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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

#171

Post by whitemary »

muglug wrote: post #100
quandrum wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xi is head of state as president, but not head of government (like King of England). Li Qiang is head of government as premier and is chief executive of the Chinese government. If you ask a Chinese citizen what their biggest problem is, many of them would say too much federalism. Individual provinces have more individual authority than even US States and most controversial policies (1 child, social credit, lockdowns)…

> If you ask a Chinese citizen what their biggest problem is, many of them would say too much federalism. Presumably that’s because protesting against the central government endangers not just your own livelihood but also the livelihoods of your relatives. Much safer to criticise the region next door.

> Presumably

I for one appreciate the self-awareness

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

#172

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

l3mure wrote: post #125
skdk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh the FBI arrested people, evidence will come out in trials. What’s the point of your comment?

The FBI has arrested a lot of people under anti-China initiatives in the past few years, and most of the cases have been quietly dropped.

How are any of those cases meaningfully similar to the cases about China's US neo-police units?

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

#173

Post by slowhadoken »

1101010010 wrote: post #52

Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stim…

Correct. The other issue is to not develop pro-CCP rhetoric out of this false dichotomy too. It’s all just varying degrees of social pollution created by some propagandists.

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

#174

Post by karmajunkie »

godelski wrote: post #151
capableweb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you can target specific demographics > control what they see > People are literally being programmed [...] by the specific triggers I hate marketing/PR as much as the next person, but have become part of daily life. How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing? Edit: Rereading your comment I realize you're talking about something else, but I guess the same applies non…

How do we get rid of it? Can you get rid of it? No. Doing so would result in the loss of many important rights and have unintended consequences. Not even China can get rid of this. BUT that doesn't mean you can't put regulations and limitations on them. As one example, we may want to make laws that ensure that ads are easily recognizable as ads. I'm referencing Native Advertising. I want to use an example from the NY…

While i think these are ideas worth considering, what I think is the answer is perhaps staring us in the face: put regulatory limits on the amount and kind of data that apps and websites can collect.

The real problem with tiktok is not the CCP; it seems likely in my mind that our own government has equally nefarious techniques at play in other countries, and I think its unfair to single out a single company over this or any other behavior that is otherwise legal.

So cut them off at the knees—make the behavior of tiktok illegal, for them and for any other of the thousands of companies doing basically the same thing. Pointedly i mean the extra-application data collection, cross-checking with third-party data miners (which should be illegal already), and the sorts of things we've just become accustomed to being par for the course.

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

#175

Post by karmajunkie »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #159
capableweb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you can target specific demographics > control what they see > People are literally being programmed [...] by the specific triggers I hate marketing/PR as much as the next person, but have become part of daily life. How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing? Edit: Rereading your comment I realize you're talking about something else, but I guess the same applies non…

> How do we get rid of it? Put down your phone.

You get points for pithy snark, but given that the problem predates smartphones, this isn't likely to solve it.

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

#176

Post by berjin »

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…

Even if the tech is secure there are still thousands of foreign employees working in those companies. It's not uncommon for people to be sympathisers of their homeland. And it's not symmetrical since very few westerners work for Alibaba, Huawei etc.

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

#177

Post by pessimizer »

Even if they didn't have an official backdoor, they would have many backdoors by just placing people on staff (getting them hired in the normal way.) You can't stop state intelligence agencies from getting into any domestic data that they want, even with law (which they can just ignore.) Social media is full of 'ex-'state intelligence operatives, and objections to that situation are made out to be bizarre, or even banned from discussion on these same social networks.

As far as I can tell, what we're supposed to think is that managing a social network, or any communications service, is within the same field as covert intelligence and surveillance, so of course that would be the hiring pool.

Non-Chinese have little to fear from Chinese government monitoring of their activity on TikTok. Chinese people know their government (which openly censors, rather than laundering their censorship through covert means like the Five Eyes), and know how to act to keep safe.

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

#178

Post by roywiggins »

janalsncm wrote: post #149
muglug wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you ask a Chinese citizen what their biggest problem is, many of them would say too much federalism. Presumably that’s because protesting against the central government endangers not just your own livelihood but also the livelihoods of your relatives. Much safer to criticise the region next door.

This logic doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s not any less illegal to protest your regional government than the central Chinese government.

There was (is?) a whole thing where local governments would kidnap people trying to petition the central government to crack down on some local government wrongdoing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/08/world/asia/chinese-petiti...

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

#179

Post by themodelplumber »

jchook wrote: post #103

TikTok is allegedly staffed with dozens of ex-FBI, CIA, and US State Department officials who moderate content[1]. Somehow PRISM and the closed-doors FISA court hearings, Lavabit, etc seem to be collectively memory-holed by USians. Nowadays their anxiety about state surveillance is reserved for the "CCP". 1. https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-ru...

> In the summer of 2021, he went straight from his top State Department job to become product policy manager for trust and safety at TikTok, a position that, on paper, he appears completely unqualified for. Earlier this year, Cardona left the company.

Fascinating stuff in here. Wouldn't it be funny if the situation was any of these:

- TikTok is some revolving-door communications center for off-the-record relations between USG and PRC

- Your TikTok device is a node in a cluster that's being used for info-wars against some extraterrestrial threat as PRC and USG combine forces

- Nah, USG just uses TikTok as a way to backdoor PRC

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

#180

Post by l3mure »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #172
l3mure wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI has arrested a lot of people under anti-China initiatives in the past few years, and most of the cases have been quietly dropped.

How are any of those cases meaningfully similar to the cases about China's US neo-police units?

> U.S. Asks to Drop Case Accusing N.Y.P.D. Officer of Spying for China

> The charges against Officer Angwang came amid growing concern on the part of law enforcement authorities in the United States and other Western countries about Beijing’s efforts to monitor Chinese nationals abroad, including dissidents.

> Prosecutors cited recorded phone calls in charging Officer Angwang and said he had reported regularly to two Chinese consular officials in New York on the activities of ethnic Tibetans. One of the officials was responsible for “neutralizing sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority” opposed to the Chinese government’s policies and authority, court filings said.

> But Mr. Carman, Officer Angwang’s lawyer, argued that the conversations described by prosecutors as “nefarious” were actually “pedestrian” efforts by his client to maintain good relations with Chinese officials so that he could obtain a visa to visit his parents in China and to introduce them to his daughter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/nyregion/nypd-officer-chi...

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