The feds asked TikTok for lots of domestic spying features
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I support a domestic ban on TikTok, and this is embarrassing. You're not supposed to be worse than the country you say is spying on your citizens. This undermines any moral authority they could claim, and makes their argument look like: "we want to ban you because we can't stand anyone doing a better job spying on Americans than us".
This is an auditing operation to determine the extent to which TikTok is a national security threat.
If you read the article though the actual content does not suggest they were asking for anything other than the ability to ensure TikTok/Byte Dance weren’t doing anything nefarious… and anyway it fell apart when it became obvious how hopeless that was because of how shady they (Byte Dance) are.
Can you share evidence that US regulators are holding US-based social media companies to all of these same requirements?
This moves goalposts. American social media companies don’t have CCP members in their senior ranks.
The problem is the “records and servers” bit could let the Feds execute illegal searches on any American’s data with zero oversight. Not that we’re being mean to TikTok.
Who added those goalposts? Chinese social media companies don't have FBI, CIA, and NSA members in their senior ranks, either.
This is whataboutism, but I'll answer anyway.
This article concerns the actions of a US governmental agency known as CFIUS.
CFIUS is not concerned with domestic issues, but rather foreign intrusions that impair national security: foreign businesses spying on US soil, foreign entities buying controlling interests in US companies and technologies, foreign real estate purchases near sensitive locations, etc. It is a regulatory body that can block sales and mergers and put a stop to such activities.
CFIUS wants the ability to audit TikTok so that it can ascertain the extent to which is or can be used to spy on US targets. From this data, they can themselves block certain business activities or recommend further actions to be taken by the government.
The Chinese do not think that they are doing anything nefarious either.
"Nefarious" is very dependent on context. The CIA spying on China is what the CIA is _supposed_ to be doing -- it's not nefarious in the US context, but surely, to the Chinese, it's "nefarious activity" and the CIA is aware of that. Surely the Chinese know that they're up to no good from the US point of view, even if it's ethically fine from their point of view.
We aren’t at war with China, but the possibility is taken seriously by the US foreign policy establishment, which knows more about the situation that you or I do. The most reliable way to avoid war is to be impossible to beat. So preempting the ability of potential enemies to collect data about our citizens reduces the chance of war.
American GEOINT, MASINT, SIGINT and TECHINT are likely the best in the world. American HUMINT, OSINT and--somewhat paradoxically--FININT are atrocious. Unfortunately, we frequently ascribe confidence intervals to our clandestine services based on experience with e.g. the NRO.
That Osama was hiding there. Which he was, at the time. And that he had carried out 9/11. Which he did.
The Irag and Afghanistan wars were not the same. Practically everyone supported the US in Afghanistan. Practically no one followed the US into Iraq.
- your country spying on your own citizens
- your country spying on foreign citizens
- other countries ability to spy on your own citizens
Afghanistan? The Iraq War? The people we drone strike every day?
The US is trying to determine to what extent TikTok is a domestic security threat.
CFIUS is an organ of the US government designed to prevent foreign intrusion that risks national security. That's the entity involved here. They don't touch ordinary US citizens.
This is not domestic spying. It's investigating the capabilities of a foreign power on US soil.
Granting access to TikTok servers to multiple US agencies is 100% about letting the US spy on users (just as they have the right to under US law, such as the US CLOUD Act, and also via the well-documented and illegal warrantless surveillance programs we all know about). Blocking executive hires is clearly so they can prevent whistleblowers from working in the organization, and is exactly what the US did when it was using Crypto AG to spy on its allies:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
Anyway, I'm against a ban of TikTok for the same reason that laws that target specific companies or individuals are unconstitutional. Instead, we should ban the things TikTok does that we think should be illegal, and then apply the law equally to US and foreign social media companies.
"We veto all your choices. But what about this guy... Relocating from Langley, VA wouldn't be hard for him."
This is how the previous "Ban Tiktok" bill basically made VPNs illegal.
Do you have a link for this? If you're referring to bills of attainder, my understanding wasn't that they're as broad as just "targeting".
This would would destroy billions of dollars in profits, take down most of the ad-tech industry, which is why I suspect it will never happen. It's much easier to target individual companies like TikTok, or Cambridge Analytica while leaving the gravy train going.
