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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

#61

Post by fauxpause_ »

grugagag wrote: post #19

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 use…

Spread outrage, controversy and doubt.

Have a neutral mutually beneficial idea? Let’s contextualize it as a divisive political issue that is championed by the political leader you hate the most.

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

#62

Post by stale2002 »

Kadin wrote: post #55
stale2002 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected Oh it is completely expected. People have been warning about TikTok for years, and yet those people get called crazy. The US should have taken action against them years ago. We can still fix the issue now though, by creating a targeted law against them.

> We can still fix the issue now though, by creating a targeted law against them. That's not a great idea, since it will invite a lawsuit on the (potentially valid) grounds that it's a de facto bill of attainder. Which the US has traditionally taken a dim view on for very good reasons. Better would be if it prompted a more general law about foreign ownership of corporations which have access to large amounts of infor…

> a more general law about foreign ownership of corporations

Sure make it targeted against large scale companies owned by china, or "owned by countries on this specific government list, which happens to only include china and a few of our other enemies, like Russia".

Same thing, and we are more than able to get away with it, even though it is basically just targeted at TikTok.

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

#63

Post by partiallypro »

xtian wrote: post #54
partiallypro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you couple this with the fact that China had secret police stations in the US trying to capture Chinese dissidents, you could use such data to track those people to kidnap them, regardless of if the information was sensitive on the app or not.

> China had secret police stations in the US trying to capture Chinese dissidents What's the evidence for this?

The recent busts in multiple countries, including one prominent one in New York City?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/04/world/china-overseas-police-s...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65305415

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1170571626/fbi-arrests-2-on-c...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-65537553.amp

https://www.newsweek.com/china-overseas-police-service-cente...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/20/explainer-chin...

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/beijing-s-long-ar...

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

#64

Post by nova22033 »

Kadin wrote: post #21
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 Chinese government, like the US government or any other large national government, is not monolithic. Having information available for easy perusal via a commercial channel (which is potentially not even illegal) is very different from having information accessible via use of national-asset intelligence capabilities. Information which can only be obtained the second way is almost certainly going to receive differ…

The Chinese government, like the US government or any other large national government, is not monolithic.

In what meaningful way does one part of the Chinese government differ from another part of the Chinese government? Isn't Xi basically the supreme leader for life now?

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

#65

Post by penjelly »

Zigurd wrote: post #28

Who uses TikTok for sensitive information? Government access to TikTok user data is of limited additional value compared to whatever TikTok sells to large advertisers and analytics partners.

us military uses tiktok for fun from what ive seen. https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=military&t=1683997954279

i know these probably just look like "fun videos" and most are likely of no consequence, but my guess is some of the military footage submitted on there is recent and potentially not in the interest of US national defense.

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

#66

Post by sneak »

bostonsre wrote: post #39
anaganisk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

For all our faults, we're not the ccp. Bashing America doesn't undo the horrors committed by the ccp. We're talking about an authoritarian regime that is currently committing genocide. Should we really just roll over and give them unfettered access to our markets while they are incredibly hostile to our companies and where we only get access by giving away ip?

The US imprisons its ethnic minorities in inhumane camps that frequently result in death at a rate 17x that of China, per capita.

The countries are way more alike than you think. Calling for more state censorship in the US brings them even more into alignment.

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

#67

Post by _8j50 »

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…

It doesn't even have to be a state actor but it isn't as simple as "at will" a compromise requires effort and resources and discovery would be attributed back to the actor. Willful access has none of that problem.

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

#68

Post by Kadin »

CSMastermind wrote: post #10

This seems sloppy. If I were to build an app that was popular in say Cuba or something I wouldn't leave myself technical gateways to access the data and manipulate things directly. That would leave a clear paper trail and open me up to some innocent engineer stumbling across what's happening. Rather I would embed trusted people into the company at low to mid-level positions of power, like software engineers, content…

Sure, and that's probably happening as well.

But it shows a level of not-giving-a-fuck if they're just leaving not-even-well-hidden "backdoors" in, so people in China can get access.

It suggests to me that the software engineers writing this stuff don't really think of ByteDance US or the US version of TikTok as being any different from ByteDance China. Because of course they don't: I don't think ByteDance itself, or its leadership, does. The whole idea of separating the company internally is a sham, and it's almost always a sham when companies claim to do internal firewalling or controls like that. (See also: pre-2008 financial companies that did both consulting and accounting/audit, and claimed they never talked across that line. Of course they did!)

TikTok is a shining example of both China being China (no real private/public sector separation, lying as standard practice, economic policy is just war by other means) and the US being the US (everything is for sale, everyone's loyalty can be rented, all laws are negotiable, workers / average people exist to be exploited rather than protected, if it's profitable it can't be that wrong)... and we wonder why it's a trainwreck for average users.

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

#70

Post by trompetenaccoun »

grugagag wrote: post #19

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 use…

The fact that many Westerners are still unsure about this and not aware that they're in the middle of an unconventional war¹ is fascinating. Xi does not care about memes of course. The app itself is the backdoor, Bytedance (which has the Communist Party right inside the company, like other Mainland corporations) controls what the users see. And what they're shown is completely different from Douyin, there is a reason Chinese residents aren't even permitted to download TikTok - the foreign propaganda version. No one will be able to tell you their strategy for certain but it's not hard to guess when you look at the content that gets boosted. It's like Twitter on steroids, it's designed to cause division and radicalize the users. The data harvesting is an added bonus and with more data they can be better manipulated.

Btw on a meta level this doesn't matter when the CCP has completely walled 1.4 billion people in. Every single American social media app is banned, the vast majority of foreign news sites is censored. It should not even be a question what the app is about, the regime is as obvious an enemy to free society as it gets and before they open up as was promised in the past in exchange for economic investment, no Chinese internet company should be permitted operating anywhere.

While the Chinese internet is so tightly controlled and the US & co are attacked in Chinese state media on a daily basis, foreign countries let them move in this Trojan horse. There's a book called Unrestricted Warfare where the authors describe just this sort of weakness of the US to political/information warfare 20 years ago. It turns out they were spot on.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_warfares

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