Is there any evidence of this? FWIW, I saw plenty of tiktoks talking about the China hack
We're not going let you have nukes just because you haven't nuked anybody yet.
It's beyond naive.
If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.
Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.
This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.
*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.
I'd agree that forbidding individuals from installing it would be an overreach, because it would be a more restrictive step then is reasonably necessary to eliminate the legitimate government interest of counter espionage.
I don't think that the governments actions here are more restrictive than necessary for that. The fact that they make some legitimate actions more difficult is completely acceptable (inevitable even).
For most people the Venn Diagram of cars they can acquire, and road legal cars, is a single circle. The government mandating all cars, even those driven solely on private property, be road legal would be an absurd overreach. At the same time they have no obligation to make it easy to acquire non road legal cars just because their legitimate regulations have happened to make that difficult.
The government currently lacks the ability to yank a binary from computing devices en masse, but the technology to do so is already mostly in place. (See Apple’s notarization escapades in the EU, for example. And I think Microsoft is working in a similar direction: https://secret.club/2021/06/28/windows11-tpms.html) I have a sickening feeling that this is only step one, and that the government will eventually mandate the ability to control and curate all software running on desktop and mobile devices within the country for “security” reasons. National security goons are salivating at the prospect, to say nothing of US corporations that are getting clobbered by foreign competitors.
If the government were to mandate that they use that feature, or Apple use that feature, especially to prevent future side-loaded installs, I'd be much more sympathetic to the overreach arguments. But that's not what they did. Rather this is a narrow law that prevents these companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. The fact that they could do some other bad thing doesn't mean the thing they did is bad.
The courts use phrases like "narrowly tailored to achieve the governments legitimate interest" to describe the balancing test here...
I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".
This law is different to that, it's all about specific actors, not about behavior and actions. A "people we don't like" list. CNN could be on a similar list soon. All constitutional of course - the law will specifically mention how this is all for national security. And no one's speech is being suppressed, the journalists can always write for a different news channel.
But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.
Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.
The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.
Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.
Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.
You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.
Can you think of any reason a government engaged in cyberwarfare might want to ensure there was informational asymmetry? I sure can.
What exactly it says... obviously we don't know.
At this point, the credibility of the trust-me-bro evidence can fall anywhere on the scale between "Iraqi WMDs" to "Imminent invasion of Ukraine", and there is just no way to know.
That said, it's not your job to understand it.
We both, presumably, voted. That was our input to the process. We don't get to be consulted about every decision thereafter.
The people we voted for were briefed in private by SME's who know more about nation state attribution than we likely ever will and had access to sources they can't reveal to us. They then made this decision.
That said, if you don't trust the people elected (of either party since this was bipartisan), don't trust the experts, can't agree on the facts, and don't even agree on what constitutes a reliable source there's no point in having a conversation.
At that point you're beyond the utility of conversation as you no longer share a common frame of reference with your fellow man. There can be no argument in good faith with someone who is completely faithless.
I'm curious what you would actually accept as a reliable source? Is there any means by which you could be shown sufficient evidence? What have you put in the place the rest us keep a relatively common framework for 'reliable source'? Tiktok, maybe?
I don't particularly trust Google or Apple to firewall a malicious and determined nation-state actor (0 days being 0 days), but it seems lower probability than the technically trivial data collection.
There is no such thing as unlimited liberty, especially with regards to systems under control of hostile nations such as China and Russia. Would you be comfortable allowing mass release of unrestricted Hamas / ISIS, Russian propaganda content to North American teenagers? National security is a real thing and geopolitics always play a critical role in people's lives.
One could perhaps argue that we must educate our citizens better, however I think rather than being naive, it's better to implement realistic regulations (within _democratic_ means of course) to contain the threats.
They may be blackmailed for watching forbidden topics like Russia friendly channels. Or explicit material if TikTok has it.
They may be blackmailed if they are in the wrong social network if TikTok has such a thing.
People watch all sorts of content on TikTok including sexual/sensual content. While they are watching alone in their rooms, all their usage patterns are recorded in intimate details and they reveal all their sexual proclivities. That is quite easy fodder for blackmail.
Health and financial information can often easily be gleaned from people's watch history. If you know people are struggling with their mental or physical health, or are having financial troubles, these are all things that can be used as leverage for blackmail, persuasion, and deceit.
