Words matter, at the very least to avoid starting nationalistic flamewars here on HN.
> Words matter, at the very least to avoid starting nationalistic flamwars here on HN.
I agree!
Back in Arcade Machines time, when a player is busy playing a fighting game, Street Fighter, I guess, and another person inserts a coin to play against him, the game pauses and a message that reads "Here's come a new challenger" pops up, so I think challenger would serve the purpose somehow!
Not that this is relevant to anything, but if it were: no one was doing this.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
Now let's explore the connotation of enemy. Playing Go against you calling you my enemy is outright wrong. However, if you were my enemy, I would not drink tea and have a laugh with you afterwards. I wouldn't even be playing a game of Go against you, but rather trying to do other not so nice things to you.
Such is the nature of connotation. Being erudite helps here ;) .
They're listed as adversaries and not enemies because aiding an enemy country suddenly unlocks a litany of other crimes.
Enemy is very specifically defined: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/2204
Adversary is very specifically defined: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
China wants to replace the US and the west as the global power. This will lead to upheaval and likely a war. When that finally comes to pass it behooves the west and the US to protect itself from anything that could undermine its own protection. In order to win a war you need hearts and minds. Not a populace that is being programmed to think despotic neo-communist-capitalist-when-it-suits-them rulers in China are somehow paper tigers.
Let’s compromise here: they are adversaries now but I think they are preparing to become enemies in every sense of the word. If they invade Taiwan, shed blood in the conflict over the breached rusting ship in the Phillipines, continue supporting Putin in his illegal attempt to annex Ukraine then yes they will eventually become enemies.
And now not only were these circumstances rare, but they were also inherently liminal. Technological and economic edges fade rapidly, especially in light of major population level differences. I see no reason to think China imagines they could or even wants to be anything like the US was 30 years ago. The world is returning to its more natural multipolar state, as it's more or less always been.
It’s by no means a given that a more even distribution of power leads to war or China ‘replacing the US’ as the only one. But an attitude where everyone thinks so, ironically, might.
The fact that you might be programmed to hate/dislike/fear China despite, I'm guessing having never been to China, is proof that America also programs you, just in another way.
Hint: Mostly through media.
Change any of those things in a significant way and I’m sure I would be a different person now. I love the idea that I am an autonomous agent of my own that exists self evidently outside of those bounds, I just don’t think it’s true.
US is in cold war with China because China might soon be economicaly getting upper hand.
The US considers all of LATAM as his own back yard. Why can’t China consider all of Asia as its own back yard?
This is what upsets people, the sheer size of hypocrisy.
The point is that the US has set a precedence on military power around the world. The US told the world that using military power for your own country's benefit is ok to do. So why can't China?
That doesn't mean either side was right, or that one justifies the other. Only that the pot should into call the kettle black.
That is absolutely the implication here.
The commenter's focus on hypocrisy reads to me more like they take issue with the US calling China out for this rather then justifying what China is doing because they aren't the only ones.
My point is that you lose all moral high ground lecturing countries on how they should behave when you're doing the exactly same thing.
If they enter into a conflict where they are cordoned off, their export oriented economy would crash immediately.
A war between China and USA is impossible to win for either sides, due to both military size, budgets, interdependence, and nuclear weapons arsenal. And this is why it's a cold war.
I am not a geopolitician, but this looks like a little too simplistic perspective, doesn’t it? I mean China diversified its wallet, including by helping to create infrastructures in Africa where there is still a largely growing young population (in contrast to the general trend in the occidental countries, or even what the long standing single child policy led to in China).
Edit: improve grammar and wording
Now coming to the subject of Facebook, Twitter etc, these apps pose the same threat to nations other than the US. As in, these apps serve US interests by pushing US propaganda onto the rest of the world and constantly monitors/tracks the individuals who have these apps installed.
So a better option is to ban any type of tracking - on all apps. But it is extremely unlikely that this will be made into law.
I sometimes get upset when I see that every privacy and safety law is written to protect only US citizens, when it is the US that creates and fuels those predatory companies. And I understand they basically don’t care if they destroy everyone if it benefits them. Great. But what are our governments doing?
Huh? Where did you get this idea? The GPDR in the EU isn't a US law, it's an EU law to protect EU citizens.
The US government really doesn't do much to protect the privacy of US citizens, certainly nothing at the level of the EU's laws.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
For example, US citizens are free to listen to chinese radio stations, or chinese TV channels, read chinese books. Why the government needs to restrict what US citizens have access to in this specific case?
