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TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

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Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#11

Post by HWR_14 »

consumer451 wrote: post #5
tremere wrote: post #3

I'm starting to become fatigued by all this TikTok news. Either ban the app or don't. Causing anxiety over TikTok without any action is the worst of both worlds.

It's an interesting problem to solve though. For one thing, there are lots of US investors who will lose money. Should they be made whole?

That's not an interesting question. No, no they should not. And that would be true even if there were US investors. Just like we don't compensate AirBnB shareholders when cities outlaw short term rentals.

But, there are no non-Chinese investors in Bytedance. There are US investors in Hong Kong (?) companies that have exposure to Bytedance and move 1:1 with Bytedance, but explicitly included in their risk analysis is that government action may zero out that 1:1 nature at any time by political action.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#13

Post by burnished »

Lucasoato wrote: post #7

I would be extremely surprised if a state-actor like China couldn’t access most US company data at will. If you can invest several billions and have thousands of people working to create a breach, no company is safe, not even AWS or Microsoft. In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected? I’m much more concerned by the laziness of mo…

I think their repeat public position was that the CCP could not have law access and did not have access. I don't think anyone believed it, but still

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#14

Post by jasmer »

It'd be extremely naive to assume that they didn't have a back door, didn't have the ability to 'direct' TikTok to do as they required for pretty much anything, and didn't use it to further whatever their agenda is.

The inverse problem is to think of TT as directly an agent of the CCP, which it is not. TT is a company that wants to make money, that exists in a regime where there is no effective rule of law, meaning the regime can do pretty much as it pleases, when it please, and they do do that, particularly for censorship, content control etc.. But otherwise, the company is left to it's own devices.

Much like if you use Google or FB, you can be assured that the US Gov. will leverage that within the normal constraints of the US, which is to say for local policing warrants and judges, and for narrow issues of national security, well, probably 'anything goes' with respect to non-US citizens, 'almost anything goes' with respect to US citizens, but that ultimately the scope of the more acute stuff will be narrow, and ultimately there will be leakers.

Aka Snowden and Assange sadly get a different form of justice, but at least it's a kind of justice and it's in the public domain. You can speak out against Biden all day long but if you leak sensitive docs, that's probably a line that will get you in trouble.

Finally, we need to start to account for corporate surveillance.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#15

Post by pydry »

Lucasoato wrote: post #7

I would be extremely surprised if a state-actor like China couldn’t access most US company data at will. If you can invest several billions and have thousands of people working to create a breach, no company is safe, not even AWS or Microsoft. In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected? I’m much more concerned by the laziness of mo…

I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening.

Is Larry Ellison a Chinese spy? He would probably have to either be complicit or criminally negligent to allow this to happen given he was given the contract precisely for this reason.

I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

And US insistence that "dumb" 5g aerials already vetted by national security agencies had to be banned (along with kit that was absolutely a legitimate risk) because they could potentially possibly harbor listening devices maybe.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#16

Post by consumer451 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #11
consumer451 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting problem to solve though. For one thing, there are lots of US investors who will lose money. Should they be made whole?

That's not an interesting question. No, no they should not. And that would be true even if there were US investors. Just like we don't compensate AirBnB shareholders when cities outlaw short term rentals. But, there are no non-Chinese investors in Bytedance. There are US investors in Hong Kong (?) companies that have exposure to Bytedance and move 1:1 with Bytedance, but explicitly included in their risk analysis is…

> That's not an interesting question.

It is very interesting to me to see if the US government is capable of putting the average citizen's welfare above that of heavy hitting investors. It would be a welcome change if they did.

> ByteDance is financially backed by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group.

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

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#17

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

Lucasoato wrote: post #7

I would be extremely surprised if a state-actor like China couldn’t access most US company data at will. If you can invest several billions and have thousands of people working to create a breach, no company is safe, not even AWS or Microsoft. In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected? I’m much more concerned by the laziness of mo…

> the laziness of most western governments in understanding if this was a threat or not

I think USA recognized the threat very early on. It's been a hot-button topic for several years. Remember when the Trump administration tried to force a sale of ByteDance's USA operations to Microsoft? And even now the apps and services are blocked on US government devices and networks. And even at a lot of public universities. The concern is there. I don't think it's laziness.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#18

Post by jasmer »

tremere wrote: post #3

I'm starting to become fatigued by all this TikTok news. Either ban the app or don't. Causing anxiety over TikTok without any action is the worst of both worlds.

Don't ban it, just force the sale of US/European or non-Chinese division to an outside party and that's that.

There's actually not that much economic downside. Having TT merged with Bytedance is not a big economic bonus.

I can't believe that this was not done ages ago.

There is hardly a loser here - it's just a 'required fork' of a business, everyone will be fine.

We do this all the time with 'important' things, for a social media app, nothing will skip a beat, the kids can keep their funny songs.

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#19

Post by grugagag »

Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP. I’ve heard of bans of Tiktok use by politicians and army bases and such. Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data… Not a Tiktok user myself, if anyone could illuminate me on this it’s be great. For example does tiktok have direct messages from users to users that could be spied on? My naive assumption is that Tiktok is a meme sharing platform and timesink

Re: TikTok Owner Had 'Backdoor' for CCP Access to US Data, Lawsuit Alleges

#20

Post by anaganisk »

blueflow wrote: post #12

So, basically just the China version of the US Cloud Act?

But it's the US, it's the bastion of democracy. Govt here doesn't put backdoors, doesn't sponsor crypto companies, doesn't target individuals and ship them to overseas camps to avoid torture laws. Wage fake wars. Doesn't use it's intelligence agencies to interfere with other countries. Oh!
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