well as extremist groups, this applies to more regular protest movements and generally an active citizenry, which is not in the interest of the feds.

* It has encouraged regular crime and idiocy. For example it spread knowledge of the Kia/Hyundai ignition bypass, and is full of pseudomedical nonsence.

It also serves as a useful scapegoat.

I have to think it's along the lines of the Strava fitness app data used to create a heat map of the positions of US military personnel.

Only a lot, lot worse.

Their big concern is NOT data stealing. That is a small thing.

They are very worried about the US citizen population saying they are DONE with Lobbyists and congress selling out. US Citizens are done with the GDP being stolen via rigged industries (pharma, 2008 crisis, Medical, taxes, etc.) US Citizens starting to all agree together on TikTok, enables citizens to galvanize into a united front.

The US Gov needs to control US citizens, by banning them. This is why US intel services have removed 100% of US citizens in militia community groups people from Facebook. 100% have their facebook accounts have been shut down. They can't shoot people over facebook. The gov's risk is that people see many other citizens galvanize that they find congress w/lobbyists effectively stealing GDP.

Agree. I've never used the app but I'm curious about what these threat vectors are. But it's never discussed. It's just nebulously "bad."

Part of the fear may be that any compelling case made against tiktok could strongly serve the purpose of getting US social apps banned from the rest of the world for the same reasons.

The actual national security concern is probably for state-sponsored psyops.

We know Russia was able to pump a bunch of psyops campaigns into Western social media, most NATO governments now have dedicated branches that root out this kind of information.

But Russia's programs were really obtuse and relatively easy to trace. On the other hand, TikTok is all about flooding people with niche content areas. And content is consumed so much faster that it propagates quicker. And keep in mind TikTok is still state-sponsored by China despite the algorithm being so addictive that it is banned domestically.

My tinfoil hat is that US officials have reports that the Chinese state is having influence on the American news cycles, but doesn't want to admit that it's made its way already into news media and politics issues.

Considering nation-states send nuclear submarines to the bottom of the ocean to tap network cables, assuming they wont use a massive trove of tracking data (largest in human history) that just falls into their lap, is extraordinarily naive.

Read any book on the history of espionage to see the efforts made to collect intelligence. Suggesting TikTok data wont be used in an intelligence context is simply ridiculous.

It's like when they blame Russians for hacks and never give any evidence.

Same here. I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth. After all, I am of the beliefs that no tactics are "off the board." The CIA used vaccine programs as a means to track islamic terrorists. So, I wouldnt be as socked pikachu faced at China using TikTok data. But it would be nice to get real hard data. I remember people making all sorts of claims about China bugging hardware and that is why we have to ban Huaweii, but all the third party analysis I've seen of their hardware pretty much concluded, "the hardware is not bugged. The most criminal thing about this is they advertise it as a latest gen i5 but its really a i5 from 2 gens ago and probably sloppy second bunk chips. You know, chips that can't get sold to like Lenovo because they failed QC."

> Alcohol was fine until hard liquor was invented

If I catch your drift correctly you might want to read up on the history of distillation, and in particular the chronology thereof.

> Alcohol was fine until hard liquor was invented.

Alcohol is no longer fine?

> Child work was expected, until factories came along.

Doesn't that more have to do with the rising household income (thanks to productivity gains, I'd imagine) and school availability, so people could afford to let their children go to school instead of needing every hand to keep the family afloat?

I've never actually used TikTok, what makes it so much more potent than other products?

The deep state whining about TikTok is the pot calling the kettle black.

I think a lot of people would agree that Twitter and Instagram are worse for users.

Twitter is a bunch of bullying and wrath, Instagram is jealousy and avarice: extremely effective at manufacturing insecurity.

America has been colonizing the world via dominance in online industry for the past 20 years and "winning the war for data". Tiktok is a symbol of the end of this trend and american nationalists hate the idea.

I think most people with an ounce of commonsense know exactly what to do, ban it.

The problem is globalisation means the incentives for leaders is no longer in alignment with the country they govern. In a lot of cases it's far more personally lucrative to grow the Chinese economy than it is their own. And no doubt, China works very hard to ensure this is the case. And so they all hide behind the "it's complicated" argument (it's actually not).