For the record, I fully agree with you on what the remedy ought to be - just cynical about viability.
This is a misunderstanding. The constitution prohibits “bills of attainder”, which are laws that short-circuit the justice system and punish past behavior legislatively rather than via the judicial system, basically declaring “it is the law that x is guilty of crime y (and will be punished with z)”. Targeting an individual or small group is only one of the several criteria that need to be satisfied for such a law to be unconstitutional.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C3-2/...
Government spying isn't a "right," the government doesn't have rights. Just a fine point but important.
I don’t use any social media, so apologies if this is a dumb question. What is TikTok doing that other ones like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook isn’t? The only difference I am seeing is that the parent company is China. Misinformation is omnipresent across all those channels too. So on what basis should we ban them?
A canary blog series kicked off by the company itself is worth keeping an eye on to see the 'myths' they want to debunk most scrupously (such as keytracking)[8].
[1]: https://www.nullpt.rs/reverse-engineering-tiktok-vm-1
[2]: https://krausefx.com/blog/announcing-inappbrowsercom-see-wha...
[3]: https://app.urlgeni.us/blog/new-research-across-200-ios-apps...
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-alg...
[5]: https://www.afr.com/technology/tiktok-admits-collecting-loca...
[6]: https://au.reset.tech/uploads/resettechaustralia_policymemo_...
[7]: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/25/971460327/tiktok-to-pay-92-mi...
[8]: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/tiktok-truths-a-new-series...
B: TikTok has different algorithms for different countries, the algorithm in China is tuned to show young people science, technology, and inspirational content, which was dictated by the CCP. The US algorithm shows young people anything that will keep them "engaged", which usually includes ragebait and all kinds of unhealthy things.
You're totally right and that is a huge problem as well. But I would say a slightly different one.
If you computed the results of this problem, the next question I ask is whom are you at more risk from?
> Two Arrested for Operating Illegal Overseas Police Station of the Chinese Government
Edit: example stats for 2016 sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
In 2016, there were an estimated 1.2 million violent crimes committed in the United States.[88] Over the course of that year, U.S. law enforcement agencies made approximately 10.7 million arrests, excluding arrests for traffic violations.[88] In that year, approximately 2.3 million people were incarcerated in jail or prison.[89]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
The article is from 2015, but nothing's been done to reverse the trend. I wonder what they've gotten the ratio up to in the last eight years.
That's redundant and repetitive.
For reference:
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/overseas-chinese-1021...
https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china...
https://www.thecollegefix.com/ccp-targeted-chinese-students-...
Moreover any such Chinese agents if caught will go through some rather unpleasant processes, does not seem usually the case for American cops even brazenly caught in various misdeeds.
I’m not talking about while I’m in America. I travel outside of the country.
If the CCP can make billionaires disappear, they can make you disappear too.
This level of narrative and dogmatic belief is how governments gain influence. They're simply the local bullies. If you need proof, look at how much they put into caring about struggling people. I.e. next to nothing. Our country betrays us daily and has the gall to demand obedience. We are not dogs.
No. It's not a measurement problem or a propaganda issue. It's just the truth. USG just literally doesn't 'disappear' US residents in modern times. It happens with nontrivial frequency in China.
When you point your finger at someone, you have 4 pointing back at yourself.
This is the problem with the original comment, it’s way to vague, or I’ve failed to make sense of it.
I support the ban from a competitive perspective. Until meta can spy on Chinese citizens, why should the Chinese spy on Americans?
Also I support it from a privacy perspective. We can’t as easily ban American companies from spying on us, but we should use any power to limit other companies from starting business spying on Americans. Make it less profitable globally.
*https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/china-...
Foreign attacking agents can do much worse than garnish your wages. They can get a no-knock raid sent to your home if they have your info and you're a target of theirs. That's relatively easy. They can drive the US system to attack you by screwing with your life from outside the US where you can't do anything to stop them. And that can be done in so many ways it's rather obscene. Let's talk about the IRS economic ways they could do it; let's talk about the child protective services way they could do it; let's talk about the no-knock SWAT raid way they could do it; let's talk about the way they could go after your identity and bank accounts; let's talk about how they could focus in on your job, boss, co-workers, etc. and try to make your life hell there; and on and on and on it goes.