And furthermore, why is it okay that it's collected AND owned by a company based in a country not subject to the rule of law?
"Facebook does it too" isn't a reason not to be worried about TikTok.
Because I, as an adult, decided that I am ok with sharing my personal data within their app in exchange for getting to use the app.
As long as I am not sharing personal data of other people (who haven’t consented to it like I did) or some government/work/etc info that I have no right to share, I am not sure how this is anyone else’s business.
P.S. I would somewhat get your argument if it wasn’t TikTok but something that could theoretically affect the country’s infrastructure or safety (e.g., tax preparation software or a money-managing app or an MFA app for secure logins). But all personal data on me that TikTok has is purely my own, has nothing critical at all (all it knows is what i watch and do within the app), and has zero effect on anyone or anything else.
The ruling mentions that users are in fact doing this.
> (Draft National Security Agreement noting that TikTok collects [...] and device and network data (including device contacts and calendars)). If, for example, a user allows TikTok access to the user’s phone contact list to connect with others on the platform, TikTok can access “any data stored in the user’s contact list,” including names, contact information, contact photos, job titles, and notes. 2 id., at 659.
I also don't believe that most adults using this app really know how much data TikTok collects. It isn't just "what i watch and do within the app". A fuller quote from the above that doesn't just focus on data involving other people is
> The platform collects extensive personal information from and about its users. See H. R. Rep., at 3 (Public reporting has suggested that TikTok’s “data collection practices extend to age, phone number, precise location, internet address, device used, phone contacts, social network connections, the content of private messages sent through the application, and videos watched.”); 1 App. 241 (Draft National Security Agreement noting that TikTok collects user data, user content, behavioral data (including “keystroke patterns and rhythms”), and device and network data (including device contacts and calenders)).
I also don't particularly believe that the US has to allow espionage just because the government spying got the individuals being spied on to agree to it.
And why have we forgotten about kids?
The law in question doesn't forbid you, or any other adult, or even any child for that matter, from knowingly installing the app. It forbids companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. You can still install the app if you want, the US companies just can't help operate the espionage app.
I'd have no problem either, if TikTok were only collecting data on you.
I wouldn't have much of a problem, if TikTok were collecting data on x0,000s of people.
To me, it rises to the level of security-sensitive when information is collected on enough people that there's a high likelihood of people in future sensitive positions (military, government, legal) having had their information collected historically.
One can't put the genie back in the bottle when a competitor government can see a new president elected... and pull up a profile of what they swiped from 10-40.
That scenario impacts not just you (the future president), but everyone you have power or influence over.
And given the Chinese government's documented willingness to coerce people in foreign countries (i.e. the "not police" police stations), betting they won't use that power seems shortsighted...
You, as an adult, may also choose to drunk drive. The country is bigger than single people. Security threats are collective.
If we go further along with your analogy, then the government would make Jack Daniels (picked a random liquor brand, nothing against JD specifically) illegal, while still allowing consumption of all other liquors.
In reality, instead, the government didn’t make Jack Daniels illegal at all, but instead made drunk driving illegal.
Also, I am not sure how your argument about the scale or collectiveness of security threats makes any sense. You can swap “drunk driving” in your argument with literally any other crime (like “murder”), and it would make the same (little) amount of sense.
…alcohol is licensed and regulated. Jack Daniels can be sold in a way moonshine cannot.
JD is regulated using the same laws that regulate Jim Beam or Suntory whiskey or any other alcohol manufacturer (without going into the details of how different types of alcohol are regulated, e.g., beer vs wine vs whatever else, because it is orthogonal to the point). There is no dedicated “JD cannot do xyz, but all other whiskey manufacturers can” regulation.
It's easy to have a gut reaction that your own government has a greater impact on your life than a foreign one, but that does not reflect the reality that 1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens; 2) the Chinese government has; and 3) the US and China are going to war one day, and China might win.
we're not in that situation, but i would expect the people of crimea and donetsk would prefer that nobody surveilled them.
but in a practical sense, surveilliance of people in donetsk and crimea by china would be less immediately threatening to their life, because china is not conducting military action in those places.
