I could be wrong but I thought Ali had an extremely guilty reaction. As if he was waiting for the reporter to accuse him of being an NSA asset. Which he very well may be.
Let's keep personal attacks down and talk about the issue at hand rather than go for character assassination.
I actually thought the same. I kept thinking the whole point of the clip would be that they would see their own names and how they had been recruited. I, too, thought 'tasked' meant bribed/coerced.
... that's not character assassination, that's just like my opinion, man.
In intelligence communities of different countries they use jargon to mean specific things (just like lawyer like to use Latin words). Except in this case it is usually English words that have specified (overloaded) meaning that might or might not retain a relation to the colloquial meaning.
But if we accept the translation and explanation from the video. Then "tasking" meaning to target specifically (focus on on detail so to speak). That is what I got from it.
Although you'd probably start by developing a list of targets, then learning (open source, government records, etc.) as much as possible, then maybe task someone with observing or recruiting.
And using TAO?
This isn't crazy movie stuff, this is exactly how people are recruited.
Because our government may not have that same level of access/power over whatever the Chinese version of Android is.