A senior Justice Department official has shown a new attitude about the threats the U.S. believes Chinese applications like TikTok and WeChat represent for national security.
John Demers, the assistant attorney general of the Division of Homeland Security, discussed President Trump’s recent executive orders similar to China-owned programs in an online interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Wednesday, offering the top points to date on Trump. Administration. thinking about the possible ban next month of the popular TikTok video sharing app, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance and the Messaging app WeChat, which is owned by Shenzhen-based Chinese global conglomerate, Tencent.
Applications “really pose the challenge that TikTok illustrates,” which is “the amount of knowledge they gather about our lives,” Demers said.
“Once you start looking for this from a national security attitude and think about the knowledge that the phone and apps accumulate about you, it’s a very different query if a country with values very different from ours,” like China,” collects all that knowledge,” Demers said. He said the Chinese government uses this kind of knowledge to expand synthetic intelligence functions and to co-opt potential intelligence targets, which he called a primary counterintelligence problem. The Justice Department official said that the “99%” of knowledge can simply be ignored through China, however, having access to the knowledge gathered through TikTok may allow Chinese intelligence officials to “extract” it to target an express person, by seeking their geolocation. aptitude and finance. Arrangement and courtship or married life “to think about the most productive way to manipulate it if the purpose is co-optation”.
It has also repositioned China ownership of the app in the broader context of knowledge gaps over the years they have connected to China, adding hacks from the Office of Personnel Management, credit reporting firm Equifax, Anthem Health Insurance Company, and others. Demers said there is “Chinese appetite for giant volumes of non-public sensitive information” while stealing archives of tens of millions of U.S. citizens. And the Justice Department official highlighted China’s history of “specific acquisitions” of corporations that would possibly not be “traditionally considered” as national security hazards, but which help China unload knowledge.
“The appeal of TikTok is that you have one of the first times that other people communicate and provide the app with their delicate non-public knowledge, first when they communicate … and then there’s the knowledge that the app collects. while he’s on his phone. And like many other apps, this app collects geolocation knowledge if you turn it on, collect the touch list and track your phone and use other apps on your phone… but it can also be used, abusively, across the state. So one is the delicate piece of knowledge, ” said Demers. “The moment is Array … Uighurs, protests in Hong Kong, Tibet, Taiwan, all these problems, there are many reports of content censorship from the point of view of foreign influence.”
Demers added: “These are the national security hazards associated with TikTok. The appeal of TikTok is that you have an example of Americans voluntarily connecting to this product, rather than the Chinese stealing knowledge or the Chinese buy the knowledge, and that’s what the recent decree intended to remedy.”
Microsoft plans to purchase U.S. operations for TikTok, however, any acquisitions will need to pass a national security review through the U.S. Foreign Investment Committee. Trump’s executive order stated that TikTok’s knowledge collection “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party to access Americans’ private and private data, potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal workers and contractors, create non-public data records for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.
Demers also turned to WeChat, noting that the app collects much of the knowledge that TikTok does and “is used here in the United States as an approach through the Chinese Communist Party to talk to Chinese-born Americans here in the United States” and to help create.” bubbles “around Chinese academics in the United States by sending them anti-American messages while in the United States. Array Demers said China’s purpose was ” to send chinese student here to reap all the benefits of American technical education, but did not allow them to be contaminated with concepts like “liberal democracy or devout freedom” and said that “the surrounding area will have to be traversed,” he argued that WeChat is a challenge of “foreign influence.”
ByteDance and TikTok have continually said that they will never deliver knowledge of TikTok users to the Chinese government, however, national security experts have expressed fear about China’s own national intelligence law of 2017, which requires Chinese corporations to help Chinese intelligence when requested.
Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s executive leader in the United States, promised that “we’re going anywhere.” TikTok recently hired dozens of lobbyists in the United States to protect the Chinese platform.
While some of the president’s critics point to TikTok because some TikTok users have said they have exaggerated Trump’s June rally attendance in Tulsa, the Chinese app was on the U.S. government’s radar much earlier.
The Pentagon has banned TikTok service members at the expiration of 2019, and the Transportation Security Administration, Homeland Security branch and State Department have also banned TikTok on government devices. The House and Senate voted to save TikTok’s federal workers, and former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential crusade also called on staff to eliminate TikTok.