Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is calling for more examination of the Chinese short-video app TikTok in light of recent whistleblower reports that Treasury authorities should look into further.
On March 8, Senator Hawley wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen with information on charges made by an unnamed TikTok whistleblower that run counter to comments made in public by top executives about how they manage user data from Americans. He referred to these allegations as “deeply concerning” and demanded that their veracity be further looked into.
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Leaked recordings from January of last year showed that Chinese engineers had accessed data from a U.S.-based platform. This alarming revelation sent shockwaves through Congress and aroused bipartisan concern.
Although Vanessa Pappas, the chief operational officer of TikTok, testified before lawmakers in September 2022 that they have “strict controls in terms of who and how our data is accessed,” and vowed that “under no circumstances would we give that data to China,” If there are any access restrictions at all, the whistleblower called them “superficial,” according to Hawley.
Employees of ByteDance and TikTok “switch between Chinese and U.S. data with nothing more than the click of a button using a proprietary tool called Dorado, Hawley said, quoting the whistleblower who likened it to a “light switch.”
With simply permission from a supervisor and dataset owner, the frightening technology Aeolus allows staff members working in China to access American data, presenting major concerns to the confidentiality of data housed in the United States.
“I have seen first-hand China-based engineers flipping over to non-China datasets and creating scheduled tasks to backup, aggregate, and analyze data.”
Also, according to the whistleblower, TikTok and ByteDance worked closely together. “rely on proprietary software they engineered in China, thereby reducing foreign scrutiny and enabling Chinese engineers to insert software backdoors,” Hawley penned a letter.
“TikTok and ByteDance are functionally the same company. They use the same data analysis tools and chat apps, and managers are in constant contact,” Hawley referenced the informant’s words.
The “highly disturbing allegations” concerning TikTok, a very well-liked app among American teenagers, have deeply concerned Sen. Josh Hawley. According to him, the application has to be immediately removed off US land in light of the most recent development.
“Despite TikTok’s many reassurances that members of the Chinese Communist Party do not have access to U.S. data, it seems more and more likely that they do,” In order to learn more about how TikTok shared its internal products, software tools, and dataset accessibility with CFIUS, Congresswoman Warren contacted Chair Yellen. He also wanted to know more about how this review panel approved these international transactions.
A TikTok representative said, in response to a question from The Epoch Times, that the whistleblower “appears to be misinformed.”
“The tools described in Sen. Hawley’s letter are primarily analytic tools—they don’t independently grant direct access to data,” Tells The Epoch Times through TikTok. A spokesman for the business noted that “[a]ll access to U.S. user data is managed in the United States by [TikTok] U.S. Data Security, and can only leave the Oracle cloud environment under limited, monitored circumstances as described in our proposed agreement with CFIUS.”
TikTok said “it is standard for tech companies to engineer their own tools and services to meet internal business needs” and that “[n]one of those tools are typically scrutinized externally.” In an effort to stay in the US, TikTok has been working on a program named “Project Texas” in collaboration with Oracle, a major American provider of cloud services that would house TikTok’s American data. Underneath it, TikTok stated: “every line of code will be inspected, tested, and vetted by multiple third parties specifically to ensure that there are no back doors.”
TikTok is a popular app with over 113 million monthly users in the United States. As the ramifications of China’s goals to upend global politics come into view, attempts have developed across the country and abroad to abolish it.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee made news on March 1 when they decided to forward a measure that might have important ramifications for social media juggernaut TikTok.
“Anyone with TikTok downloaded on their device has given the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] a backdoor to all their personal information. It’s a spy balloon into your phone,” The committee’s chairman and author of the proposed legislation, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), told The Epoch Times’ sister publication NTD.
As a result of several state-level restrictions on TikTok usage on government equipment, a nationwide ban was enacted in December as part of a comprehensive budget deal valued over $1 trillion and 650 million dollars.
FBI Director Christopher Wray highlighted the serious potential risks of TikTok as a tool for foreign espionage and intervention during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing this week. He stressed how the Communist Party of China may use it to possibly impact large numbers of Americans’ opinions.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the committee’s vice chairman, asked Wray if China might use the app to foment public unrest and advance certain narratives. Wray said that it may be challenging. “See many of the outward signs of it happening if it was happening.”
“I think the most fundamental piece that cuts across every one of those risks and threats that you mentioned, that I think Americans need to understand, is that something that’s very sacred in our country, the difference between the private sector and the public sector—that’s a line that is nonexistent in the way the CCP operates,” Wray said.