It's just protectionism, like banning the Huawei phones (not talking about the infrastructure, that's different) or banning DJI drones. It just sounds better to mention national security than to say "we don't want others to do to us what we do to them, and we don't want them to compete with us".
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-eff-applaud-rul...
Much of the Patriot Act is probably unconstitutional but the government had 9/11 as a national security justification. No similar justification exists regarding TikTok.
The government getting into the business of banning companies, and more specifically banning online services, is very, very dangerous in my opinion. This one move effectively creates the need for our own great firewall, starting with a list of only one service but with the executive power to grow that list as more "national security threats" are named.
In this -- extreme case -- the exceptional case of banning the company I think is warranted.
Secondly, half the country voted for DJT. Some insignificant percentage believed his lies and doubted science and such during COVID. Mistakes were indeed made by governments and scientists and public trust in them was strained ... but it proved to me, at least, that the general US public is not educated enough or are just too hopped on their social media opium to care enough to really weigh the threat that TikTok plays. And in this case I defer to the intelligence community and those who operate in the area of national defense to handle this. Seems enough of congress and the senate agree with me.
I'm hesitant to assume people are uneducated because of who they vote for. Talking about Covid and the pandemic response, a vast majority of our politicians and health leaders were knowingly spouting off lies in the name of what they thought was best for us. Again, I can't pin that on any one person, even Fouci. The system broke down and that says nothing meaningful about the average voter.
That said, an educated populace is a fundamental need in a democracy and one that the US founders were well aware of. We don't have that today, whether by incompetence or malice our major societal systems reinforce obedience and subservience. We need more people following their curiosity wherever it leads, and we won't get there by continuing to further lean into a distrust of the general public or by making everyone's daily lives more and more complicated and stretched with less time to spend however each person wants to spend it.
When has the US forced a private corporation to sell up via Congressional decree in peacetime?
Seems to me that Congress is betting that Bytedance will capitulate instead of taking the case to the Supreme Court.
Radio and newspapers(including internet articles here in general) are a one way street. With Tiktok, you not only get access to the users device via the app, but it is also a two way street. Tiktok gets to choose what it feeds you.
And what you describe is also true in a lot of countries(I can choose my medium). However, with newspapers, radio and television what you feed the population is readily visible to anyone. I can turn on the telly to see what is being streamed. This is not the case with an app. Unless the government watches you 24/7 and I doubt that. The costs are prohibitive. The thing that does exist is metadata. If I were to visit terrorist.com or bombmanual.org.uk I would make a list. But watching TikTok all that is being seen is me communicating with content-servers(here the subject that needs to be watched also changes from the user(me) to the proprietor(the company)) from them and protocolling the content of everything watched, unless you break encryption at scale, and monitor everyone is also prohibitive. Not to mention analysis of the content. So Tiktok is the perfect vehicle for subversion of a foreign nation if I want to play for time.
The internet broadened that and introduced apps. So I would see this as a correction rather than anything else.
This is the government grabbing the authority to ban online services that they deem a national risk. The bill would honestly have been much more benign if it was a few pages spelling out a specific ban on TokTok. Hell, I don't think they'd even need a law to have Google and Apple pull the app from the app stores.
If doesn't work in many cases anyway, Government has no way to track who is tuning in and listening to hostile radio broadcasts.
Even it might be hostile propaganda, First ammendment protects both publishing and consuming content, without any "national security" considerations. But US lawmakers are now seemingly keen to introduce such conditions in the publishing and consuming of content.
During the cold war it was perfectly legal for the Soviet Life magazine to be published in the US and for people to buy and read it.
First ammendment really does say that "Congress shall make no law .." without any caveats for national security or even war-time exemptions.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the SCOTUS.
Mentioning propaganda you choose the latter.
Pray tell what are those campaigns you talk about? If you are posing this question you must have at least some in mind and ready at hand to share.
Or all those action movies relying on leased military equipments under the condition they will never portray the US military in a bad manner?
Or Operation Mockingbird during the cold war?
Those are all examples of US propaganda.
There is much I left aside ofc, including anything related to the support of the ongoing "military operation" against the palestinian people.
But let's entertain those smokescreens even just to see where it leads:
The second Gulf war was outright wrong agreed. The hawks had their day and it was a dark one and all that followed because of it. A falling from grace. No argument there. But it is not an argument one should make when arguing over operations done by other countries especially since it is not related and long past and the current subject of discussion is happening right now.
