Listening to politicians justify their support for the new TikTok ban, I wonder if the true purpose of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Enemies Act is to protect national security from China or It’s hard to say whether it’s about protecting children from reckless videos. But that doesn’t matter because even the law can’t achieve it.
For the fax generation, TikTok is a file-hosting platform where users share short videos, most of which can reduce the viewer’s IQ by a small percentage, increasing the amount of time spent on the platform each day .
Imagine Facebook and The Gong Show combined. TikTok claims to have 1 billion users, 150 million of whom live in the U.S. ByteDance is a privately held Chinese company with investors from around the world, including a large number of U.S. shareholders. is owned by.
China is spying on people, but so are American intelligence agencies
Chinese companies are subject to the National Intelligence Law, which requires organizations to comply with the Chinese government’s requests for information gathering.
That sounds pretty creepy, but it’s similar to what was granted to U.S. government officials by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). Specifically, Section 702 of FISA requires “compulsory assistance of electronic communications service providers to obtain foreign intelligence information.”
To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is an overall moral equivalence between the Chinese Communist Party and the Democratic or Republican parties. But it is a travesty to feign outrage that the Chinese government is using technology to amass vast amounts of data that Americans are willingly putting at risk when they use their cell phones.
It’s certainly easier for the Chinese to do it through a ByteDance subsidiary, but if Facebook and AT&T have all your personal data, they’re not working on behalf of most developed countries that also have that data. There are smart people out there. And the TikTok ban bill won’t change that.
Congress desperately needs lessons from modern technology
Although the Protecting Americans from Foreign Enemies Act does nothing to protect Americans from foreign enemies, I am fairly confident that the government is actively pursuing other methods of protection. Masu. Perhaps the most valuable of these is through technology and other methods that most of us do not have access to. I don’t even know it exists.
That’s why it’s funny to see our elected officials get embarrassed trying to discuss technology-related matters. If you’re bored and need some cheap entertainment, don’t open the TikTok app. Instead, search for “Embarrassing Technology Questions in Congress” videos on Google. Watching the late Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) awkwardly interrogate Mark Zuckerberg is thrillingly entertaining.
Of course, when you watch these videos on YouTube, Google knows what you watch. And so do other companies and decent teenage computer hackers, and so do governments who want to know.
president david moon moon capital managementcan be reached.david@mooncap.com.
