TikTok and National Security

From the U.S. to the E.U., lawmakers are banning TikTok from government-owned devices due to concerns about the platform's Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Now, the U.S. government is considering whether to ban it entirely.?

Social media excels at using targeted content for personal/professional/political gain. It exists, almost entirely, for its users to exert influence. Staunch critics have long argued that this kind of information exposure and sharing is dangerous for myriad reasons. Now that one of the most popular apps in the world is subject to the laws of a Communist regime, U.S. government officials and some private citizens are taking a hard look at the implications of its widespread use.?

Will banning TikTok actually improve national security??

Social media is a big part of many Americans’ lives. According to the Pew Research Center , approximately 82% of Americans between the ages of 18-49 use at least one social media site daily. For most users, there is the tacit understanding that using a free social media site means that they are the product. Translation: When any site offers up fun and games for free, and the user is required to input personal information, the platform’s provider (“technology company”) is mining that personal data for financial gain. The provider is also tracking usage to understand user trends, habits, and preferences. When it comes to social media, in particular, frequent, heavy usage returns more data to the provider, making the user that much more attractive for data harvesting and targeting. The Cambridge Analytica scandal featured this fact, front and center. Many other tech company gaffs have kept privacy issues top-of-mind since.

Despite well-known personal privacy concerns, the seedy underbelly of social media has evolved. There is no end to how people will use social media sites and apps. They have become a symbol of personal expression and freedom of speech, a mechanism to reach an audience devoid of geographic boundaries. When it comes to posting ideas and opinions, Americans have a lot of leeway in what they can write or say, due to their First Amendment rights. Whether the information is true, partially true, mostly distorted, or entirely fabricated, social media users in America enjoy their freedom of speech.?

Social media is also a haven for so-called self expression, or “alternative facts,” even though the true aim of this “information” is influence. Influence, in all its forms, has one goal, and that’s to affect others’ thought processes. Oftentimes this goal is well meaning. Other times…well…

Social media and “influence”

The spread of mis- and disinformation grew so egregious by 2017/2018 that MIT scientists published a massive study ? to show how and why “fake news” travels faster and farther than the truth. A main vehicle for mis-/disinformation: Social media.?

Controversy on social media is, thus, not new. But most major social media sites were born and bred in Silicon Valley, giving U.S. users more comfort that any maliciousness was due to the founders’ unreasonable instructions to a helpless workforce. The concept of “influence” meant something completely different when it occurred on the platform of a U.S.-based organization. Many U.S. users thought (and still think) that misinformation/disinformation and “alternative facts” were/are problematic, but less so when they were/are perpetrated by their own people, in the U.S.?

Then TikTok emerged — with a vengeance. Fueled by boredom during the COVID pandemic lockdowns, TikTok usage skyrocketed around the world, with U.S. adoption leading the way. Given worldwide social and political tensions at the time, the Trump administration honed in on the app’s Chinese ownership. TikTok is owned by the Chinese internet giant, ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing, and therefore subject to China’s National Intelligence Law which states that all Chinese citizens and companies must “support, assist, and co-operate” with Chinese intelligence efforts.

Now, it’s not like the U.S. doesn’t conduct its own surveillance on U.S. citizens (ahem, Edward Snowden ). But, to many Americans, the idea that TikTok is run, in essence, by a Communist party is unacceptable.?

At the time of the Trump administration’s proposed ban, courts were not ready to concede such an extent of wrongdoing by TikTok or its owners. Now, three years later, the U.S. government is concerned about the potential harm China could cause if it were to use the app and all the data it collects as part of its national security program.

Government warnings

In response to the Chinese government’s stance on data handling and personal privacy, both the FBI and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have warned that TikTok administrators could be forced to turn over the data of any TikTok user. And TikTok’s data collection is excessive, just like that of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tinder, Uber, and numerous other apps and websites. Nonetheless, Chinese ownership of TikTok has led the U.S. government (and several other allied countries) to ban its use on government-owned and operated mobile devices. The premise is that, by banning usage on government devices, the authoritarian and unfriendly regime can’t harvest user data that might be helpful in the Chinese government’s quest for worldwide totalitarianism.

