TikTok hysteria notwithstanding, the heads of the CIA, FBI and Intel
community are careful to note that any threat to national security is purely
hypothetical.
There's no evidence that TikTok has ever coordinated with the Chinese
government.
TIKTOK THREAT IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL, U.S. INTELLIGENCE ADMITS
“We have nothing to add,” the FBI said, when asked for evidence of TikTok’s
actual threat.
Ken Klippenstein
March 16 2024
THE PURPORTED THREAT of TikTok to U.S. national security has inflated into
a hysteria of Chinese spy balloon proportions, but the official record tells a
different story: U.S. intelligence has produced no evidence that the popular
social media site has ever coordinated with Beijing. That fact hasn’t stopped
many in Congress and even President Joe Biden from touting legislation that
would force the sale of the app, as the TikTok frenzy fills the news pages with
empty conjecture and innuendo.
In interviews and testimony to Congress about TikTok, leaders of the FBI,
CIA, and the director of national intelligence have in fact been careful to
qualify the national security threat posed by TikTok as purely hypothetical.
With access to much of the government’s most sensitive intelligence, they
are well placed to know.
The basic charge is that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese
company, could be compelled by the government in Beijing to use their app
in targeted operations to manipulate public opinion, collect mass data on
Americans, and even spy on individual users. (TikTok says it has never shared
U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked.
This week, TikTok CEO Shou Chew said that “there’s no CCP ownership” of
ByteDance, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.)
Though top national security officials seem happy to echo these allegations
of Chinese control of TikTok, they stop short of saying that China has ever
actually coordinated with the company.
Typical is an interview CIA Director William Burns gave to CNN in 2022,
where he said it was “troubling to see what the Chinese government could
do to manipulate TikTok.” Not what the Chinese government has done, but
what it could do.
What China could do turns out to be a recurring theme in the statements of
the top national security officials.
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FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a 2022 talk at the University of
Michigan that TikTok’s “parent company is controlled by the Chinese
government, and it gives them the potential [emphasis added] to leverage
the app in ways that I think should concern us.” Wray went on to cite TikTok’s
ability to control its recommendation algorithm, which he said “allows them
to manipulate content and if they want to [emphasis added], to use it for
influence operations.”
In the same talk, Wray three times referred to the Chinese government’s
“ability” to spy on TikTok users but once again stopped short of saying that
they do so.
“They also have the ability to collect data through it on users which can be
used for traditional espionage operations, for example,” Wray said. “They
also have the ability on it to get access, they have essential access to
software devices. So you’re talking about millions of devices and that gives
them the ability to engage in different kinds of malicious cyber activity
through that.”
Wray is referring to the potential ability, according to U.S. intelligence, to
commandeer phones and computers connecting to TikTok through apps and
the website.
In testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee in November
2022, Wray was even more circumspect, stressing that the Chinese
government could use TikTok for foreign influence operations but only “if
they so chose.” When asked by Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., if the
Chinese government has used TikTok to collect information about Americans
for purposes other than targeted ads and content, Wray only could
acknowledge that it was a “possibility.”
“I would say we do have national security concerns, at least from the FBI’s
end, about TikTok,” Wray said. “They include the possibility that the Chinese
government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or
control the recommendation algorithm which could be used for foreign
influence operations if they so chose.”
The lack of evidence is not for lack of trying, as Wray alluded to during the
same hearing. When asked by Harshbarger what is being done to investigate
the Chinese government’s involvement in TikTok, Wray replied that he would
see whether “any specific investigative work … could be incorporated into
the classified briefing I referred to.”
The FBI, when asked by The Intercept if it has any evidence that TikTok has
coordinated with the Chinese government, referred to Wray’s prior
statements — many of which are quoted in this article. “We have nothing to
add to the Director’s comments,” an FBI spokesperson said.
The fiscal year 2025 FBI budget request to Congress, which outlines its
resource priorities in the coming year, was unveiled this week but makes no
mention of TikTok in its 94 pages. In fact, it makes no mention of China
whatsoever.
