Remember, kids. If it’s them stinking foreigners hoovering up your personal data, that’s bad! But if it’s the clean-cut, white guys of the FBI or NSA or … doing it, that’s good!
To allay fears the short-form video app could be used as a Chinese surveillance tool, the federal government nearly transformed it into an American one instead.
Sounds bad.
The agreement would let agencies examine TikTok’s US facilities, records, and servers with minimal prior notice and veto the hiring of any executive involved with leading TikTok US data security organization. It would also let US agencies block changes to the app’s terms of service in the US and order the company to subject itself to various audits, all on TikTok’s dime, per Forbes. In extreme cases, the agreement would allow government organizations to demand TikTok temporarily shut off functioning in the US.
The agreements, if accepted as written at the time, would open TikTok’s US operations up to supervision by a number of external third-party auditors and source code inspectors.
Sounds… not at all like what the US government would do if it wanted to use Tiktok for surveillance (no automated collection of data? No mandated installation of monitoring gear like the NSA was rumored to do decades before Snowden came along?). However, it does sound like exactly what the US would do if it wanted to prevent the use of Tiktok for Chinese surveillance.
The US government is 100% comfortable with spying on its citizens, but IDK how they got from point A to point B in this particular instance. Well, actually I do; the article will get more clicks this way.