Yeah right. I dare anybody on HN to proclaim that, I want to see the supporting premise where the foreign party like Russia having all your info is not as big of a deal.
The notion that the FBI would do worse things from that position than Russia would is absurd, given what we've seen out of Russia. And China is absolutely no different in terms of its willingness to attack the US opportunistically (the Obama Admin had to obtain a cease fire agreement with China in regards to aggressively attacking the US re hacking, recall).
There are no chains at all on what Russia can do to screw with the US citizenry, given the information. And more advanced AI systems should make it even easier for them to do it in the near future.
If Russia could push a button and blank out 30 million US bank accounts, via a hacking plausible deniability means (anything that gives them the required minimum cover), they'd do it immediately. There's so little downside from where Russia is sitting these days, it'd be a no-brainer for them. What are you gonna do? Sanction them? We're sure as hell not going to war with Russia over that.
Imagine if the US wasn’t a police state, and the average person had good social/financial protections. We’d make China and Russia powerless according to your logic.
This is a foreign government we have a decent chance of being in a great power military conflict with, the first of such since the Second World War. It is so obviously a tool that would be used in such a conflict that I have a hard time accepting this is a good faith question you’re asking. If it is, then you need to stop thinking of it as a social media platform and remember that’s just the front end of the network.
1. Build platform teens love 2. ??? 3. Compromise national security.
Fundamentally, the product isn't an effective way to get into secure spaces. Its core audience does not generally have direct access to those spaces, and if they did, that feels like an institutional security breakdown that they allowed any personal devices or software there.
At this point, War Thunder and Discord have both proven to deliver more high-secrecy documents than TikTok has, yet nobody's demanding widespread bans.
"Ooh, but it will spread propaganda or filter things in a way Beijing likes." And if that happens, the audience moves on. Haven't we noticed that social platforms are hyper-fickle, especially for ones targeted towards a youth and entertainment market? How many "look at China's awesome high-speed rail" videos can you slip into the feed before the kids say "screw this, I'm moving to this new platform which pioneered the Drink An Entire Litre of Bleach challenge"? They actually built a very non-sticky platform compared to Facebook (which will persist for decades because people need to talk to Aunt Bertha who never learned any other platform) or YouTube (which has long-form content of value even if the firehose of new content starts winding down)
It all just reeks of sour grapes. We were perfectly happy with China when they were a passive trading partner, a convenient "elsewhere" to offshore all that pesky polluting manufacturing to. But when they start to represent a real economic and political counterweight, producing a high-margin and culturally relevant product that's outcompeting our own offerings, we immediately start rattling sabres. I figure it's the same spiel as with Huawei and ZTE; if domestic products had been compelling enough to win on their own merits, there would be no meaningful market penetration and we'd never even be discussing a ban in the first place.
I wonder if the Vine people feel vindicated now, it feels like they could have been TikTok 10 years ago.
For what it's worth, this idea that propaganda is noticeable is itself propaganda.
Even a "pure entertainment" product that doesn't need to do any particular ideological heavy lifting has a hard time. If you're taping an episode of a sitcom today, the language you use might have passed to "cringy" by the time it airs, and the trend you used as a plot device might have fizzled.
Social media's ability to stay relevant is managed by constantly eating its own-- people fall in and out of trend. That makes it harder to use as a means to inject a specific message; you'd need to be constantly generating new users and getting them into closed circle communities as the old ones wear out their usefulness. Note I don't say impossible, but it's an interesting set of challenges and probably pretty different from the ones the guys running Radio Havana face.
Not defending TikTok but there’s a wealth of public real time data from not just the US, but the entire world, some public api calls or scraping scripts away. Tiktok isn’t any more invasive than any other social media post, many of which are public and anyone in any country who wants to use the data can do so easily.
What trove of intelligence is being gathered by self obsessed videos of people mouthing a clip of some song or inspirational talk while begging for attention in the form of likes and follows?
I haven’t seen any sign of intelligence on TikTok that they even could gather lol, and if anything the app’s purpose isn’t to spy on us, it’s to make us dumb, inattentive, mindless consumers who all fight over everything and can’t compromise or work together.
