Going by “national security” reasons most countries should ban Facebook and google, not to mention amazon, Microsoft, oracle, Cisco etc. since the us government has already shown willingness and ability to spy on anything they can get their hands on, including foreign heads of state. Allowing US controlled social media and other tech companies is a huge risk.
Of course power doesn’t balance that way so they don’t.
What I find bizarre about the Tiktok ban is that they are being banned essentially on executive whim: as far as I can tell, there are no concrete allegations, much less evidence, that they're violating any US laws.
But it's not OK for the US to keep out spyware. Heck, retaliation for China's banning of Google etc would be sufficient justification for banning TikTok on its own.
The issue isn’t a tit-for-tat they block, we block issue, with the US and China acting like playground children.
The issue is whether or not the rule-of-law still means anything in the US. Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law.
If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so. Don’t let your executive do an end run around your democratic process.
The courts are doing exactly that, determining whether the executive has the authority to implement this. This is in fact the rule-of-law in action.
This is also the reason why the rule-of-law is lacking in China, the courts rarely if ever finds against the government in constitutional matters like these. Their system was designed for the CCP to retain power.
That's not how the rule-of-law works. The bill of attainder doesn't allow the US gov't to punish an entity (or a group of) arbitrarily by legislating.
The legislative and executive branches have already been briefed on privacy and/or security threat Tiktok poses to US. The US senate already passed a bill to ban federal employees from using Tiktok on gov't issued devices, which is exactly what the legislative is supposed to be doing without overreaching and impinging on Americans' civil liberty, and Trump in turn issued executive orders to deter national security/privacy threats from foreign entities. The judicial branch likewise appropriately exercised their power by delaying Trump's EO and challenging his authority.
That's precisely how the rule-of-law is supposed to work in the US -- there is nothing novel or arbitrary here.
That's independent of the rule of law being preferable to the alternative.
The rule of law itself doesn't put much of a constraint on what the government can do, it just requires proper form.
If US wants to retaliate China by becoming more China, well, surely China isn’t the only one getting hurt.
It's like butting your head against the wall to teach the other fellow not to but his own head against the wall.
Plus it goes against the US's low restrictions and limitations on doing business.
What you are saying is that unless PRC becomes like the US, the US has to become like PRC. I'm amazed how this is not clear to anyone following this. The only way to go forward and not become what you are pointing fingers at is taking the high road. The US is clearly not doing so.
Be noted that China is not a country under rule of law.
When Google was blocked, there was no primary legislation stipulating that online content shall be censored in whatsoever way. There were vague administrative rules (secondary legislation) with questionable applicability. Today, there is only one piece of primary legislation with a section on online censorship in China, but this section targets ISPs only, not content providers.
EDIT2: corrections
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
The US Senate unanimously approved a bill banning federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices last month. So there is some consensus among lawmakers that some sort of privacy and/or security threat exists -- it's hardly on "executive whim."
I suspect the answer is that Tiktok is just doing the same as Facebook etc, and that's unacceptable only because the mined data might go to China.
As an example, they could make it illegal for all video hosting companies operating in the US to censor videos on Taiwan, Tienanmen and Tibet.
Which would probably run afoul of the first amendment. Freedom of speech requires freedom to refrain from speech.
But even if that would fail, I am sure that a team full of lawyer could find something which would be incompatible with Chinese law.
* In a sense that Google didn't want to follow Chinese laws anymore.
FWIW, Google already has a substantial presence in China, but they don't target consumers there.
I work at a French software company in Shanghai (outside any pilot zone fwiw) and we don't have or need a local partner. Our software is on-prem so data storage is not an issue.
Yes.
As a European, I believe in Europe (and in the rest of the world) we should definitively ban most US tech be it for ethical reasons or national security. Same for China.
EU Politicians don't seem to understand the situation yet, but given the current technological cold war happening, I hope we'll wake up soon and switch either to open tech or at least to our own local tech.
China's tech could also be used, but I am not a Trump supporter. I would be more afraid of Trump facist controlled NSA backdoors monitoring me than CCP seeing my dance moves
Yes.
A single laptop has likely hundreds of processing units, running unknown software, often with direct access to the memory buss. Building a secure devices however where every bit of code and every bit of hardware is designed domestically (and preferable in house) is so prohibitively expensive that no one do that. The hope is that if there is a security fault then someone else will find it and report it, and so a reputation system is the only economical viable method for hardware security in most consumer devices.
Edit: Quite a lot of high end cpu are now done in Taiwan TSMC, they caught up to US capabilities. But most of intels cpu's are still made in US.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
By the way, they never provided any proof and even better, claimed that their laptop broke when pressed.
Edit: this too? Mob mentality here. Sad. Lol if this is being downvoted I have some words for you.
It is highly duplicitous to be sabre rattling over perceived ideological differences, when America's own ideology is couched in immensely contradicting - nay, hypocritical - failures to conduct state affairs according to International law.
>It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.
This is also true of American companies, especially those with a trillion dollar profit motive in the military-industrial endless-war market.
Be very, very careful about what doors you open with statements such as this:
>If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations
We know all too well how tightly wrapped up in its deep state secrets America's own heinous crimes against humanity are .. and if you are so sure of your own states innocence that you feel warranted in calling for other states' downfall for similar reasons, you must surely be willing to discuss America's own human rights abuses in a similar light.
No? Then the moral authority you claim does not exist.
It is pretty accepted no government has the higher morale ground. You can dig enough in any past or present to find evil or good.
The political regime of the countries you deal with is not a national security issue in itself, that's not what national security means. Certainly, 'dictatorship' is not a national security issue. Some of the US's "best friends" were, and are, dictatorships.
Neither Bytedance nor TikTok are Chinese companies.
It's true that Bytedance has buildings in Beijing, and a Chinese app (Taotiao) that is a Chinese subsidiary, but Bytedance is a Cayman's Islands company and TikTok doesn't even have servers inside China.
For purposes of the Chinese National Intelligence Law compelling the company to share user information with the CCP, Apple shares way more user data than TikTok does.
Sure, it's incorporated in the Caymans, but we all know that that is just a technicality.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-unlikely-approve-ti...
Can you prove to me that any company, domestic or otherwise, operating in the US has its national security in mind over shareholder value?
It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.