US Banning TikTok Should Be Just the Beginning - Gook Skinner box has fallen out of favour among the Washington elite


By Peter Harrell and Tim Wu
Mr. Harrell was a senior director on the National Security Council from 2021 to 2022. Mr. Wu was a special assistant to the president on the National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023.

There’s growing momentum in Congress to ban TikTok, the social media app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, for reasons of national security. Last week, the White House expressed support for a bipartisan bill in the Senate that would give President Biden the power to ban the app, and the White House is also reportedly pressing ByteDance to sell the company.
The security concern is not that we’ll be corrupted by goofy videos but rather that the Chinese government could use the TikTok apps installed on millions of American phones as a form of spyware — collecting sensitive data and personal information, including where we go and what we do. (On Friday, The Times reported that the Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of Americans by ByteDance.)
Congress is focused on TikTok for an obvious reason: It’s wildly popular and everyone’s heard of it. Banning it or forcing it to be sold off wouldn’t be a bad idea; the app does present serious privacy and security threats. But focusing just on TikTok would be a showy, inadequate response that would do far too little to protect Americans from the broad range of data security risks that China poses. Instead, Congress should pass a law to comprehensively protect American data and security.
TikTok accounts for just a small part of the Chinese technological surveillance threat, much of which is hiding in plain sight. China can (and probably does) buy data from the many commercial companies that effectively spy on Americans through our phones; an entire industry of little-known data brokers like Kochava and Acxiom legally collects and sells information in just this way. Moreover, despite bans on some Chinese security equipment and routers, Americans still rely on Chinese software in a wide range of tools and devices, such as the software for Chinese-made cranes in shipping ports and countless small drones Americans have bought for personal and commercial use. The Chinese government has also repeatedly hacked its way into the servers of American companies and the U.S. government. And then there are the surveillance balloons.

Given China’s history of hacking and its ability to easily purchase data on the open market, the best way to protect Americans’ data is through legislation that would reduce the collection of data in the first place and force companies to increase their cybersecurity protections — to shift the burden of protecting data from the individuals who produce it to the companies and other entities that process it. Congress should target data brokers to restrict the type and volume of data they can sell and to require them to know to whom they are selling it to avoid compromising national security.
What we’re envisioning is along the lines of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act that Congress considered last year. Beyond protecting national security, it responds to strong public demand for privacy: Americans across the political spectrum say they want better protection and less collection of their sensitive data.
But despite the support of the public, as well as the backing of both political parties, the White House and much of the business community, the act wasn’t passed. It ran into opposition from California officials who sought to protect their state’s privacy laws from federal pre-emption — even though most experts consider the federal law to be stronger. Alas, there was a time when states were proud to see the laws they pioneered inspire national protections. Regardless, Congress should not let state resistance stand in the way of passing a strong national law.
To better control apps and software from Chinese-owned companies, the government needs new tools, such as the ability to ban TikTok provided in the bipartisan Senate bill that the White House expressed support for last week. It is important, however, that such tools include the authority not only to ban or sanction such apps, but also to mandate security measures and transparency, and when necessary to force apps to be sold.
TikTok and other Chinese-owned companies have tried to address security concerns voluntary, offering to store American data in servers in the United States and to provide source-code transparency. TikTok, for example, has been touting a plan called Protect Texas, in which the Texas-based software company Oracle would store TikTok’s U.S. data and audit TikTok’s source code to help ensure that Beijing can’t manipulate it for propaganda purposes.

But neither current nor proposed laws offer an effective way to enforce these voluntary commitments or to impose them on companies that resist. Congress should empower the government to impose such measures and issue fines and bans for companies that fail to comply.
Opponents of an aggressive data security law will argue that the United States, as an open and democratic country, ought to refrain from limiting the access of foreign-owned companies to its markets. Others worry that such a law would encourage countries like France and India, already skeptical of U.S. tech companies, to use the American example as a reason to impose increased restrictions on American companies.
These criticisms are misplaced. Being an open and democratic country does not mean being a sucker. Accepting unequal treatment is not a badge of honor. The United States would be justified in responding to China’s limits on U.S. companies by imposing its own limits.
And when it comes to our allies in Europe, Asia and Latin America, this what diplomacy is for. The United States should be building a coalition of nations that agree to take privacy and security seriously, guaranteeing access to one another’s markets on that basis — building on the Declaration for the Future of the Internet that the Biden administration introduced last year.
Passing a comprehensive data security law would require more work for Congress than targeting a single company. But privacy protection and the need to compete effectively with Beijing happen to be among the small number of issues with broad popular appeal and bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Congress has a rare opportunity to serve national security and also meet public demand. It shouldn’t waste it.
 
It's Chinese so it would be chinks. Gooks are like Koreans and Vietnamese. I don't know a racist slang term for Japanese. I just call them Japs for short. If they are Chinese that would be chinks. Slant eyes dinky dow and fellow yellow are some other racist slang terms for orientals. For other Asians like Indians I just call them street shitters curry niggers and dot heads.

TikTok is cringe. It needs to be banned. It's a total fucking cancer like the rest of social media. But it seems to be used by the most cringiest and retarded of the Western populations. Then when they ban it, they need to round up everyone who used it and execute them for. Most of the people using TikTok are human garbage so it would be doing the world a favor. It's nothing but Chinese spyware.
 
The UK Government and the devolved Governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have banned Government employees from having TikTok on their devices.
 
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I think the most widely used is "Nips."
Tojo? Zipperhead?

I'm surprised nobody's called them "Nipples".
Tojo I guess could work. But that's what Hank's dad called them. Zipperheads would be Koreans. From what I understand it comes from the jeep tire tracks that got left on their heads as the Americans drover over their dead bodies in jeeps. Which makes me think of something a teacher told me once. He was a Navy Seal and served in Iraq during ODS and he said on this highway in Iraq the dead Iraqis were all over the place and there was this joke they used to tell each other. What do you call a dead Iraqi? A speed bump.

I forgot about nips. Nips works. It would be funny if someone called them nipples.
 
I will never understand how anyone can even use that mind rotting platform. Just the ads I get for it makes me legitimately disgusted with how much it's literally the "lowest common denominator" of entertainment. No, making "quirky" faces over nigger rap or reciting Rick and Morty lines is not creative, entertaining or comedic, you just come across as the most unpealling mushed brained faggot imaginable.
 
Not a word about the Chinese money and students in the Universities though. Or workers in all the tech and financial companies. Or off shoring industry leaving it open to mass IP theft. There's massive problems with the integration of Chinese nationals globally. They're largely owned by the CCP.
 
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Japs is technically a slur against the japanese because of historical context. Similar to how "paki" is a slur against pakistanis in the UK. However the use of "japs" as a slur itself is so old that I guarantee a majority of the use of the short form of the word nowadays is just people naturally saying the shortened version and not realizing back in the 1940s it was a insult.
 
Alot of people are hopelessly addicted to making asses of themselves in Tik Tok for clout. Its either gonna move onto youtube once its banned or simply continued in another shape or form. Tik Tok is a huge boon for the CCP and not for everyone else.
 
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Alot of people are hopelessly addicted to making asses of themselves in Tik Tok for clout. Its either gonna move onto youtube once its banned or simply continued in another shape or form. Tik Tok is a huge boon for the CCP and not for everyone else.
CCP heavily moderates TikTok inside of China. If you want to go viral you make a video of yourself throwing away your garbage or helping an old person cross the street.
 
They can't ban TikTok, zoomers can still just browse the tiktok website on the phone or whatever. Interesting how devastating results from social media happen in a "free" country like the US and not in China.
 
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