6 ms·

The US government, specifically people who have high-level access to classified intelligence, has insinuated a lot about TikTok but has not revealed any specifi

The US government, specifically people who have high-level access to classified intelligence, has insinuated a lot about TikTok but has not revealed any specifics about what the concerns are. Would love to see a reveal of substance, or something, literally anything. Right now it just feels like agitprop

ismokedoinks 4y ago
Not that I have any deep subject matter knowledge but I agree, it feels like app store McCarthyism
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  ALL of these sorts of social media programs are terrifyingly-capable spying platforms. It'd be weird if we didn't regard one controlled by a foreign adversary as a threat. I think the domestic ones are, too—but they feed info to US law enforcement and intelligence and are making lots of money, so we can't crack down on those, I guess.
- eatonphil 4y ago
  McCarthyism was primarily a political thing by politicians. The FBI chief being discussed here, Wray, is a political appointment but not an elected politician so hopefully the appointment shields them from politics. Nevermind that the DoJ tries pretty hard to be independent of the President. But beyond that, this particular chief was appointed during the previous administration of a different party. And has served in both party's administrations. I have no position on TikTok, but Wray saying this is not really comparable to McCarthy.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    I feel like the FBI has politicized quite a bit since Comey.
  - advisedwang 4y ago
    The FBI chief is and has always been highly political. J Edgar Hoover was a extreme anti-communist and was investigating suspected communists, infiltrating CPUSA and creating blacklists at the exact same time that McCarthy was conducting his hearings. In fact the McCarthyism acticle on Wikipedia has a whole section about the FBI. The FBI was deeply involved in McCarthyism.
  - lehi 4y ago
    Something being political does not require it to be partisan. Joseph McCarthy worked hand in hand with then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, and Wray was appointed by a president who also tried to ban TikTok.
    - eatonphil 4y ago
      Sure, but being kept on by an administration of the opposing party goes a bit to show that he is also not particularly partisan.
- rchaud 4y ago
  It definitely sounds like that. But to me this feels more like 'testing the waters' to see if the argument sticks with the American people. I don't think it will, because they provided even a hint of a smoking gun. Eventually, I can see these hearings continue, but the line of argument will change to protecting American jobs, especially if Meta's ad revenues fall.
favaq 4y ago
It's the Huawei story all over again.
- jpgvm 4y ago
  i.e we don't want to compete so lets just ban the foreign competitor we don't want to compete with.
  - huhtenberg 4y ago
    A competitor under full control of Chinese government that owes its birth to a full copy of Cisco firmware deposited by Cisco with said government as a condition for entering Chinese market. That Huawei or is there another one?
    - jpgvm 4y ago
      Technology transfer isn't illegal, Cisco was happy with the commercial arrangement. More importantly Motorola before them which is who really kickstarted the Chinese electronics manufacturing sector. I wish it was more common actually. Imagine if we shared technology more freely in exchange for reciprocal benefits. For instance Australia (my home country) has a wealth of natural resources yet very little high-tech. We should leverage China's dependency on our raw resources to obtain technology transfer to enrich our country in a mutually beneficial way.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    We just usually call them tariffs and duties.
- kalleboo 4y ago
  There's a pretty big difference between core infrastructure and a video entertainment app
advisedwang 4y ago
TikTok is a threat in many ways: * The extent to which TikTok tailors content, normalization of over-simplified content, ease of creating content and other factors make it great for radicalization. As well as extremist groups, this applies to more regular protest movements and generally an active citizenry, which is not in the interest of the feds. * It has encouraged regular crime and idiocy. For example it spread knowledge of the Kia/Hyundai ignition bypass, and is full of pseudomedical nonsence. It also serves as a useful scapegoat.
- dry_soup 4y ago
  You might as well be describing YouTube or Twitter
ourmandave 4y ago
I have to think it's along the lines of the Strava fitness app data used to create a heat map of the positions of US military personnel. Only a lot, lot worse.
- warner25 4y ago
  I believe this is the answer. I'm a career military officer, but without any inside knowledge, and the most troubling "red team" ideas that I've read involve an adversary targeting our troops and families in their ordinary lives at home, where we're soft targets. Troops accept the fact that they might be told to put themselves at-risk overseas, but they expect that their spouses and children will be safe in their own neighborhoods, that their utilities will keep working[1], that their identities and bank accounts won't be stolen, etc. We go after terrorists and insurgents the same way by learning their social networks and patterns of life. I'm sure that we wish we had stuff on our adversaries like the data from the OPM breach[2], the Strava fitness data, or the kind of data that TikTok can collect on their phones. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34474946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34474946 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
- david_allison 4y ago
  It can get much worse: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expose-nuclear-weapons-secrets-via-flashcard-apps/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expos...
- rchaud 4y ago
  Militaries have extremely rigid rules about personal electronics for this reason. But this isn't about the military, this is about a national ban for everybody.
HashThis 4y ago
Their big concern is NOT data stealing. That is a small thing. They are very worried about the US citizen population saying they are DONE with Lobbyists and congress selling out. US Citizens are done with the GDP being stolen via rigged industries (pharma, 2008 crisis, Medical, taxes, etc.) US Citizens starting to all agree together on TikTok, enables citizens to galvanize into a united front. The US Gov needs to control US citizens, by banning them. This is why US intel services have removed 100% of US citizens in militia community groups people from Facebook. 100% have their facebook accounts have been shut down. They can't shoot people over facebook. The gov's risk is that people see many other citizens galvanize that they find congress w/lobbyists effectively stealing GDP.