Since at least 2020, the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the
United States has investigated the implications of ByteDance’s acquisition of
TikTok. The investigation followed an executive order by former President
Donald Trump that sought to force TikTok to divest from its parent company.
When that investigation failed to force a sale, a frustrated Congress decided
to get involved, with the House passing legislation on Wednesday that would
force ByteDance to sell TikTok.
In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Director of
National Intelligence Avril Haines, the highest-ranking intelligence official in
the U.S. government, was asked about the possibility that China might use
TikTok to influence the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. Haines said
only that it could not be discounted.
“We cannot rule out that the CCP could use it,” Haines said.
The relatively measured tone adopted by top intelligence officials contrasts
sharply with the alarmism emanating from Congress. In 2022, Rep. Mike
Gallagher, R-Wis., deemed TikTok “digital fentanyl,” going on to co-author a
column in the Washington Post with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., calling for
TikTok to be banned. Gallagher and Rubio later introduced legislation to do
so, and 39 states have, as of this writing, banned the use of TikTok on
government devices.
None of this is to say that China hasn’t used TikTok to influence public
opinion and even, it turns out, to try to interfere in American elections.
“TikTok accounts run by a [People’s Republic of China] propaganda arm
reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S.
midterm election cycle in 2022,” says the annual Intelligence Community
threat assessment released on Monday. But the assessment provides no
evidence that TikTok coordinated with the Chinese government. In fact,
governments — including the United States — are known to use social media
to influence public opinion abroad.
“The problem with TikTok isn’t related to their ownership; it’s a problem of
surveillance capitalism and it’s true of all social media companies,” computer
security expert Bruce Schneier told The Intercept. “In 2016 Russia did this
with Facebook and they didn’t have to own Facebook — they just bought ads
like everybody else.”
This week, Reuters reported that as president, Trump signed a covert action
order authorizing the CIA to use social media to influence and manipulate
domestic Chinese public opinion and views on China. Other covert American
cyber influence programs are known to exist with regard to Russia, Iran,
terrorist groups, and other foreign actors.
In other words, everybody’s doing it.
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Yu, who pledged under penalty of perjury that he is
telling the truth, alleges he viewed access logs
showing that CCP officials — whom Yu described as part
of a special “committee” with dedicated physical access
to ByteDance’s Beijing offices — used a so-called “god
credential” to bypass any privacy protections the
company may have otherwise applied to the TikTok data.
“The Committee and external investigators used the god
credential to identify and locate the Hong Kong
protestors, civil rights activists, and supporters of
the protests,” Yu alleged in the filing. “From the
logs, I saw that the Committee accessed the
protestors’, civil rights activists’, and supporters’
unique user data, locations, and communications.”
..."US officials have characterized their suspicions of
TikTok in much broader terms, describing fears of the
Chinese government using TikTok data to inform large-
scale intelligence gathering operations or to promote
disinformation campaigns at a societal level.
When Rob Joyce, the National Security Agency’s director
of cybersecurity, was asked by reporters in December to
articulate his security concerns about TikTok, he
offered a general warning about the potential for harm
rather than a specific allegation.
“People are always looking for the smoking gun in these
technologies,” Joyce said. “I characterize it much more
as a loaded gun.”
TikTok CEO Shou Chew previously told US lawmakers that
the company has never been asked by the Chinese
government for data on its US users, and would never
comply with such a request. TikTok has also said it is
implementing a plan to store US user data on third-
party US-based servers, with access to that data
controlled by US employees. The company is moving to
implement a similar solution for European data.
But Chew and other TikTok officials have also balked at
answering specific questions about the nature of
TikTok’s relationship to ByteDance or ByteDance’s
relationship to the Chinese government.
The allegations by Yu concerning Hong Kong dissidents
are much closer in nature to the type of concerns
raised by the US government. They imply the direct
interference of Chinese officials in the business
operations of a private company, ultimately leading to
broad-based surveillance intended to shut down
democratic activity.
Yu’s claims have still yet to be proven. But they
provide a rare, if not the first, substantive
accusation of what many have hypothesized as merely a
possibility."
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