>1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens
i don't understand how anyone can seriously make this claim, and i really don't understand why potential danger isn't a consideration.
potential danger is simply danger. privacy rights are established in recognition that a threat is itself harmful.
and abuse is not unreal. america has had a larger incarcerated population than any other country for my entire lifetime. both absolute size and per capita.
in america, political movements are consistently dismantled by counterintelligence. political action is met with violence and arrest.
perhaps few people are outright murdered, but it's not necessary to murder the powerless. outside of america proper, american power is much more lethal.
every concern and contradiction that threatens the present situation - environment, infrastructure, housing, healthcare, labor, war - is maintained by suppression of political organizing, enabled by surveillance.
the administration incoming next week has promised a massive project of deportation. it has promised retaliation against journalists. it is apparently motivated to criminalize the existence of transgender people. none of these threats are reduced by american surveillance of american people.
>2) the Chinese government has [abused its power]
sure. but this is a problem primarily for chinese people, and americans are not subjects of chinese power.
american surveillance of american people does not reduce any threat of chinese power.
why isn't the american legislature addressing the problems of american people subject to american power?
>3) the US and China are going to war one day.
i don't expect this. there's too much to lose on both sides. it would be a disaster and a tragedy.
true or not, it's certain that american citizens would benefit, and america itself would improve, if arbitrary surveillance on the present scale was impossible.
And before someone hops in with Kent State, Tuskegee trials, et al., let's set the comparison bar at order-of x00,000 to x0,000,000 citizens killed by the government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_to...
To the extent this is maybe remotely arguably defensible, it is only so because the US has historically defined internal subjects who it wished to abuse most intently as non-citizens (or even legal non-persons), including chattel slavery of much of the Black population until the Civil War, and the largely genocidal American Indian wars up through 1924. But even in those cases you still have to ignore a lot of abuse in the period after nominal citizenship was granted (for Black Americans, especially, but very much not exclusively, in the first century after abolition of slavery).
Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.
Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/09/japan-chinese-authoritie...
And here's their overall 2025 page on China which details, among other things, harassment of critics based out of Italy, detention of U.S. based artist, and even harrassment of protestors in San Fransisco.
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/china
I think their suppression of criticism on Uighur forced labor has also encompassed harassment of extended support networks people from the region as well, but that's just off the top of my head and not necessarily on that page.
Elizabeth B. Prelogar: And the one final point on this is that ByteDance was not a trusted partner here. It wasn't a company that the United States could simply expect to comply with any requirements in good faith.
And there was actual factual evidence to show that even during a period of time when the company was representing that it had walled off the U.S. data and it was protected, there was a well-publicized incident where ByteDance and China surveilled U.S. journalists using their location data --this is the protected U.S. data --in order to try to figure out who was leaking information from the company to those journalists.
Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.
They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...
The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.
So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.
EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!
https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...
> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.
but data harvesting is not the real problem
the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP
None of this is a normative statement - I’m not saying whether this is good or bad, but if you want to know why the US government thinks Elon is better than ByteDance, it’s because they can shoot Elon tomorrow if they decide to, but they can’t shoot Zhang Yiming without causing an international incident.
We can't just ban everything though. It'd be better to just allow everything.
Honestly X is pretty crazy on the propaganda these days, it's a little scary. The issue with TikTok would be way more subtle or speculative. Anyway if it is "unacceptable", I don't want that to be for the govt to decide. Even if it was being overtly politically manipulative (which is less scary than being subtle I guess) - I'd still support it. I like consuming foreign media, recognizing bias, being exposed to different view points, and thinking critically to make my own decisions. If you don't think the average american can do that, well too bad, we can't just spoon-feed people "approved" content.
But control of an algorithm that can shift public opinion in ways that are imperceptible through promotion / demotion of posts on certain topics, is a different matter altogether. And the CCP are masters at this (since their own social networks in China are heavily controlled).
I 100% agree with open access to all sources - but you should know what the sources are. If the CCP secretly owned the NYT, that would be a problem as I would want to know that when I read the NYT it's likely reflecting CCP authorized views, just like I know what to expect when I read the Economist, WSJ, or The Times.
Basically what Twitter was before Elon bought it.
I think those alone would be grounds to at least take a close look at his access to Twitter data, his censorship choices and any input he has into the algorithms.