TheBlight 4y ago
Agree. I've never used the app but I'm curious about what these threat vectors are. But it's never discussed. It's just nebulously "bad."
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  One concrete badness IMO is the black box algorithm of it. It's controlled semi-directly by the CCP, and they openly use a different algorithm and different filters in china vs the US, and not just for cultural reasons. Letting the CCP put it's fingers on the scale of what gets fed to millions of impressionable teens is just as stupid and dangerous as letting facebook continue to do so, with the only difference being Zuckerburg isn't a nation-state actor who is openly our rival. There is a lot of possible power for China to attempt to utilize in TikTok, do you really think they won't?
  - rchaud 4y ago
    > Zuckerburg isn't a nation-state actor who is openly our rival. Zuckerberg has openly violated the privacy of millions of Americans, and been fined the largest amount in FTC history for doing so. He might not be in the Axis of Evil, but the fact that he continues to operate his division-by-doomscroll machine on American soil makes this TikTok talk sound pretty ridiculous.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  The one mentioned is that the Chinese could potentially use TikTok to control the narrative about a topic. Which is true, but it's the kind of thing everybody else does all of the time.
- belltaco 4y ago
  A live example https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/22/23522808/tiktok-journalists-data-accessed-bytedance-internal-audit https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/22/23522808/tiktok-journali...
- lm28469 4y ago
  Tiktok in China seems to provibe much bethier content, especially to teens Science VS twerking how to be a good citizen VS tide pod challenge &c. It's not a military or political threat per say, just a slow brain rot over an entire generation https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-between-tik-tok-in-china-and-the-us https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...
ashwagary 4y ago
Part of the fear may be that any compelling case made against tiktok could strongly serve the purpose of getting US social apps banned from the rest of the world for the same reasons.
legitster 4y ago
The actual national security concern is probably for state-sponsored psyops. We know Russia was able to pump a bunch of psyops campaigns into Western social media, most NATO governments now have dedicated branches that root out this kind of information. But Russia's programs were really obtuse and relatively easy to trace. On the other hand, TikTok is all about flooding people with niche content areas. And content is consumed so much faster that it propagates quicker. And keep in mind TikTok is still state-sponsored by China despite the algorithm being so addictive that it is banned domestically. My tinfoil hat is that US officials have reports that the Chinese state is having influence on the American news cycles, but doesn't want to admit that it's made its way already into news media and politics issues.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Your post can also be used as an argument for how disinformation claims are being weaponized. Hamilton 68 was a key figure in the Russian disinformation stuff. They claimed to have pinpointed hundreds of Russian bots and used this to create an interactive dashboard, headed by a former FBI counterintelligence official, enabling real time tracking of the latest "Russian disinformation." It was repeatedly referenced by both the media and high level politicians alike. This included Adam Schiff, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, PBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and many more. Mother Jones ran at least 14 articles on their "research" alone. The problem is that this was, itself, all complete disinformation. Their "Russian bots" were largely made of normal, and very real, conservative Americans. [1] Many were of substantial note, including authors, lawyers (one had published a book on the constitution), news editors/hosts, and more. So you ended up in this zone where anything conservative individuals were talking about was immediately claimed to be Russian disinformation, which was equated with fake news. But you'll never see anything about this in those same news sites that ran stories based on the disinformation. Nor is their any grand demand that we shut down Hamilton 68. In fact you can still find their dashboard on the "Securing Democracy" page. [2] So normal genuine conversation was being censored under the guise of 'securing democracy against state sponsored disinformation' while major examples of genuine disinformation, which did (and continue) completely distort democracy, remain completely ignored. Very little of it has anything to do with integrity, security, or safety. It's all petty politics. And supporting the government banning apps, with no proven misdeeds, is one heck of a nasty precedent. [1] - https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105 [2] - https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/hamilton-dashboard/ https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/hamilton-dashboard/
lazyeye 4y ago
Considering nation-states send nuclear submarines to the bottom of the ocean to tap network cables, assuming they wont use a massive trove of tracking data (largest in human history) that just falls into their lap, is extraordinarily naive. Read any book on the history of espionage to see the efforts made to collect intelligence. Suggesting TikTok data wont be used in an intelligence context is simply ridiculous.
epolanski 4y ago
It's like when they blame Russians for hacks and never give any evidence.
tcmart14 4y ago
Same here. I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth. After all, I am of the beliefs that no tactics are "off the board." The CIA used vaccine programs as a means to track islamic terrorists. So, I wouldnt be as socked pikachu faced at China using TikTok data. But it would be nice to get real hard data. I remember people making all sorts of claims about China bugging hardware and that is why we have to ban Huaweii, but all the third party analysis I've seen of their hardware pretty much concluded, "the hardware is not bugged. The most criminal thing about this is they advertise it as a latest gen i5 but its really a i5 from 2 gens ago and probably sloppy second bunk chips. You know, chips that can't get sold to like Lenovo because they failed QC."