The action movie thing... it is their equipment, they may provide it under any condition as they see fit. I wouldn't want to lend my neighbor a canister either if I knew he chooses to use it to write not so funny stuff in burning letters into my front lawn. I would not be surprised if other militaries would do the same thing if they were to lend their equipment at all.
>Or Operation Mockingbird during the cold war?
Was that even a real operation?
> There is much I left aside ofc, including anything related to the support of the ongoing "military operation" against the palestinian people.
That one is a doozy. The US made it clear that Israel should do more to shield civilians from harm. But let's be clear. Israel and the US are the wrong party to be mad at. If you want to be mad: be mad at Hamas, at Iran for supporting Hamas and at China and Russia for using it in a game of Geopolitical checkers in the UN security council. Without the scourge that is Hamas, who still continue to shoot missiles from South Gaza and who deny a sovereign nation the right to exist, non of this would've happened. Hamas uses the Palestinian people as shields, uses humanitarian institutions(e.g. hospitals) as hide outs and ammunition storages and subverts aide organizations created to help the people in the Gaza strip. They also slaughtered innocent civilians and kidnapped 100s a few months ago. And the people in Gaza should also be mad at their long ago elected inapt and impotent president and their dysfunctional governing bodies. And their inability to face down those terrorists hiding amongst them.(I cannot blame them though, it is a horrid and couraguous thing to do in any circumstance.)
And let's entertain the scenario that the US would step out.... well the entire Middle East would implode or explode like a powder keg. Trade would also suffer considering the shipping routes, oil and other things. And then Iran with Russia's and/or China's blessing would then do evil things... not a very comforting thought either, especially if you give a hoot about religion.
Basically all tech is clean and ok if comes from the good guys (the US and allies) and unclean if it comes from the bad guys (China, Russia ...).
IMHO a sad state of affairs. We would be at a healthier and less hypocritical place if our tech was secure by design, and suppliers and platforms were subject to open objective criteria and rule of law wrt. censorship and surveillance.
The one thing it would change though is that it would make the life a bit harder for cyber criminals(think downgrading tls connections).
And the criteria you talked about, they are open. Called capitalism, and regulations those companies operate under. Along the way that abomination of surveillance capitalism was born though.
> Parallel to this we need a federal national data privacy law that protects us but also cracks down on the huge industry of data brokers selling Americans’ data to anyone that has cash.
And also dismantle the law where the US can request any data on any person, even abroad, if the company is US-based
I believe the underlying narrative of TikTok was with government control the algorithms would be purposefully tuned to promote disorder elsewhere which is a level of control the U.S. government does not have over U.S. companies and they were jealous (although with the level of information control during Desert Storm I am not 100% certain on that). However, I think this law was very premature and should have required evidence of tuning or actual war. While soldiers may have apps they should not the spies should know better.
The China side where they have banned encryption apps also seems to be war preparation. A digital iron curtain while depressing for the population behind it is not something that can be torn down from the outside. A per app legal war seems an unfeasible use of congressional time when many Chinese smart device control apps require location to function and are on many phones. This also appears to be an opening shot by congress for putting up a U.S. national firewall if TikTok just leaves all US offices and continues business through web based offerings.
Absolutely.
This is already in process in case of EU: https://noyb.eu/en/update-cnil-decides-eu-us-data-transfer-g...
Also, unlike the Bytedance and the Chinese Government, US companies do not run intelligence operations. They are in it solely for the money, otherwise the NSA wouldn't have had to snoop on Google in 2013(?).
and this point
> And also dismantle the law where the US can request any data on any person, even abroad, if the company is US-based
I find questionable. It is too blanketed. There are international criminals afoot after all. Red Letters do have their purpose as do international treaties for law enforcement to cooperate across borders in a bespoke manner in accordance with their and international laws.
Is this a joke?
There's a difference between "Hey, France, we would like this info on a known criminal" and "U.S.-based companies have to turn over all data on any person regardless of that data location or the nationality of the person in question".
That's basically the basis for both Schrems I and Schrems II.
Edit: See also CLOUD Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
--- start quote ---
The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil
--- end quote ---
This is crucial. Legal due process. Also
> ..... U.S.-based technology companies ....
Other jurisdictions have something similar, every company must adhere to the laws of the jurisdiction they want to operate in. You don't like it as a company, not a problem just don't incorporate in the US and live with the repercussion.
There is nothing that suggests that it is out of the ordinary or malicious.
Where it becomes interesting is access without a warrant, or with a muzzle attached, at large scale. That is the clandestine stuff. The purview of intelligence agencies.
