Last September, in an effort to assuage concerns over security threats from the CCP, TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas provided Congressional testimony saying “there are strict access controls around the data that is accessed in the United States.”
But then we learned a Buzzfeed reporter’s data was accessed by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance.
They also accessed the data of a Financial Times reporter.
And multiple Forbes reporters.
According to Forbes, “ByteDance tracked multiple Forbes journalists as part of this covert surveillance campaign, which was designed to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company’s ongoing links to China. As a result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned.”
“I was deeply disappointed when I was notified of the situation… and I’m sure you feel the same,” Liang wrote in an internal email shared with Forbes. “The public trust that we have spent huge efforts building is going to be significantly undermined by the misconduct of a few individuals. … I believe this situation will serve as a lesson to us all.”
Yeah, a lesson not to get caught. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), a big proponent of a TikTok ban in the U.S., says his whistleblower says safety measures at the Chinese social media giant are “superficial” at the best.
“The whistleblower describes TikTok’s access controls on U.S. data as ‘superficial’ at best, where they exist at all. As an example, he describes how TikTok and ByteDance employees — including members of the Chinese Communist Party known to be on ByteDance’s payroll — can switch between Chinese and U.S. data with nothing more than the click of a button using a proprietary tool called Dorado… In his words, ‘[i]t’s just like a light switch.’”
“I have seen first-hand China-based engineers flipping over to non-China datasets and creating scheduled tasks to backup, aggregate, and analyze data,” the whistleblower told Hawley’s office, adding “TikTok and ByteDance are functionally the same company.”
Time to ban TikTok.