My dad literally comes home from his job and scrolls TikToks of increasingly radical political rants and half naked chicks before inevitably passing out in his chair, phone in hand, mouth open, and whatever TikTok was on screen when he fell asleep playing on loop until he jerks awake or the phone dies. He’s not unique. So much of people’s lives are wasted on social media and it does them no positive
1. For now 2. ...unless you have family abroad, particularly in China 3. ...also assuming you don't need to travel to said country (now / in the future)
one example:
arbitrary seizure of private property? turns out that isn't just the domain of pretend communists, its a tenet of our society too
There was an elite outcry.
That's just the kind of overheated hyperbole derailing so many of our civic discussions nowadays.
FBI and CIA have far more effective tools at their disposal. They'd nearly always decline to use the journeyman tools China has in its cyber arsenal.
> There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.
I don't think that's wrong? Although it is certainly in bad taste for a prime minister.
"Rome demands victory from her Generals" .. and those who tried and failed, were publicly killed. As they still do in China actually.
we can do better than this
Leave room for nuance and discussion.
It's wrong, too - the Chinese economy is in trouble, and has been since Covid. Xi has accumulated more autocratic power, but if he's able to use it to "turn their economy around on a dime" then he's not doing so.
I'm a major fan/paying contributor to the EFF, but that seems absurd to me. We don't have to equate the US with China in order to say the US is doing terrible things and needs to stop. In fact doing so just distracts from the issue by changing it into an argument about something else.
And yes, the US and China are not the same. But they both have the same capabilities. Parent poster argued that the Chinese government had a greater capacity to spy on their citizens("better tools"). I simply pointed out that it's false.
China also has a lot more surveillance and filtering controls, especially with traffic leaving/entering the great firewall. They have the social credit system and things as well, which the US could have with credit card and banking information, but (at least for now) the US has to get a warrant whereas the Chinese just gobble all of it up. That's probably moot though since the banks will store that info forever so a warrant can be gotten later. Anyway we could debate whether those are "tools" or not. But overall I'd bet we agree on the vast majority of things. Even if I think you're being a bit hyperbolic, it always makes me happy to see other people passionate about this topic, so thank you!
If it was about preserving privacy or any moral argument, they would also ban domestic social media. They have no reason to do this since they already have access to domestic data.
A second reason might be to mitigate foreign influence and propaganda, but this is also rampant on domestic social media, and they apparently have no desire to prevent this either. This seems ludicrous to me, as these tools are the primary weapons of information warfare.
The PATRIOT act does this by just existing and continually being extended. Room 641a. Julian Assange's case. Mortal authority left the building in the early 2000s.
"Letting it expire" is not some accomplishment other than kicking the can further down the road.
The state ran media calling actually peaceful american flag waving re-opening protestors terrorists and murderers for spreading COVID, then literally a matter of days later called the costliest riots in U.S history mostly peaceful protests that were incapable of spreading COVID. This was probably the sign that it was all over and we had entered the biological terrorism era.
It is better to think that the gov is incompetent than outright malicious (which is definitely the case). Gor some reason they NEVER drop the ball into giving more freedoms but they ALWAYS drop the ball on taking some away.
I didn't believe for a second that the MS Exchange vulnerability was not known & abused since forever. Now the Chinese have created what Zynga, Facebook, Pinterest, and the rest of the silicon valley failed to succeed. Get everyone meth-ed on an app. 150m Americans is nearly half the population. If you leave out the under 4 and the over 70, that's the majority of active population, having a homing beacon in their pocket reporting to China.
This puts Room 641A to shame..
A hard no from me. But it doesn't seem to make a difference what I say.
> * Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,
Such as if it includes arbitrary access to user data, or opportunity to modify the systems rather than only examine.
Forbes included this interesting other bit, separate from its bulletpoint list, and I didn't see Gizmodo mention it:
> It would also force TikTok U.S. to exclude ByteDance leaders from certain security-related decision making, and instead rely on an executive security committee that would operate in secrecy from ByteDance.
BTW, why is Forbes calling this a "free speech platform"? Is that now accepted terminology, or is there some spin they're promoting?
