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The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

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Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#281

Post by sdsd »

dd36 wrote: post #53
mistermann wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the US public have any genuine, identifiable democratic power over the FBI?

Absolutely. The FBI head must be appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. Oversight is performed by Congress. He can be fired.

This is technically true, but I wonder in practice. Like, the King of England absolutely has the power to withhold consent on acts of parliament. How accountable is parliament to the King? But replace the King with Congress, and parliament with the FBI.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#282

Post by p0pcult »

advisedwang wrote: post #276

TikTok is hitting a much broader slice of the US population, and getting a much broader slice of political opinions. And it's connecting all these people and all these opinions. You can find communists and nazi's on TikTok, building communities, and getting their voice out. The administration hates TikTok because it is potentially destabilizing. The FBI's concern is not that it's foreign influence, but that it's allo…

Ever heard of "The Foundations of Geopolitics"?

According to Wikipedia, the prescription for destabilizing America is: "Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#283

Post by SkyMarshal »

xwolfi wrote: post #245
derefr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to escape a sandbox to monitor people’s communications that are done through your own backend servers.

And God knows China is collecting all that important juicy information on teenagers' love for the latest fad ... Man the FBI acts like tik tok is used in jet planes and nuclear power plants...

There are at least three worrisome things that data can be used for:

1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).

2. Train AI for analyzing and further manipulating foreign publics, or for providing strategic insight into political and election dynamics, making political and election interference operations more effective.

3. Collate data on individuals gained from TikTok with other sources like credit ratings agency breaches, OPM, etc. for their entire life, to create a continually growing lifetime data profile on every American, European, Asian, South American, African, etc. which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar. Think of it as "customer lifetime value" [2] for political purposes.

None of which we want an adversarial, totalitarian foreign power to be capable of doing to us.

[1]:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tristan-harris-social-media-pol...

[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#284

Post by yamtaddle »

sleepymoose wrote: post #111
drcross wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump tried this and had to back down due to it being an unpopular decision. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/06/politics/trump-executive-...

Anything Trump did was an unpopular decision. If this starts to move forward under the current administration people would be more receptive to it purely based on the fact that it's the other side now.

I'm about as libby a lib as ever lib'd and Trump's action on China was maybe the single thing I agreed with him on. Neoliberal free-trade-over-all-other-concerns policies are actually pretty unpopular among voters in both parties, but are very popular with the donor and policy-wonk class, with the result that both parties typically favor it and have since the 80s, despite their voters mostly disliking it. One of the notable things about Trump's candidacy and presidency was his breaking from this (unpopular) long-standing norm, which fit with the rest of his messaging in that he mostly ignored whatever was ordinary or standard and instead picked the kinds of positions you'd hear talking to a Republican trucker in a diner ("They ought to just build a wall" is straight out of those kinds of conversations, for instance).

Oh, wait, one other thing I agreed with him on: leaving Afghanistan ASAP. The whiney push-back he got on that and the way the military managed to sand-bag the effort until well into Biden's term and still fuck it up, was straight-up embarrassing. Heads should have rolled.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#285

Post by sdsd »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #166
luckylion wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US can probably replace TikTok with something "homegrown" that's sufficiently like TikTok that people will be happy to use it once it becomes widely adopted. What could replace Facebook, TikTok etc in Europe? Do we just shut down the internet because it's run by third parties who don't have our best interests at heart?

> The US can probably replace TikTok with something "homegrown" You say that, yet Instagram, Twitter(1), YouTube who have all tried so far have all failed. (1): You're probably reading this and saying "What? not they haven't", well open a video on Twitter then swipe it up off the screen, you're now in TwitTok.

>You say that, yet Instagram, Twitter(1), YouTube who have all tried so far have all failed.

Youtube Shorts didn't fail, they're actually way better than TikTok and are doing well. Instagram Reels are basically a flop, but Shorts are freaking addictive. I tried using TikTok a while ago after all the praise on HN for its magical recommendation algorithm. After trying to get the algorithm to give me anything interesting for an hour, I gave up. Youtube Shorts on the other hand is like crack. It's way better than YT's "normal" recommendation algorithm.

I recommend it if you haven't tried

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#286

Post by Workaccount2 »

shkkmo wrote: post #258
Workaccount2 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese government owns tiktok. The algorithm that decides what videos americans will consume is signed off on by the Chinese government. That is an enormous national security threat.