ismokedoinks 4y ago

Not that I have any deep subject matter knowledge but I agree, it feels like app store McCarthyism

yamtaddle 4y ago
ALL of these sorts of social media programs are terrifyingly-capable spying platforms. It'd be weird if we didn't regard one controlled by a foreign adversary as a threat. I think the domestic ones are, too—but they feed info to US law enforcement and intelligence and are making lots of money, so we can't crack down on those, I guess.
eatonphil 4y ago
McCarthyism was primarily a political thing by politicians. The FBI chief being discussed here, Wray, is a political appointment but not an elected politician so hopefully the appointment shields them from politics. Nevermind that the DoJ tries pretty hard to be independent of the President. But beyond that, this particular chief was appointed during the previous administration of a different party. And has served in both party's administrations. I have no position on TikTok, but Wray saying this is not really comparable to McCarthy.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  I feel like the FBI has politicized quite a bit since Comey.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  The FBI chief is and has always been highly political. J Edgar Hoover was a extreme anti-communist and was investigating suspected communists, infiltrating CPUSA and creating blacklists at the exact same time that McCarthy was conducting his hearings. In fact the McCarthyism acticle on Wikipedia has a whole section about the FBI. The FBI was deeply involved in McCarthyism.
- lehi 4y ago
  Something being political does not require it to be partisan. Joseph McCarthy worked hand in hand with then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, and Wray was appointed by a president who also tried to ban TikTok.
  - eatonphil 4y ago
    Sure, but being kept on by an administration of the opposing party goes a bit to show that he is also not particularly partisan.
rchaud 4y ago
It definitely sounds like that. But to me this feels more like 'testing the waters' to see if the argument sticks with the American people. I don't think it will, because they provided even a hint of a smoking gun. Eventually, I can see these hearings continue, but the line of argument will change to protecting American jobs, especially if Meta's ad revenues fall.

favaq 4y ago

It's the Huawei story all over again.