> Were it to be finalized, the agreement would provide the government near unfettered access to internal TikTok information and unprecedented control over essential functions that it does not have over any other major free speech platform.
Is the explanation really as simple as:
> Forbes (/fɔːrbz/) is an American business magazine founded in 1917 and owned by the Hong Kong-based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014.[3][4]
I'm inclined to think that the best defense against hypothetical threats from an app like this is a smart, critical-thinking, principled citizenry. But since Rupert Murdoch, and the culture that followed, have decimated that capability, maybe we need more help from government.
What the US establishment actually doesn't like is that TikTok wields a capability to influence the American public by amplifying certain topics and deranking others, also with their content policy. It's a capability that the US companies enjoy all across the world with few authoritarian exceptions, and even the EU doesn't get to review Facebook or Google's algorithms (there is an effort to force them to explain their algos (Digital Services Act), but as far as I know it's not even close to the intrusive search-like audits and vetos mentioned in this article), and smaller less influential countries/political entities can't even dream of forcing the FAANG to comply with their demands. So it's tremendously hypocritical for the US to rile up paranoia about "personal data" and "national security" especially considering the Snowden revelations. (Draconian)rules are for thee but not for me. Also the US companies' algorithms are probably protected by the first amendment, so I'm not even sure that this crack down on TikTok is even legal.
It's the same threat that Hollywood and Jazz music had to the USSR and the same threat that Facebook and Reddit has to the CCP.
Ain't it funny how for themselves, the CCP wants tiktok users to see inspirational content and science and happy stuff, while the west gets whatever addicting smut we can manage to produce. The CCP also says kids in China shouldn't see gay stuff, and a certain 1980s chinese social movement.
TikTok is literally the CCP attempting to influence americans. It's not okay when facebook does it, and should 100% be illegal, but american politicians DGAF about that, but it sure as hell shouldn't be okay for the CCP to do that either. Just because the american government is unwilling to reign in local corporations doesn't mean they should also abstain from doing their job with foreign threats.
If TikTok was a US based company I bet the content would be about the same. It's in the very American capitalism-influenced cultural tradition to have business practices that skirt the edge of the legal/acceptable to maximize profits, and patronizing speech regulations (recommending science instead of "addicting smut") are as un-American as it gets.
With lots and lots of gay/queer/trans content and cooking/baking on my FYP it seems to be doing an awfully good job at making me want to spend time away from the computer and back in the kitchen making delicious food and putting on makeup.
If it's trans people talking about their transition, it seems to be an interest category that would only be offered by TikTok if you're actively interesting in it and engaging with that type of content.
If you mean "generic content made by people who just happen to be trans", that's pretty normal. In the real world you also can't go around asking a street performer to get out of your face because they happen to be trans.
The same with content creators making funny videos and showing a rainbow flag. Why would that be filtered out?
I know I am getting exactly what I am interested in/engaging in... I was simply pointing out that the OP's choice of words stating that TikTok is trying to manipulate users with their FYP seems off-base.
I don't want them to get out of my face. I am not complaining about the content and the selection, I am ecstatic, but its a far cry from media that is meant to make me angry.
The Netherlands used to be very gay-friendly but there is a large movement which is trying to reverse that (I think spurred on by Trump as American politics still has a lot of influence on the Netherlands). Which bothers me a lot and I rail against it.
And I understand your point, I don't think TikTok are doing so either.
But what kind of content do you get about china? What about Taiwan, or hong kong? What kind of content do you get about the US as a country? How do you know that the CCP isn't influencing you through subtle recommendation changes?
How can anyone say that's not true today? I thought we all had the same wake-up call that metadata is as important as the data itself a few years ago already.
Quantity being a quality all of its own, who can even say what it's possible to infer if you had the ability to data mine Tiktok? I mean, supposedly it was possible at one point to tell when shit's doing down in DC just because there was a spike in late night pizza delivery.
It's basically a global training program to teach youth to constantly be making and posting videos online in inappropriate places.
Whatever obnoxious crap is on Youtube nowdays, the content's notably different and unlikely to be timely. And that's if it even leaks the same sort of metadata.
Strava managed to do most of this entirely by accident.
