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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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So... Now Tiktok gets to be a surveillance tool for the US government like every other major social media? Wonderful.
Why are you reacting this way to laws which seem very specifically aimed at curbing (or attempting to curb) the use of Tiktok for Chinese surveillance? If the US government was demanding that Tiktok install a keylogger and provide the data to it, that would justify what you're saying. But, as I keep repeatedly saying with sourcing, it's the opposite. Do you have an argument for why this represents any kind of US surveillance, beyond just repeating the assertion?
Edit: Let me ask in a little more distilled form. Why, if the US government wanted to use Tiktok for surveillance, would they keep attempting to ban it from various classes of people's phones, and keep talking about banning it from everybody's? That seems counterproductive to the surveillance mission, no?
The US has consensual access to pretty much every major player in the social media marketplace (as we know from the Snowden leaks)... Except TikTok.
Until TikTok opens itself up to US surveillance, they should be banning it to push users towards platforms that the US does have access to. Watch them roll back the bans if these policies actually get implemented.
I believe this to be true, yes. (It's acknowledged that they have access through subpeonas, and personally I think they have active spy operations in pretty much every major internet community including Tiktok. They have active spy operations in actively hostile foreign governments, and compared to that, getting clandestine access to a large internet community is child's play.)
What part of the Snowden leaks? The big things I'm aware of Snowden revealing were massive efforts to capture and store phone and backbone raw-packet data, partial compromise of TLS, and another massive effort at compromising email. Then there were some other more minor specifically targeted things, but I didn't see any social media in those. Can you send me a source on this?
I think I spent a pretty good length of time documentation and explaining why I think that these rules do not represent opening up Tiktok to US surveillance. Y'all keep repeating that these new rules represent opening up Tiktok to US surveillance, and then riffing on from there the further conclusions. If you want to talk to me about this, can you back it up a little and say why you think these specific rules represent surveillance?
E.g. the NSA (according to rumor) installed their hardware decades ago at some AT&T backbone sites, with consent of AT&T. When Verizon later became a major player, they tapped into major Verizon backbones, without the consent of Verizon (as was leaked by Snowden.) Both of those are surveillance. What they didn't do was get involved in AT&T's terms of service, ask for the right to veto hiring certain executives, conduct audits and assessments of AT&T's operations... because that's unnecessary if what you want to do is surveillance. You just surveil. Why, then, are you saying that when the US wants to do those things to Tiktok, that represents some kind of surveillance?
Literally the entire PRISM operation? It gathered internet traffic from all major US tech companies and could pretty much access any data those companies had on you.
The US can't really force a foreign entity to comply, so this is the next best thing. If anything, it means that TikTok's systems are so robust that US alphabet agencies haven't found an easy way in yet.
So, I just looked this up. I honestly had some of the details of it wrong in my memory (I remembered it as pretty much only backbone packet eavesdropping, with FISA warrants for a company's internal data as a separate thing, but Snowden describes those two things as working hand in hand under PRISM which I guess makes sense.)
Are you saying that TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. is currently exempt from FISA warrants? If a FISA court issues a legally binding request to USDS for internal data, USDS tells them to get lost? If that's what you're saying, which part of these proposed regulations is going to change that?
That's what keeps blowing my mind about this -- the US loves doing surveillance on people's internet stuff, I'll agree with you 100% on that, and that that's in general a bad thing. But, as far as I can tell, opposing these particular regulations because you're opposed to the US doing that genuinely just makes no sense.
If you said that Project Texas was a cover for US surveillance, that would actually make some sense, since that was what put US Tiktok operations physically and corporate-structure-wise more within the US hence subject to US courts and physical spying. But that already happened. Forbes is writing this article pretending that now that they've seen the new regulations, they're a shocking overreach expanding US surveillance, and I honestly just don't see anything in the new regulations that would justify that statement.
Let me ask something else: Are all these countries also singling out Tiktok for this same type of treatment out of this same desire to surveil Tiktok users?
None of those countries have negotiated with TikTok for a plan of operations: they've been following guidelines shared by US intelligence... Are you at all surprised by their behaviour?
Are you saying that TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. is currently exempt from FISA warrants? If a FISA court issues a legally binding request to USDS for internal data, USDS tells them to get lost? If that’s what you’re saying, which part of these proposed regulations is going to change that?