You make some fair points, but there is no way that I would trust a government agency to actually do code reviews and verify that a company isn't doing something wrong.
I feel increasingly unsafe because this app is being operated by a company that is beyond extradition with the USA. So if they ARE busted for doing bad stuff, who is getting jailed?
In an era where every snapdragon SoC seems rootable from any old application, and you can use machine learning to pick out key words from text streams, do we really need this app in the market?
How is this any different? The US is one of the Five Eyes countries. They routinely spy on their own people (see Snowdon et al). I see no difference between the two in this regard, other than the US has a court system that sometimes acts independently and has a Constitution that sometimes is followed.
Which is why Facebook is not allowed in China.
For example, do individuals in the US not enjoy more freedom (of speech) than individuals in China?
Isn't it worth supporting and enhancing one regime and fight against the other (at least on this dimension)?
> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
Congress creates laws. The President enforces them. This is an enforcement action--it's not unusual for Congress to be uninvolved.
> Should the president really have this power?
Multiple Congresses gave these powers to the President [1][2][3]. The current and next ones are free to take them back.
My personal belief is no, the President shouldn't have this power in the absence of clear and present danger. We need a commission, likely under Commerce and/or State, that assesses civil fines and passes prosecution recommendations to the DoJ. Furthermore, we need legislation describing (a) which countries are deemed economically friendly and economically adversarial, (b) how those determinations are made and (c) what companies from those countries can and cannot do as well as (d) how they may achieve "safe harbor" status (e.g. by locally hosting data and submitting code for periodic review).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exon–Florio_Amendment
[3] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/international/Docum...