If the general public is that stupid and that this kind of protection is really needed, then it also means that democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.
No. Influential foreign propaganda is inconspicuous. There’s nothing to be mindful of other than “who benefits if this is widely believed?” and it’s not a low opinion to think most people aren’t mindful of that.
I fully agree. The last year has shaken my confidence in democracy more than any other time in my lifetime. Not because of threats of war or revolution, but because what is the point of elections if the majority is chronically misinformed? Why have a yes/no election if no one knows what the question is?
It's still the best worst system, and i'm still going to vote in 2 years and again in 4, but my faith is low.
Read the federalist papers. Our obsession with elections has destabilised the balance built into our republic.
Read the Federalist Papers. Elections are an essential part of democracy. But it's possible to overdo it, and elections alone a democracy does not make. (Much less a functioning republic.)
Democratic values are good but not without flaws.
Well, half the country voted for a convicted felon who _illegally tried to overturn the results of an election_, so yeah, it's pretty low.
> democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" -- Churchill
It's flawed, but still miles better than what China has. At least there are still some safeguards on Trump, unlike Xi.
What is your evidence that propaganda efficacy scales inversely with intelligence?
It's far from self evident. There is all kinds of nonsense that is catnip for overthinkers. The reason I paused at that assertion is that a lot of propaganda (and in general, military misdirection) is aimed at deceiving leadership.
that's naive. Literally leaving CNN on in your living room 3 days a week will eventually change you opinions. Our minds absorb things we hear repetitively, even if we now they might be half truths or lies.
They are, it is, and it never was, for that exact reason.
You may not think this but it was one of the two arguments the made to SCOTUS.
You mean... like the rest of the world countries are. Look, you make a point here, but the only solution here is to completely cut-off the internet and for the government to run a single TV channel akin to Korea.
The US has been tirelessly working to "infiltrate" other countries media and influence them. That was heralded as "bringing freedom". How the times have changed.
There are 2 separate problems:
- Lack of US privacy legislation
- Security-sensitive systems and infrastructure owned by competitor nations
PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
That there exist other problems is not a justification for inaction on this particular problem.
I'd absolutely consider Meta to be security sensitive. And Microsoft. And Google. And Netflix.
"You watched Red One, and we'll tell you employer and wife about it unless you ..."
How does this work?
If TikTok can infer something about a person, then Netflix can also infer it.
What does that even mean in this context? Have you used TikTok before?
TikTok's CSAM problem is well documented [1].
Disposable idiots are a necessary asset for any intelligence operation. Kim Jong-nam's assasins, for example, "were told to play harmless tricks on people in the vicinity for a prank TV show" [2].
[1] https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/tiktok-under-fede...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam
It isn't like TikTok are the only part of the internet with a CSAM problem. By default anything that offers file hosting has a CSAM problem. To keep the Chinese away from blackmail material the US would have to ban any form of image hosting served from the Chinese mainland - the CSAM people go to the CSAM, it doesn't proactively seek people out.
Of course not. I was just providing an easy example of what TikTok may have that we don’t want the CCP to.
Did you mean for that link to go somewhere different?
Your link doesn't say anything about TikTok?
> Kim Jong-nam's assasins, for example, "were told to play harmless tricks on people in the vicinity for a prank TV show"
What? How is that connected to "blackmailable individual profiles"?
How can they blackmail me? Please explain. You mean like "I see you watch cat videos so now go revolt against your government or I will tell everyone you watch cat videos?", this is the blackmail part?
They may not be able to. But it sure would be helpful to have a list of people in likely financial distress with addresses close to military installations. Such a person may not ask questions if given a job offer from an influencer or whatever to take selfies around town.
Sure, that's possible, but I think it's a bit of a stretched argument. Can't you target people like that on Facebook with ads? Can't you buy data about these people from U.S. data brokers? Can't you already access this data publicly because people share it openly on social media?
Ads have too low of an SNR--you'll blow your cover before getting anything useful. Buying works, but (a) you'd need to be careful about hiding your intentions and (b) it's never going to be as high fidelity as the direct data stream. (Think of the amount of unique data they got from their copy-paste hijacking alone [1].)