That has been addressed by the EU with legislation; privacy shield was not really the hit, but guess what: MS complied. https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-roll-out-data-b... so spooks from the US will now have a harder time accessing user data at scale without a warrant.
That is entirely US-based and ignores any laws or regulations of other countries.
> Other jurisdictions have something similar, every company must adhere to the laws of the jurisdiction they want to operate in.
The key: operate. The US claims data from those companies even if the data and the operations happen in foreign countries.
> That has been addressed by the EU with legislation
EU legislation does not negate US laws. CLOUD Act is still there. And that is a huge issue for any country dealing with US companies.
If it's that China will know more about Americans through data ingestion, they can already do that. Americans willingly upload every little bit of their lives to YouTube, Twitch, and tons of other platforms. Not to mention that Temu is the most downloaded shopping app in the US. And what kind of attack can TikTok information provide that other publicly available online information scraped from other social media sites cannot?
If it's that China can show American citizens a curated list of topics and videos to make Americans think certain ways or vote certain ways, then I absolutely think that's a 1A problem. That's the exact same rhetoric tons of repressive Communist countries used and still use to deny people the freedom to read books from outside, watch movies from outside, read newspapers from outside, etc. And I'm never going to accept the idea that information (even full on lies) so dangerous that people shouldn't be allowed to see them.
I tend to come down with the same opinion as you though. It's all still essentially a first amendment issue and the negatives I listed aren't going to disappear if TikTok goes away.
The establishment wants and needs a monopoly in shaping the opinions and thoughts of its citizens.
Facial recognition database and tracking people at a global scale.
With advances in computing power and unsupervised machine learning, correlating a person with the person's surroundings is now largely or fully automated – what used to take forensic experts weeks, months or years to hunt down a person by poring over indirect clues in photographs or CCTV camera footage, is now almost instantenous.
Remember, TikTok is not just topless teenagers twerking on the camera, it is used by people to take short videos at random locations (and the locations are already easify to classify and account for), so if you happen to be a dissident (or a person of interest in general) hiding from the CCP, and you happened to have walked past a TikTok user shooting a short video and you got in the shot, your identity is matched up and your current location is revealed automatically, in near real time or with a short delay.
I have almost no doubt that people in TikTok videos are already digitised, and their faceprints are sunk into a gigantic database behind the Great Firewall. It is easy to project what other kinds of nefarious abuse are possible when such datasets are available.
I don't know of any system capable of doing what you describe. But if such a system existed it could just use publicly available videos from Facebook and Instagram. It wouldn't need its own social media platform to feed it data.
Having a direct feed of videos being uploaded from the user's device is also advantageous as the higher resolution of the original video will provide more details before it is recomompressed for long term storage in a smaller resolution. Most importantly, Instagram and Twitter won't allow uncontrolled access to the content they host whereas a Chinese company simply does not have a choice and has to serve the content up on its state demands.
Until proven otherwise, it is safer to project that such a system exists.
I don't think China are going to find their Dissident in TikTok videos any time soon. The false positive rate on even the best facial recognition is way too high for tracking individuals globally.
Everything you've pointed to can be done already by mining the publicly available treasure trove of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc. A pretty small team can scrape these sites and do what you're insinuating.
And lastly, I still don't see the danger of releasing this info? I mean, can't any foreigner travelling on a tourist visa record public vistas for 30 days and essentially do the same thing?
Not from US so I had to check the 1A:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
"or of the press" sounds like it applies here but does 1A covers also foreign companies?
But this is communist era logic used in some countries to this day to ban "foreign" and "corrupting" materials. Forgive me if it smells like repression and tastes like repression, I think it is repression. Shaping the minds of youths is not the exclusive purview of the US political class. That's some 1984 logic...
Look: the Cold War is over. And communism is a red herring. The world has changed. For some reason Americas elites view TikTok as a threat, probably because they don’t have the kind of total access to their servers that they’re accustomed to with American firms. But that has little to do with regular Americans. And there’s no argument other than decades old red baiting tropes they can think of to try to get us to care.
To not see the coming conflict be it cold or otherwise or not see the CCP for what it is is just ludicrous to me.
They want to — and as they should — become to dominant world power and reshape things as they see fit.
They will take Taiwan by force and it is zero sum: either China and its allies become the world’s leading economy and lead on things or the US and it’s allies remain in “power” and the west continues. This is the threat.
Now I’ve nothing against the people of China. It’s the government that I don’t trust.