The big problem is that once you accept you want to control location data why can you justify the ongoing use of it by existing systems? (Google and FB, mainly, though far from exclusively). I once audited an SDK from a YC startup many moons ago that went as far as collecting the altitude and bearing of the user when viewing an advertisement - this stuff is incredibly widespread.
My personal view is a law is needed that bans central collection of location data. (Even anonymised would not be sufficient). It's fair game for a user (and their apps) to have access to encrypted logs of the location of their devices, but that should not be remotely accessible by anyone.
The issue is indeed legitimate, but it would be a systematic issue with all non-western/non-US apps, not just TikTok which is being singled out in an ad hoc manner. And it has as much to do with Google's store/android location data policies as it is with the apps.
>My personal view is a law is needed that bans central collection of location data.
Agreed.
...
UPD: I also suspect that preserving location data from state actors is a lost battle and modern SIGINT satellite constellations are already capable of pinpointing location of phones en masse, or will be capable of doing it in the coming years.
During the presentation, A6 tracked the movements of the Russian army along the Ukrainian border, Chinese submarine positions, and even the American intelligence community. This was a bold idea: To demonstrate just how powerful its phone tracking capabilities are, A6 showed Zignal that they could spy on American spies.
On a satellite map of the U.S., A6 sales rep Brendon Clark drew digital boundaries around CIA and NSA headquarters. This is a technique known as geofencing. Within these boundaries, 183 dots appeared, representing GPS pings from phones that had visited both locations.
Lines radiated from each dot, showing where the phones had traveled. As Clark noted: “So, if I’m a foreign intel officer, that’s 183 start points for me now.”
Zeroing in on one dot, A6 showed how its software could reveal this individual’s movements as they traveled throughout the U.S. using the location data pulled from apps on their phone. In their demo, the person they were tracking traveled to a U.S. army base in Fort Bliss, Texas, an airfield in Jordan, and their likely home in suburban Maryland, close to NSA headquarters. The demo concluded with a Google Street View of the person’s house."
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/04/surveillance-anomaly-six...
Ding Ding Ding. Agree the issue is the ability to control the national narrative. Too many US users on TikTok means that US powers may not be able to control all the topics and discourse like they want .
And there’s nothing hypocritical about both using and blocking an exploit, although I disagree with the reductive view that US companies are as aligned with US policy as Chinese companies are with China’s policy.
If by exploit you meant the general capabilities granted such app's popularity, then in my opinion it is at least somewhat hypocritical for a nation who's motto partly is basically(or was, I'm not sure as of right now) "free trade and free speech"
>and I can immediately see how this could be used to identify and recruit potential assets or improve psyops.
So should all cross border internet companies be banned by all the countries since cross border activity inevitably "exfiltrates" some data on the populace across the border, which could be used adversarially?
As a member of this community, you should already know that mobile apps generate certain types of data that distinguish them from “all cross border internet companies,” and whether or not you’re willing to acknowledge the unique geopolitical context of this particular app, neither of the above can be ignored in any productive, nuanced discussion about TikTok.
ACLU and EFF consider the Montana ban unconstitutional. So it's about free speech, at least partly.
>This is a software product.
Code == speech argument has been used many times. No settled case law so far as far as I know.
>mobile apps generate certain types of data that distinguish them from
Then make a law that regulates the exchange of this kind of data for all foreign companies. Instead we have the CFIUS commission being used to arbitrarily regulate a particular foreign company, which theoretically doesn't even need to have US presence to function, and it looks very close to the Chinese-style protectionism.
>unique geopolitical context of this particular app
The unique geopolitical situation is that US companies influence (and siphon data) the entire world(the degree of US government's influence on that influence is beside the point, and is a very complex issue), but the US refuses to be influenced(and have data siphoned) by a potential adversary even at the "app where teens dance" level.
China does limit what US companies can do there in far more draconian ways than the US does for any country, and the EU absolutely does have the power to force FAANG companies to comply with their data protection laws.
Like, do you not want countries to have spies or try to defend themselves from foreign spies? I don't really get the complaint here.
But the narrative is "we are not like them", "we are about freedom, free trade, respecting private property and rights". But the moment "national security" gets even tangentially involved a lot of of this goes out of the window I guess.