> The Chinese government owns tiktok Only figuratively in the hacker/gamer sense. TikTok is owned by ByteSense. The "TikTok can be used to spy on americans" is much like "Russians interfered in our elections". Both are true, both are legitimately very concerning, but both are also things that the USA has been doing for decades with minimal domestic outcry. So implicit in our attempts to reign in other countries behav…

>Only figuratively in the hacker/gamer sense. TikTok is owned by ByteSense.

No, in the very literal sense that Bytedance has a board of directors, and on that board is a CCP member who has the real final say on everything the company does. When you are a business in China, you defacto work for the government.

China isn't America with a red flag, it's a fundamentally different system. Too many people think they know China because they understand America.

If Biden wants instagram showing people pictures of ponies, it simply isn't going to happen. If Xi wants tiktok to show people ponies, the next day every kid in america will be looking at ponies.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#287

Post by pksebben »

shkkmo wrote: post #261
computerfriend wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a separate topic and you're engaging in whataboutism.

Literally the exact same topic: making a list of the worst infractors. Edit: Here's the summary of this thread so far: 1) Let's make a rule against it instead of just hitting companies based on their nationality 2) A rule would be great, but in the mean time let's target the worst actors 3) These US based spy agencies do a bunch of stuff that is similar, where are they on that list? 4) That's off topic whataboutism 5…

I think we either need to narrowly define whataboutism or stop using it altogether. in discussions like these it takes the role of a hammer to beat anyone that questions American exceptionalism and it's kinda gross.

it always goes along the lines of your thread;

a: "hey, look at awful thing x is doing, we should do something about that"

b: "we do that too, and it is bad. we should fix it"

a: "that's whataboutism and it's off topic"

where x includes, but is not limited to: class-based legal asymmetry, extralegal incarceration, the existence of a ruling class, unprovoked invasions of sovereign territory, race-based murder by state actors, news suppression...

.. and mass surveillance with a political agenda.

Were I to Don my tinfoil chapeau, I'd say there's a taste of astroturfing to conversations like these. Abusive patterns of social interaction that certainly seem like they're in service of a national agenda. But lacking proof, I won't.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#288

Post by andrewclunn »

Oh so our current owners are concerned that they might lose control of the culture to some new foreign owners? If I believed that the US security state was there to protect the American people I might be more concerned, as it stands this is just a changing of the guard for who will be our technocratic authoritarian overlords, and I can't be plotzed to care.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#289

Post by p0pcult »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #102
squarefoot wrote: post #58

I can't imagine their reaction when they discover that so many IP cameras/NVR/DVR have been and still are being used as surveillance devices, and in some cases they have been hacked to either phone home (China?) video feeds, or as botnet hosts. https://hacked.camera/ http://www.insecam.org/en/

Or when they discover most of the technology equipment and chips they buy are made in China, including common networking equipment like routers that require cloud login to manage.

This is a very different threat vector. None of the examples you or the parent commenter have cited enable influence/propaganda/mis- or dis-info/psyops.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#290

Post by ZainRiz »

pjc50 wrote: post #56
darkteflon wrote: post #12

Utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue to operate in the current geopolitical climate. China is a surveillance autocracy and has been engaged in adversarial conduct against the West for years - including extensive psyops. Shut it down, yesterday. Build a local clone so that people can get their fix or whatever. China sure as shit doesn’t allow its citizens to cough up their personal information for algorithmi…

sigh can we not have targeted-by-nationality bans and instead have .. rules? If Tiktok the app is performing surveillance, ban surveillance by apps . All of them. Or make it technically impossible to escape its little sandbox, and let people have their entertainment.

If you read the first paragraph of the article, the primary concern mentioned is not surveillance, it's influencing the American public in ways that benefits China and harms the US.

Psy-ops effectively

Here's a segment by 60 Minutes explaining how they show their own citizens educational, beneficial content inspiring them to be better citizens, while the rest of the world gets the degenerative content we usually associate with ticktok.

And China could easily further adjust their ranking algorithm further to highlight the views it wants us to have. All social media has the power to do this, but China has both the most adversarial incentive and a demonstrated willingness to do so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0xzuh-6rY

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