Having the data yourself means you can silently query high-fidelity real-time data on a third of the American population. That's difficult to replicate. Again, if you need a familiar bogeyman, consider what the NSA would ask Meta to do if Instagram weren't banned in China.
[1] https://lifehacker.com/is-tiktok-really-recording-everything...
We could shut all of this shit down if we actually wanted to, but that means going after American companies too, which they won't. They want to have the cake and eat it too: outlaw foreign spying on American users without outlawing domestic spying on American users. They want to make it so China can't do exactly what social media et al does in America, to Americans. Americans are not stupid: they are perceiving this. They know they are being manipulated, perhaps by China, perhaps by the U.S., definitely by dozens if not hundreds of private enterprises, likely all fucking three.
On one hand, the American government's priority is the security of America and her citizens, but on the other, we have an entire segment of the economy now utterly dependent on being able to violate citizen's privacy at will and at scale. Surveillance capitalism and foreign surveillance are effectively interoperable. You can't kill one without killing the other.
Edit: And even more on the personal front, for your every day Joe: this is completely stake-less. "Oh China is spying on me!" big fucking deal. The NSA was caught spying on us decades ago, and by all accounts, they still are. Google AdSense probably knows my resting heart rate and rectal measurements that it will use to try and sell me the new flavor of Oreo. We accept as a given that our privacy is basically long gone, not only did that boat leave the pier, it sailed to the mid-Atlantic, sunk, and a bunch of billionaires imploded trying to check out the wreckage in a poorly made submarine. I don't fucking care if China is spying on me too, that's just a fact of my online existence.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/15/duolingo-sees-216-spike-in...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-boycott-faceb...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/over-half-million-tiktok-...
People are protesting because it's cool to do especially when you're a rebellious youngster but I'm pretty convinced it's going to fizzle out. I don't think it's fair to say it's disingenuous to believe as much. Maybe you could say it's "too early" to write it off, to which I'd respond saying it's too early to buy into the belief that it will take over American culture in any way that resembles TikTok.... and that even if it did, that it wouldn't be banned from the US again.
Just wait until the Chinese government realizes young American social media users have no problems talking about politics, sex, and drugs on social media.
We'll see how long open platforms with citizens of both countries last.
Or maybe this story is hugely relevant to a lot more people than your average story? I find it hard to believe china is waging a huge phsyop on HN
E.g. Fox News comments are that are base-level "Nunh unh!" or argumentless boosting.
Meta collects your data and advertisers can indirectly use that data to serve you ads. In addition, government actors can use Meta's advertising tools to spread propaganda.
But TikTok is an all-in-one solution. The government have direct control over the algorithm in addition to having access to all of the data. They don't have to go through a third party intermediary like Meta and aren't only limited by a public advertising API.
I don't understand how or why this is hard for people to grasp? It's no different than Radio Free Europe being secretly funded by the CIA, except it's even more powerful.
This right here is the answer. People just don’t care about this type of privacy because they assume some American company already has their data. Combine that with us being two generations removed from the Cold War and the average TikTok user doesn’t see any reason why the owner of this specific data being Chinese matters and frankly I’m sympathetic to that argument. If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.
That's the real value of TikTok. Having the eyeballs of young people and being able to (subtly or not) influence their perception of the world is valuable in a way that massive amounts of data aren't.
I do also worry about this with Musk, but I also acknowledge that taking away social media ownership from a foreign company is different than taking it away from a US company.
Fox News* is America's most watched television news source. Is this the kind of alternative you are envisioning?
*Also owned by a foreign national
If there was a way to force Musk to sell X or ban it, I would support that 100%. But that's unlikely to ever happen especially now with co-President Musk. But in the meantime, either breaking TT free of CCP control, or banning it, would be at least one battle won.
...Benjamin Franklin? This country was built on mass media being in the hands of "unaccountable" persons with strong personal agendas. Projecting the right of American citizens to own and control media like this is precisely what the First Amendment is for.
Foreign owned media isn't nearly so cut and dry, but trying to act like the first ammendment doesn't cover Elon Musk just because his politics got you bent out of shape is absurd.
and the reason it doesn't is because unlike traditional media -- which by the way is regulated in the US (FCC) -- X, FB and the rest go to great lengths to say that they are _not_ publishers and are _not_ responsible for the content. therefore it's not a 1A issue
My point isn't that there is some grand conspiracy here, just that if you wanted to have outsized influence on people who are there just for entertainment, you could do it and make it look organic. Inception has to be the target's idea and all that.