>the EU absolutely does have the power
As I said their regulation of US companies is not as extensive, and if judged by how ineffectual the cookie law is in the presence of omnipresent browser fingerprinting and actual GDPR practices by the US companies that I know of the compliance is perfunctory at best.
>Like, do you not want countries to have spies or try to defend themselves from foreign spies?
The position where a cross border internet company automatically a spy questions the legitimacy of internet as a communication medium. From that point of view the Chinese have been doing the right thing isolating their citizens from the foreign internet.
You also can't vote Xi out of office, can you? You can however vote the politicians that are responsible for domestic spying out of office, or try to press them into being transparent and implementing proper legislation through various means.
Don't pretend the two are equal. The only thing equal between them is that you don't like either.
You can't get rid of them through voting, the next president will just install another stooge and the cycle will continue.
The FBI spied on Trump's campaign, he "cleaned house", Christopher Wray is just as bad as James Comey. It can't be fixed. Merrick Garland is just as bad as Bill Barr. It needs to be abolished.
Also remember that Barr was first working for Central Intelligence and then became the US Attorney General. If that wasn't so sick I could at least laugh.
The government asking someone else outside of the jurisdiction of the Fourth Amendment to violate American citizens rights on their behalf is still a violation even if the government technically doesn't directly do it.
> Block changes to the app’s U.S. terms of service, moderation policies and privacy policy,
> Veto the hiring of any executive involved in leading TikTok’s U.S. Data Security org,
> Order TikTok and ByteDance to pay for and subject themselves to various audits, assessments and other reports on the security of TikTok’s U.S. functions, and,
> In some circumstances, require ByteDance to temporarily stop TikTok from functioning in the United States.
Knowing that TikTok keeps lying about CCP ties and data security this seems like a way to keep them honest? This doesn't list any domestic spying features.
I'm not buying the alarmist angle here.
Nothing sidesteps the legal need. But I’m seeing no evidence that these agreements contemplate any oversight. If the agent doing the examining decides to simultaneously look up an American’s TikTok account, nothing would stop them. (I agree the tone of this discussion is alarmist.)
And this is a concern because? They already have everything tiktok could give them. They shouldn't, but they do.
So my take is that “agreement would let agencies examine TikTok’s US facilities, records, and servers” is specifically to enable the audits also mentioned in TFA.
There is a legitimate concern about ByteDance honestly responding to said orders. Wanting to double check first hand isn't a ridiculous ask. What seems an overstep is wanting to do so with zero oversight.
Huh? Congress can do its oversight duty anytime it wants to.
This is a terrible mode of executive oversight, particularly when it comes to something like warrantless search. Congressional oversight pertains to entire frameworks, not particulars of specific searches.
Edit to add: “and veto the hiring of any executive involved with leading TikTok US data security organization” - this is dangerously close to saying the quiet bit out loud.
But if no one has heard of it, then no one would be using it. Why would you ban something that no one is using...
I wish this was merely a facetious response as opposed to the literal version of what the rule actually is.
We’d be fine if Bytedance were European, Australian, Japanese or even Indian. This is a problem with Russia and China, belligerent autocracies with whom our chances of near-term military confrontation is elevated.
Being indistinguishable from state owned / CCP controlled at a time of fraying diplomatic relationships and heightening military tensions with China.
Actually, all that does is allow the US gov the same level of control of tiktok that the CCP does.
Either China allows FB, Google, Instagram, X, etc to operate there.
Or we ban TikTok here.
Countries already have unfair competition protections, this would fall under that.
The FDA can inspect food plants, and if in the public interest, shut them down temporarily.
Let me ask this, without this power how do you propose the government hold TikTok accountable for anything?
YMMV.
The emperor has no clothes until the US has an equivalent to the GDPR that legally enforces privacy practices for all companies, and all NSA surveillance is abolished. I'm all for preventing mass surveillance, actually doing it. But this is just a farce, and a culture war facet at that. It's just a vocal minority that's mad about people consuming media other than the conservative crack pipe.
You're just rewiring your brain in a way that it'll want easily obtained dopamine with zero work. This leads to a rebound effect where you'll become bored quickly and depressed without it (similar to a recovering addict)
It's not really "what you make of it".
The format doesn't dictate the content nor what one can get from it.