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi...

It's enough to make you vote for a reality TV star as president...

Yeah, it's like people have forgotten that Snowden revealed a direct link between NSA and big tech via PRISM.

It's worse than that. State governments are actively using their quasi-legal (they haven't passed the judicial tests yet) powers to force social media to help prosecute their citizens...

And they're hiding behind "the chinese government is worse". Yeah, they're terrible. Prosecuting women for seeking health services is also terrible.

To be clear, the Wuhan Institute of Virology's research program involving betacoronaviruses and CRISPR gene editing technology was funded in part by the US government via a grant to Ecohealth Alliance from the NIH (at least $600,000 which is fairly significant) and the lead researcher at Wuhan developed that approach in collaboration with US scientists, so it's hardly just 'China's fault'.

If a complete ban on this kind of research (CRISPR-editing wild-type viral sequences to make them more infectious in human cell lines, or in mice expressing human genes, etc.) had been implemented and enforced by NIH and NIAID, this scenario might have been avoided. Any (financial? criminal?) reckoning over who is at fault would result in at least some significant degree of shared liability between the USA and China.

Wuhan had "pneumonia like" cases back in november. CCP is still at least responsible of keeping it quiet till it got too difficult to handle.

> Also, couldn't the CCP just purchase this same/similar data from a thousand other data brokers?

Contrary to popular belief, data-broker data is generic and not very good. Knowing that you are a 30s male who likes beer is not as useful as, say, finding out you are a high ranking military official and what remote locations you visit in the US.

> #1, isn't TikTok mostly just a bunch of teenagers dancing?

How quickly TikTok understands your preferences and feeds you content you like is scary. And it's designed to send you down niche rabbit holes. You may start watching construction videos, but within an hour you may be watching a nurse tell you pharmaceutical companies are trying to kill us but set to a fun dance.

preventing the mass exfiltration of american data seems like something that the government has absolute authority over. If Tiktok cannot prove that they are not doing that, then this is no different from the health department shutting down a restaurant.

Was it not China that set the precedent by effectively banning many Western apps?

The rest of the world, which for simplicity's sake we'll call the EU and china, have fairly powerful protections in place. EU law applies to companies operating in the EU, and China effectively bans all foreign apps. If Chinese businesses were not de facto arms of the Chinese state, and we had the diplomatic resources to investigate and prosecute chinese companies serving american citizens under american laws, then it might make sense to leaev well enough alone.

Banned in app stores and it will die.

Almost everybody has TikTok via either Apple's or Google's app stores. So it's very easy to block the distribution of the program.

Distribution in App Stores, running servers on US soil, and payment using the US dollar or involving US persons would presumably all be banned. That would be enough to effectively ban it.

I think it's plausible that the deep state feels threatened by Tiktok because it is out of reach of US misinformation campaigns: Tiktok has the power to counterprogram against falsehoods spread by US officials.

We've seen how cozy Twitter is with the state. I wonder if any US propaganda falsehoods have been corrected by Tiktok already or if this a just a threat to national orwellian potential.

Why can't you (any parent, really), as her concerned parent, implement such a ban?

Social media is more dangerous than alcohol. 21 is probably the minimum age to permit it.

Just like america's style of "NO BOOZE UNTIL 21" while building a stupidly pro-getting shitfaced culture results in new college kids who have extreme levels of binge drinking, a complete ban with sudden access at a certain age will just leave us with kids suffering from horrible and debilitating addictions to social media right as they leave the home.

Maybe educate your kids in media literacy, and engender in them an understanding of high quality media vs low quality media, or how social media should be considered like a giant bucket of ice cream: Tasty but really bad for your health.

I too wonder the same, but prohibition generally just accomplishes the opposite.

This is what makes the ostensible claim that it needs to be banned for national security reasons harder to understand or accept. This leaves us just guessing about what the real reasons are, and people will call it conspiracy theory. Possible reasons could be:

-They want to consolidate the number of outlets they need to manage

-An interagency conflict between FBI and the ones managing Tiktok

-Financial benefit for the competitors in which security state has financial stake

-Some organizational or architectural issue that makes it difficult to control ????