jpgvm 4y ago
i.e we don't want to compete so lets just ban the foreign competitor we don't want to compete with.
- huhtenberg 4y ago
  A competitor under full control of Chinese government that owes its birth to a full copy of Cisco firmware deposited by Cisco with said government as a condition for entering Chinese market. That Huawei or is there another one?
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    Technology transfer isn't illegal, Cisco was happy with the commercial arrangement. More importantly Motorola before them which is who really kickstarted the Chinese electronics manufacturing sector. I wish it was more common actually. Imagine if we shared technology more freely in exchange for reciprocal benefits. For instance Australia (my home country) has a wealth of natural resources yet very little high-tech. We should leverage China's dependency on our raw resources to obtain technology transfer to enrich our country in a mutually beneficial way.
- falcolas 4y ago
  We just usually call them tariffs and duties.
kalleboo 4y ago
There's a pretty big difference between core infrastructure and a video entertainment app

advisedwang 4y ago

TikTok is a threat in many ways: * The extent to which TikTok tailors content, normalization of over-simplified content, ease of creating content and other factors make it great for radicalization. As well as extremist groups, this applies to more regular protest movements and generally an active citizenry, which is not in the interest of the feds. * It has encouraged regular crime and idiocy. For example it spread knowledge of the Kia/Hyundai ignition bypass, and is full of pseudomedical nonsence. It also serves as a useful scapegoat.

dry_soup 4y ago
You might as well be describing YouTube or Twitter

ourmandave 4y ago

I have to think it's along the lines of the Strava fitness app data used to create a heat map of the positions of US military personnel. Only a lot, lot worse.

warner25 4y ago
I believe this is the answer. I'm a career military officer, but without any inside knowledge, and the most troubling "red team" ideas that I've read involve an adversary targeting our troops and families in their ordinary lives at home, where we're soft targets. Troops accept the fact that they might be told to put themselves at-risk overseas, but they expect that their spouses and children will be safe in their own neighborhoods, that their utilities will keep working[1], that their identities and bank accounts won't be stolen, etc. We go after terrorists and insurgents the same way by learning their social networks and patterns of life. I'm sure that we wish we had stuff on our adversaries like the data from the OPM breach[2], the Strava fitness data, or the kind of data that TikTok can collect on their phones. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34474946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34474946 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
david_allison 4y ago
It can get much worse: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expose-nuclear-weapons-secrets-via-flashcard-apps/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expos...
rchaud 4y ago
Militaries have extremely rigid rules about personal electronics for this reason. But this isn't about the military, this is about a national ban for everybody.

HashThis 4y ago

Their big concern is NOT data stealing. That is a small thing. They are very worried about the US citizen population saying they are DONE with Lobbyists and congress selling out. US Citizens are done with the GDP being stolen via rigged industries (pharma, 2008 crisis, Medical, taxes, etc.) US Citizens starting to all agree together on TikTok, enables citizens to galvanize into a united front. The US Gov needs to control US citizens, by banning them. This is why US intel services have removed 100% of US citizens in militia community groups people from Facebook. 100% have their facebook accounts have been shut down. They can't shoot people over facebook. The gov's risk is that people see many other citizens galvanize that they find congress w/lobbyists effectively stealing GDP.

TheBlight 4y ago

Agree. I've never used the app but I'm curious about what these threat vectors are. But it's never discussed. It's just nebulously "bad."