This thought process is somewhat faulty, since users can always get around restrictions if they want to badly enough. However, banning a direct pipeline to data does erect barriers, at least, making it harder for the Chinese government to get their hands on U.S. government employees' data and actions directly.

But as time has gone on, U.S. lawmakers have started thinking again about a total ban on the app for all U.S. citizens. To prevent that from happening, TikTok has been putting significant effort into restructuring the company. They’ve opened a U.S. office, hired U.S.-based executives, and are migrating all the data of U.S. users to servers controlled by Oracle, an effort they’re calling “Project Texas .”

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Despite TikTok’s moves, the Biden administration is not convinced; they are pushing for ByteDance to divest its interest in TikTok. Some security experts agree. Researchers who’ve seen what could happen at the hands of skilled attackers are also calling for a total ban on the app. Their argument: Any data collection engine is an attractive cyber attack target. A data collection engine with hundreds of millions of users who live in an area that said attackers want to dominate…that’s not a risk worth taking.?

Despite their concerns, there is little evidence that ByteDance is actually conducting any nation-state activity on Bella Poarch, the British Promise Cats, or any of the other 3.5 billion users worldwide. Still, the potential exists. Plenty of adversarial regimes have carried out covert operations — using social media — in the past, only for the victim nation to find out they’ve been duped at a later date. So could China be secretly harvesting U.S. users’ TikTok data? Sure. At this point, though, there is no evidence of it happening.

An additional concern has been expressed; given the amount of data collected on users, and how impressionable the general public is (see MIT study, quoted above), threat actors could use the app to brainwash users by deploying highly targeted content. In particular, lawmakers are concerned that the Communist government could feed pro-China messages via the app. In other words, Chinese officials could use social media influence to rally support for their causes and/or recruit “insiders.” This is what social media does best: taking content that is attractive to certain users and promoting it to them for personal/professional/political gain.

Tailoring content to users is not new. Again, U.S.-based tech giants do it all the time. Elon Musk even bought Twitter so he could push the messages he wants to push to his users and suppress any contrary points of view. However, critics of TikTok say that because of the way TikTok recommends content to users — by applying algorithms that target individuals — it could push pro-China sentiment to the most vulnerable users and manipulate them into becoming vehicles for Chinese disinformation sprawl.

Is TikTok a national security threat?

The real question is this: Is TikTok a national security threat? My answer? Potentially. But no more so than any other social media platform. We’ve already seen the type of damage that can be done. Facebook and the 2018 election is the prime example of how communication platforms (a.k.a. social media) can be manipulated by anyone with access (and again, where there’s a will, there’s a way, national bans be damned).

The threat of domestic influence using false rhetoric is just as likely as a foreign actor exerting their influence. We see it every day, on social media and in mainstream media. The only difference is that China is a politically adversarial nation-state that maintains horrific policies about how it treats humans. But really, most Americans are less interested in the human rights of Chinese citizens than they are the threat of nuclear war or Chinese companies stealing U.S. jobs.

In truth, Americans should be concerned with all of the above. However, globalization also offers tremendous advantages; it’s one of the ways Americans know, or can learn about, the inhumane treatment of Chinese citizens and try to affect positive change. Globalization gives people in underserved or underdeveloped countries more opportunity than in a world that operates based on geographic borders. Globalization financially benefits consumers because no one company or country can have a monopoly on building “the best” products. So we should not shun a global economy.

Regardless, there is no way to halt the worldwide financial engine that is greed and power. The U.S. is not going to stop buying products from China. Full stop. Should we? That’s a huge topic for a much more in-depth debate by people who are much smarter and more educated than I.?

So, is the app really the issue? Maybe. It is a vehicle, a “fast pass” of sorts, to Americans’ data. But it’s far from the only way the Chinese government is surveilling consumers. It’s far from the only way China can exert its influence. It’s, today, the most widely deployed avenue of potential threat, and so the U.S. is attempting to mitigate a vulnerability before it becomes a true national threat.

But TikTok is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s getting the U.S. government a lot of good press, but let’s not put up a false flag. Fortifying systems and data repositories that contain actual national secrets, hardening access controls, preventing lateral movement inside networks, tightening up the supply chain, and more are critical efforts that need vast improvement, more so than TikTok.?

Let’s not forget about defense in depth while we’re watching dance videos and wishing we didn’t have to triage yet another security alert.