In a similar vein I see talking heads of people in their kitchens contemplate world issues. Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, life in China: you can get in-depth opinions on all those issues from a hairdresser in Nebraska or a mechanic in Michigan, and they all will present them well enough. So I think there is something there.
But the clear damn solution is to pass laws that prohibit a bunch of this stuff across the board. The fact that Instagram Reels can do exactly what TikTok is doing but with ties to a different world power makes this ban seem shameless. Ban them all. Or none. Or regulate them like they should be regulated. But don't pretend like this security theater is somehow going to fix anything meaningful.
Apparently influencers get a lot of unsolicited pressure to take stances on things like Palestine even if they're just a crafting influencer.
What a weird comment. I goaded an interpretation out of you? I was just trying to get at why you seemingly think TikTok is different than any other social network and your response was that "There is an undercurrent of opinion on the platform that happens to align with Chinese worldviews". But I guess the bad faith alarm has already been triggered so not much point continuing from here.
Just because Musk is a f*ing problem for all Americans, doesn't mean that the CCP isn't a problem. Not much you can do about "President" Musk -- so you have to work with what you can control.
I frankly don't understand why I keep seeing on social media people like yourselves push the idea that it's okay because other companies are also harvesting the data. It is obviously not about the data. It is about China being in a position to manipulate information flow.
That's why arguing in this sense never works. Someone isn't trying to work something out, they've already decided and are trying to explain the decision to you. That's not the same thing as thinking through something.
There is such a thing as protecting people from threats they don't know about or understand.
If there is an invasion of Taiwan, I don't think it would be unthinkable that everyone's phones being broken wouldn't be a major tactical and political advantage of shifting the US's priorities and political will in the short run.
Sure, it burns the asset in the process, but I mean... this has been a priority for an entire century.
along with details about how the US has no defensive alliance with taiwan, and that the US does not need to intervene
This is a very realistic scenario. It doesn't mean people will suddenly see messages from the CCP on their screens. It could mean that posts that are critical of China are subtly downweighted (not banned, that would be too obvious and problematic) while those favorable towards China would be upweighted.
One thing the CCP is quite good at, from its long experience of always controlling the narrative in China, is this type of social media manipulation.
If they can't take the island quickly, then maybe propaganda helps. I just think neutering or nuking everyone's phones for a few days is enough to genuinely split the attention of the American people. I think it's very safe to say our culture cares much more about it's butter than it's guns right now. We are decadent.
Edit: other sites put YouTube, and others higher with TikTok at 40% of phones.
Nothing else controlled by the CCP looks like it even comes close to that in America.
A surprising (and funny) example of this is how the open-source intelligence community and sites like Bellingcat used purchased or leaked data from private Russian commercial data brokers to identify and track the detailed movements of elite Russian assassination squads inside Russia as well as in various other countries. They learned the exact buildings where they go to work every day as well as who they met with and their home addresses. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-bellingcat-unmas...
Volunteer open-source researchers also used these readily available data sources to identify and publicly out several previously unknown Russian sleeper agents who'd spent years hiding in Western countries while building cover identities and making contacts. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/25/socialite-widow-j...
To your point, if volunteer internet hobbyists can use commercial broker data to identify and track elite Russian assassins and undercover sleeper agents, in Russia and around the world, China having direct access to US Tiktok data, which Tiktok sells to anyone through brokers anyway, doesn't seem like an existential intelligence threat to our national security. Forcing TikTok to divest Chinese ownership would, at most, make Chinese intelligence go through an extra step and pay a little for the data.
If politicians were really worried about foreign adversaries aggregating comprehensive data profiles on everyone, just addressing China's access to TikTok is a side show distraction. Why didn't they pass legislation banning all major social media services from selling or sharing certain kinds of data and requiring the anonymization of other kinds of data to prevent anyone aggregating composite profiles across multiple social platforms or data brokers? That would actually reduce the threat profile somewhat.