mrguyorama 4y ago
One concrete badness IMO is the black box algorithm of it. It's controlled semi-directly by the CCP, and they openly use a different algorithm and different filters in china vs the US, and not just for cultural reasons. Letting the CCP put it's fingers on the scale of what gets fed to millions of impressionable teens is just as stupid and dangerous as letting facebook continue to do so, with the only difference being Zuckerburg isn't a nation-state actor who is openly our rival. There is a lot of possible power for China to attempt to utilize in TikTok, do you really think they won't?
- rchaud 4y ago
  > Zuckerburg isn't a nation-state actor who is openly our rival. Zuckerberg has openly violated the privacy of millions of Americans, and been fined the largest amount in FTC history for doing so. He might not be in the Axis of Evil, but the fact that he continues to operate his division-by-doomscroll machine on American soil makes this TikTok talk sound pretty ridiculous.
boomboomsubban 4y ago
The one mentioned is that the Chinese could potentially use TikTok to control the narrative about a topic. Which is true, but it's the kind of thing everybody else does all of the time.
belltaco 4y ago
A live example https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/22/23522808/tiktok-journalists-data-accessed-bytedance-internal-audit https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/22/23522808/tiktok-journali...
lm28469 4y ago
Tiktok in China seems to provibe much bethier content, especially to teens Science VS twerking how to be a good citizen VS tide pod challenge &c. It's not a military or political threat per say, just a slow brain rot over an entire generation https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-between-tik-tok-in-china-and-the-us https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...

ashwagary 4y ago

Part of the fear may be that any compelling case made against tiktok could strongly serve the purpose of getting US social apps banned from the rest of the world for the same reasons.

legitster 4y ago

The actual national security concern is probably for state-sponsored psyops. We know Russia was able to pump a bunch of psyops campaigns into Western social media, most NATO governments now have dedicated branches that root out this kind of information. But Russia's programs were really obtuse and relatively easy to trace. On the other hand, TikTok is all about flooding people with niche content areas. And content is consumed so much faster that it propagates quicker. And keep in mind TikTok is still state-sponsored by China despite the algorithm being so addictive that it is banned domestically. My tinfoil hat is that US officials have reports that the Chinese state is having influence on the American news cycles, but doesn't want to admit that it's made its way already into news media and politics issues.

somenameforme 4y ago
Your post can also be used as an argument for how disinformation claims are being weaponized. Hamilton 68 was a key figure in the Russian disinformation stuff. They claimed to have pinpointed hundreds of Russian bots and used this to create an interactive dashboard, headed by a former FBI counterintelligence official, enabling real time tracking of the latest "Russian disinformation." It was repeatedly referenced by both the media and high level politicians alike. This included Adam Schiff, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, PBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and many more. Mother Jones ran at least 14 articles on their "research" alone. The problem is that this was, itself, all complete disinformation. Their "Russian bots" were largely made of normal, and very real, conservative Americans. [1] Many were of substantial note, including authors, lawyers (one had published a book on the constitution), news editors/hosts, and more. So you ended up in this zone where anything conservative individuals were talking about was immediately claimed to be Russian disinformation, which was equated with fake news. But you'll never see anything about this in those same news sites that ran stories based on the disinformation. Nor is their any grand demand that we shut down Hamilton 68. In fact you can still find their dashboard on the "Securing Democracy" page. [2] So normal genuine conversation was being censored under the guise of 'securing democracy against state sponsored disinformation' while major examples of genuine disinformation, which did (and continue) completely distort democracy, remain completely ignored. Very little of it has anything to do with integrity, security, or safety. It's all petty politics. And supporting the government banning apps, with no proven misdeeds, is one heck of a nasty precedent. [1] - https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105 [2] - https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/hamilton-dashboard/ https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/hamilton-dashboard/

lazyeye 4y ago

Considering nation-states send nuclear submarines to the bottom of the ocean to tap network cables, assuming they wont use a massive trove of tracking data (largest in human history) that just falls into their lap, is extraordinarily naive. Read any book on the history of espionage to see the efforts made to collect intelligence. Suggesting TikTok data wont be used in an intelligence context is simply ridiculous.

epolanski 4y ago

It's like when they blame Russians for hacks and never give any evidence.

tcmart14 4y ago

Same here. I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth. After all, I am of the beliefs that no tactics are "off the board." The CIA used vaccine programs as a means to track islamic terrorists. So, I wouldnt be as socked pikachu faced at China using TikTok data. But it would be nice to get real hard data. I remember people making all sorts of claims about China bugging hardware and that is why we have to ban Huaweii, but all the third party analysis I've seen of their hardware pretty much concluded, "the hardware is not bugged. The most criminal thing about this is they advertise it as a latest gen i5 but its really a i5 from 2 gens ago and probably sloppy second bunk chips. You know, chips that can't get sold to like Lenovo because they failed QC."