A top Justice Department official shed new light on threats the United States believes Chinese apps such as TikTok and WeChat pose to national security.
John Demers, the assistant attorney general of the National Security Division, discussed President Trump’s recent executive orders related to the Chinese-owned apps during a web interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Wednesday, providing the most detail yet about the Trump administration’s thought process behind potentially banning next month the popular video-sharing social media app TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, and messaging app WeChat, which is owned Shenzhen-based Chinese global conglomerate Tencent.
Apps “really raise the problem that TikTok illustrates best” which is “how much data they collect on our lives,” Demers said.
“Once you start looking at that from a national security perspective, and thinking about the data that the phone and the apps are collecting on you, it’s a very different matter if a country with very different values from our own,” such as China, “is collecting all that data,” Demers said. He said the Chinese government uses this kind of data to build artificial intelligence capabilities and to co-opt potential intelligence targets, which he called a major counterintelligence concern. The DOJ official said “99%” of the data might be ignored by China, but having access to the data collected by TikTok could allow Chinese intelligence officials to “mine” it to target a specific individual, learning about their geolocation, health, finances, and dating or married life “to think about how to best approach you if the purpose is co-optation.”
He also put China’s ownership of the app in the broader context of data breaches over the years that have been linked to China, including hacks of the Office of Personnel Management, credit reporting agency Equifax, health insurance company Anthem, and others. Demers said that there was “the Chinese appetite for large volumes of sensitive personal data” as it purloined records from tens of millions of U.S. citizens. And the DOJ official pointed to China’s history of “targeted acquisitions” of companies that might not be “traditionally thought of” as national security risks, but help China obtain data.
“What’s interesting about TikTok is that you have one of the first instances in which individuals are signing up for, and providing to the app, their sensitive personal data, first when they sign up for it … and then there’s the data the app collects about you while it’s on your phone. And like a lot of other apps, that app is collecting geolocation data if you enable it, it’s collecting contact list, and it is following your phone and your use of the other apps on your phone … but can also be used — abused, really — by the state. So, one is the sensitive data piece,” Demers said. “The second is … Uighurs, Hong Kong protests, Tibet, Taiwan, all those issues — there are many reports of the content being censored from a foreign influence perspective.”
Demers added: “Those are the national security risks associated with TikTok. What’s interesting about TikTok is you have an instance of Americans voluntarily signing on to this product as opposed to the Chinese stealing the data or the Chinese buying the data, and that’s what the recent executive order was meant to address.”
Microsoft is exploring the purchase of U.S. operations for TikTok, but any purchase must pass a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Trump’s executive order claimed that TikTok’s data collection “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
Demers also addressed WeChat, noting the app collects a lot of the data that TikTok does and “is used here in the U.S. as a method by the Chinese Communist Party to communicate with Chinese individuals here in the U.S.” and to help create “bubbles” around Chinese students in the U.S. by pushing anti-American messaging on them while they are in the U.S. Demers said China’s goal is to “send the Chinese student here to reap all the benefits of the U.S. technical education, but do not allow them to get polluted by ideas like liberal democracy or religious freedom” and said to do that “you need to control the space around them.” He argued that WeChat is a “foreign influence” problem.
ByteDance and TikTok have repeatedly claimed they would never turn over TikTok user data to the Chinese government, but national security experts have raised concerns about China’s own 2017 national intelligence law, which requires Chinese companies to assist Chinese intelligence services when asked.
Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s general manager in the U.S., vowed that “we’re not going anywhere.” TikTok recently hired dozens of lobbyists in the U.S. to defend the Chinese platform.
While some critics believe the president is targeting TikTok because some TikTok users claimed to have inflated the expected attendance at Trump’s June Tulsa rally purposefully, the Chinese app was on the radar of the U.S. government long before.
The Pentagon banned service members from using TikTok in late 2019, and the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department also banned TikTok on government devices. The House and the Senate voted to block federal employees from using TikTok, and former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign also told staff to delete TikTok.