But on topic I still think the ban is still old men barking at cloud. Somehow embarrassing really.
That's a funny argument, given that the same piece of legislation with the TikTok "ban" also includes a(nother) $60.8 billion package for Ukraine [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/senate-aid-pa...
I feel like all these arguments just come down to “China bad, therefore anything that annoys China is good” which is silly and juvenile reasoning
Reading your comment, it's pretty obvious that we should do something about propaganda here in the EU. About US propaganda I mean.
This way the same thing happens and china did also make some money. I don't see the argument that china having your data is somehow better than your government.
The US government is a far greater danger to the average American than the Chinese government is, and this bill just gives even more power to the US government to dominate its citizens.
The US government could, if it wanted to, slaughter the entire civilian population of the US right now and no one could stop them. I don’t believe for a second that China would be so restrained if it suddenly had that power over the USA. So, while it’s true that having the power that it does makes the US government a potential threat, it is nowhere near as much of an actual threat as China.
What the fuck are you talking about???
And you base that where exactly ?
As an aside, I always viewed TikTok as a real world analogue to the mind control subplot from Zoolander (Frankie says 'relax')...
Oh, and a US company spaying foreign citizens in not only legal in the USA, but also required.
And they already do -- neither China nor Russia allow Meta services in their countries. Nor do they allow most of Google's services.
I guess by "safer" you mean "less accessible by the US" and I suppose that is likely "true".
But would you rather be in China and send an anti-Chinese message to your friend via... some app that China allows? Or would you rather be in the US and send an anti-US message to a friend?
Both countries are going to try and snoop that data. Both are going to be successful.
But in which would you feel "safer" -- meaning in which one is the government likely to take action against you?
But since I live in the "west", I'd rather be spied by China and Russia, than by the USA or any of their allies and vassals.
That being said, I'd rather be spied on by the government, than by my wife, family, and friends.
People and organizations I don't have to deal with are less of a threat to me.
now that would be a bridge too far...
Thanks for being a spelling-nazi :)
Yea that mind set sounds awful.
And the reach of one individual is just not the same as a nation state. I’m not sure I get your point.
Can we apply this logic to Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc?
I personally only support a ban of TikTok if we apply the logic universally. Such services are weapons, and weapons are sure to be weaponized.
All centrally mass collected, plaintext or effectively plaintext data will sooner or later be co-opted by state actors.
Best to ban the practice of bulk plaintext data storage entirely unless it can all be E2EE and anonymozed to the point of being useless to the companies storing it.
We can ostensibly anyway regulate the American social media companies whereas the Chinese ones are a black box even though they might operate here under an American entity. That’s why we are here. They claimed they didn’t share data but they do. And that’s how the whole algorithm and value works
Every step you do to isolate yourself from your enemy makes them even more your enemy.
At the end of this process is war. Completely unsurprising. Pretty much inevitable.
Alternatively you could accept that you are loosing competition in some fields without turning it into mortal conflict.
At this level of paranoia you may as well ban Facebook and other social media as there is no guarantee their data is not getting intercepted by China.
> The potential for abuse from the CCP on the minds of US users exists
The exact same way Facebook and other U.S. social networks abuse the minds of US users.[1]
> as does the tracking the app could do and every data point that is generated is stored and potentially useful for blackmail or otherwise on members of Congress or others.
Yep, and in a similar way every large US player hoards as much data about its users as it can get away with, even if it doesn't know what it'll do with it, and eventually loses said data in a giant breach, which can lead to blackmail, etc.[2]
And here we sit, either toothlessly regulating the U.S. actors or attempting to ban the foreign ones instead of teaching people how to actually use social media in a way that helps them instead of melting their brains and exposing their deepest secrets to malicious actors.
I'm not much of a capitalist or a social darwinist but I'd say the best thing to do is let people learn the hard way. We seem cool to do that with junk food,[3][4] and the similarities in social engineering between the social media and junk food are striking.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/08/11/waukegan-district-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
The US and its allies got rid of Chinese telecom hardware from their networks for the very same reasons now it’s time to do the same with TikTok.
Would you let an enemy supply you with the very same kit you would use to fight them? No. Would you let that same adversary install an app on your most used device to watch and track you? Hah no.
A spin to a US company is not enough. It needs to cease operating in the US because there’s no surety that even with a spin data and sharing won’t get back to ByteDance China.
Parallel to this we need a federal national data privacy law that protects us but also cracks down on the huge industry of data brokers selling Americans’ data to anyone that has cash.