In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected?
I’m much more concerned by the laziness of most western governments in understanding if this was a threat or not.
Having information available for easy perusal via a commercial channel (which is potentially not even illegal) is very different from having information accessible via use of national-asset intelligence capabilities. Information which can only be obtained the second way is almost certainly going to receive different treatment than the first.
There is value in making information more difficult (and more illegal, and less socially and politically acceptable) to access, even if that control is not 100% effective or if there are still ways of getting around it.
Increasing the friction involved in accessing personal information is an imperfect win, but a win nonetheless.
For most users of commercial software, your system is penetrable and should be considered insecure against a nation-state level attacker willing to spend a 0-day on getting in. But that doesn't mean you should just leave everything hanging out in the open where any doofus can get to it, or voluntarily hand your information over to an unfriendly government's partner corporation. At least make them work for it.
In what meaningful way does one part of the Chinese government differ from another part of the Chinese government? Isn't Xi basically the supreme leader for life now?
Every sufficiently large organization, such as a government, has delegated areas of responsibility to various sub organizations. Those scopes will have varying overlap with other sub organizations, where it will result in political battles. It is more like competing microservices than monolith.
Li Qiang is head of government as premier and is chief executive of the Chinese government.
If you ask a Chinese citizen what their biggest problem is, many of them would say too much federalism. Individual provinces have more individual authority than even US States and most controversial policies (1 child, social credit, lockdowns) you hear about are provincial and not federal policies.
Presumably that’s because protesting against the central government endangers not just your own livelihood but also the livelihoods of your relatives. Much safer to criticise the region next door.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/08/world/asia/chinese-petiti...
I for one appreciate the self-awareness
Uhm: the king of England (which incidentally happens to be king of quite a number of other territories that have yet to fully emancipate themselves from monarchy) is NOT the head of government in any of the the territories he is king of, but merely the head of state… which in constitutional monarchies is a rather formal show pomp role with very little political power. Conversely, the head of government in the UK with actual executive power is the Prime Minister, not the king.
That's also what Xi would say.
Oh it is completely expected.
People have been warning about TikTok for years, and yet those people get called crazy.
The US should have taken action against them years ago.
We can still fix the issue now though, by creating a targeted law against them.
That's not a great idea, since it will invite a lawsuit on the (potentially valid) grounds that it's a de facto bill of attainder. Which the US has traditionally taken a dim view on for very good reasons.
Better would be if it prompted a more general law about foreign ownership of corporations which have access to large amounts of information on US persons, regardless of how it is obtained or who they are.
As a US citizen, I don't want any government that I don't have input into -- even the relatively indirect and less-than-satisfying input of casting one vote among millions -- compiling a dossier on me, and I expect my government to do what it can to make that at least somewhat difficult. (And yes, I am aware there is no way to stop it completely. If the Chinese government wants to task its intelligence service to compile a dossier on me, there's nothing much that can be done about it. But let's at least try to raise the bar on the difficulty and effort involved. The more difficult and expensive, the more illegal, and the more internationally frowned-upon the task becomes, the harder it is to do at scale to millions or billions of people at once.)
Sure make it targeted against large scale companies owned by china, or "owned by countries on this specific government list, which happens to only include china and a few of our other enemies, like Russia".
Same thing, and we are more than able to get away with it, even though it is basically just targeted at TikTok.
Just block all apps from countries that already block all yours.
I think USA recognized the threat very early on. It's been a hot-button topic for several years. Remember when the Trump administration tried to force a sale of ByteDance's USA operations to Microsoft? And even now the apps and services are blocked on US government devices and networks. And even at a lot of public universities. The concern is there. I don't think it's laziness.
Is Larry Ellison a Chinese spy? He would probably have to either be complicit or criminally negligent to allow this to happen given he was given the contract precisely for this reason.
I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.
And US insistence that "dumb" 5g aerials already vetted by national security agencies had to be banned (along with kit that was absolutely a legitimate risk) because they could potentially possibly harbor listening devices maybe.
And is it really that hard to imagine a world where a hostile and ambitious nation would seek to leverage a technology platform to listen to sensitive conversations? The US has done it in the past and you better believe China will be doing it too.
So when the US government made a song and dance 18 months ago about why it was absolutely critical that it be done to protect against exactly this threat you think they were lying or staggeringly incompetent?
And this time they're totally not?
What do you mean "this time"? I just see a personal lawsuit?
But if the government did say the chinese government still has access, I don't think there would be much reason to disbelieve them. If the government claims there is a problem, and then a (possibly halfassed) attempt to fix it happens, and then the government claims the problem still exists... there is some credibility lost on the "fixing" front but the "problem exists" front is likely still credible. Especially if the different parts of that saga are coming from different parts of the government.
Erecting an industrial complex dedicated to a poorly-defined and probably impossible anti-China mission on a Chinese-controlled platform, run by entities that salivate at Chinese $$$, doesn't seem like the best idea.
ByteDance has claimed that their US operations were administratively firewalled from their Chinese ones, and then it's been repeatedly shown not to be the case. At this point they have lost all credibility about their ability to 'firewall' or internally control access to user data, probably because they (or certain parts of the company) don't really want to.
Bloomberg, not WSJ.
The allegations are from 2017-18 when the guy was fired. The migration of user data was last year, but it is not like they are disconnected from China
I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.
It was a 2018 Bloomberg story. Bloomberg still refuses to admit they were wrong, and doubled down in 2021. That no "tiny chips" have turned up yet should be near definitive proof that story was bogus.
Unless there is hard proof of anything I always assume news like these is the usual suspects warmongering.
The TikTok angle is like stuxnet for that type of corporate/gov espionage....
Its ludicris how poorly the USG has handled this.
But then again, you have so many people in congress with dual citizenship (which should be illegal and a capital crime IMO)
but then look at the spouses of lawmakers, their investments, their citizenship, their network ranking over the time their spouce was in congress, and their kids...
FFS we are still arguing over Biden's ties to money laundering in Ukraine and China, but we dont talk about the GOAT of grifters ; Mitch McConnell?
the CCP has more backdoors into the USG than they do with just TikTok ... and lets not even talk about Israel's backdoors which are actually a front-door-fire-hose.
About the most forward-thinking the US gets is writing the occasional contingency plan. Everything else is done in haste once a serious problem becomes plainly obvious to everyone, and people (deep-pocketed ones especially) start screaming to their elected representatives to fucking do something about it. Then and only then do the gears start to turn.