Obviously, they aren't doing that because the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, INS, IRS, Homeland Security and their Five Eyes international partners are aggressively buying data broker info on all US residents at massive scale every day and aggregating it into comprehensive profiles - all with no warrants, probable cause or oversight. The US Constitution doesn't apply because it's just private commercial data, not government data. Any such law would have to explicitly carve out exceptions allowing US and allied intelligence agencies to continue doing this. Alternatively, they could put such use under the secret FISA intelligence court. US intelligence has thoroughly co-opted FISA oversight but jumping through the FISA hoop is extra work and filling out the paperwork to be rubber-stamped is annoying. They much prefer remaining completely unregulated and unsupervised like they are now, collecting everything on everyone all the time without limit. They've certainly already automated collecting all the data they want from every broker.
So yeah... let's very publicly make a big show of slapping just China and only about TikTok - and loudly proclaim we really did something to protect citizen privacy and reduce our national data aggregation attack surface. This is the intelligence community cleverly offering a fig leaf of plausible deniability to politicians who can now claim they "did something", while leaving the US intelligence community free to pillage every last shred of citizen privacy in secret.
Any idea why it is unidirectional? If the data is openly available why can't the Russians track US/Ukrainian agents the same way?
Russian officials / employees are easier to bribe, so there are brokers selling access to car ownership / license plate records, cell phone location records and call logs, passport records etc.
There's a good Bellingcat article on this at https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-...
Or did Tom Clancy lie and they are so incompetent they can't even use OSINT tools lol
I'm not an expert though. There's a lot of detailed info on OSINT sources and methods online. The bottom line is it's extremely difficult to put the data genie back in the bottle. The stuff seeps out everywhere and searching aggregated databases from multiple sources and time periods uncovers any connection. It only requires a single slip-up happening one time. This just reinforces that a regular citizen in a Western democracy who's not a spy trained to operate under cover with a nation-state providing authentic false identities, is screwed in terms of maintaining their own privacy.
Is the FSB/GRU more incompetent than my local fentanyl dealer? new identity, plastic surgery, contacts to protect iris scanning, no digital comms except in house tech, avoiding legal entrypoints seem to be the very basic in today's age especially for a hit
Tom Clancy lied that's a few hours of my life I'll never get back lol
In Soviet Russia, you don't get an ESN.
The correct term to use here is IMEI, ESN is CDMA-specific (and hence mostly US-specific) as far as I understand.
Like foreign adversaries can already run influence campaigns on american media platforms, often, the american ones will even cooperate with it. It’s just theater. They dont need tiktok to do whatever people are saying the reason is.
The other key point you are missing is that we can ban one app and then ban/regulate others later. You don’t have to do it all at once even if all organizations were engaging in the same behavior.
Even more - the process and legislation required to just ban/regulate Meta or other American tech companies for example is more difficult not just because of the actual legal apparatus required to make it happen, but because of economic considerations and jobs and such too. Further, no doubt the CIA, NSA, and FBI all but have offices at Meta headquarters. They might be engaging in activity or influence campaigns we don’t like - but that’s for us to figure out, not some other country.
TikTok is just some random company that doesn’t matter outside of engaging in activities we don’t like and we choose to allow it to do business in the United States as we see fit.
As casually as we can decide to allow it to do business in the United States so too can we revoke that permission. We do this all the time. We recently stopped Nippon Steel from buying US Steel. TikTok isn’t anything special.
It's about having an adversarial entity -- one with whom the US could be at war with one day -- have control over a social media network that is highly pervasive in US society. It's not about harvesting the data. It's about having the ability to subtly manipulate public opinion through control of the algorithm that determines what comes up on people's feeds.
Yes, foreign adversaries can run TV ads like anyone else, or have their people on social media to try to sway the conversation (there's even a name for these people in China - "wumao"). I'm sure there's some people working for the CCP on this thread. But control of the network is a whole other level of influence -- orders of magnitude greater.
edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:
- Bullrun
- PRISM
- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries
- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings
- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans
- Vault7
- XKeyscore
- STELLARWIND
- MUSCULAR
etc.?
Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.
But here you go anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
Google it yourself, if you're actually interested. It's fascinating.
Totally untrue. It was also confirmed by officials from affected companies as well as Cybersecurity monitoring companies. There is quite a bit more detail and substantiation -- even in the Wikipedia article -- than you are acknowledging.
What forensic evidence was published?
Afaicr, it was attributed on the basis of methods. Gmail didn't publicly disclose any internal logging.
And the email chain of custody is unreliable, so post-leak analysis has the can't-spot-a-perfect-forgery problem.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/apt... https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targe...
No such evidence has been published implicating the Chinese government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
> On January 12, 2010, Google revealed on its weblog that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. The company said the attack occurred in mid-December and originated from China. Google stated that more than 20 other companies had been attacked; other sources have since cited that more than 34 organizations were targeted.
I am. Google Salt Typhoon.
Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.
At least they have healthcare!
This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.
If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.
For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.
(I'm not even American, and I don't care much about all this US TikTok nonsense. The entire shitstorm is deeply amusing to me as a side observer, as Americans seemingly learned nothing from the experience of my country)
The point of my response is: sometimes you have to be paternalistic, and the federal government doesn't need to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it because those people don't matter. They meaningfully defended the ban to the courts.
My point is that I don't think "access to this information services will stoke negative sentiment towards the US government" is a good reason to ban access to said service in a liberal democracy. It would be a good reason to ban the service in an autocracy of some sort, but standards for individual freedoms are higher (though not infinitely high) here. At least, they ought to be higher. That's where the disagreement comes from: I do not care that access to TikTok threatens the US Government. I care about US citizens generally. The interests of these two parties are increasingly disconnected, a sign of a decaying democracy.
I would say both at the same time
And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
Can I see the evidence?
Search for Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon.
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.
But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.
It's possible to believe TikTok is bad and that the pathway the US just proved out to banning it in the US has shown that no US court will seriously question the "security reasons" fig leaf. Telegram and Signal are both used by plenty of people the US could easily paint as "security threats" and it's unclear there's any defense to a ban that they could mount at this point.
1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.
3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.
Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.
Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.
There is no wall. The Trump "tax cuts" raised taxes on most Americans and cut them for the 1%. Trump has not faced any consequences for betrayal in the past, why would he now?
In fact, TikTok helps promote the lack of awareness of all the above. If anything he'll want to keep it in place, to keep the public misinformed.
None of the stated reasons for the TikTok ban matter except this one: a country who is openly hostile towards us can control what our citizens see. That alone is enough to ban it. War with china is not some far flung fantasy, it’s something both sides have been actively preparing for for a long while.
I would wager that in a modern war scenario, your ability to bend the public support of your enemy’s war effort is going to be a huge factor in the outcome. I don’t really need to explain why; it’s self-evident.
If relations with china were better, the ban would not make sense. If this was a French social network or something, a ban would not make sense. But China is a hostile nation that explicitly aims to oppose the US. It’s not worth letting them walk all over us just out of “fairness.” I don’t want to be fair to China in a future conflict, I want to win.
The real criticism we should be making, is about how relations with china got this bad in the first place. Could there have been more diplomatic treatment? Better trade deals? Agreements on IP ownership? Etc etc… that’s a discussion that would make more sense to have. But given the current relationship between the countries, the TikTok ban is literally the bare minimum we should be doing. I expect a lot more things like this to follow.
No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.
This. It's this. Don't waste your time thinking past this answer, you already nailed it.
As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?
Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.
The United States Government is. I'm a United States citizen. Importantly, they're not fighting for me or my stability, they're fighting for the stability of oligarchs. They will gladly destabilize me and my life in service of the ruling class.
Appeals to nationalism only work on nationalists. I'd need a good reason to be a nationalist. The very few listed reasons are some vague reference to freedom as if just saying that makes it true.
Get back to me when it's "China is threatening your guaranteed housing!" or "China is going to roll back the statutory work holiday laws in the US!" or "China is attacking the information systems used for our guaranteed child care program!"
It's really simple: if you want people to love and defend the US and what it purportedly stands for, then give them concrete reasons to do so. Improve their quality of life.
Until then, leave me the hell out of the fearmongering about China. I'm much more fearful of the systemic policies of the US making me homeless than some nation state's cyberopium ruining my mind or protecting information systems that were intentionally left insecure in service of profit and the intelligence apparatus.
They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department. Specifically they used the telco hacks to gather geolocation data in order to pinpoint Americans and to spy on phone calls by abusing our legally mandated wiretap capabilities.
Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones.
I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.