FBI director says TikTok poses ‘national security threat’, gives Beijing access to data, devices
Christopher Wray
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray has branded the popular short-form video-sharing app TikTok as a “national security threat” amidconcerns over the possibility of data of millions of users being used by the Chinese government.
Speaking during a US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee hearing on "worldwide threats to the homeland", Wray said that there are high chances of the Chinese government weaponising the data of around 80 million Americans.
He claimed that ByteDance embeds specific application programming interfaces (APIs) in the short-form video app which gives Beijing access to “control data collection of millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, whichcan be used for influence operations,or to control software on millions of devices, which gives the opportunity to potentially technically compromise personal devices.”
The FBI chief called the foreign intelligence and economic threat from China "the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s ideas, innovation, and economic security.”
“China’s fast-hacking program is the world’s largest, and they have stolen more of Americans’ personal and business data than every other nation combined," he said.
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Concerns over the Chinese government’s influence over ByteDance company have been a long-standing issuebetween the US and China.
Wray said that there has been a surge in cybersecurity cases, throwing a challenge to the FBI.
“We’re investigating over 100 different ransomware variants and each one of those with scores of victims as well as a whole host of other novel threats posed by both cybercriminals and nation-states alike," he said.
These security concerns have already promoted the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the military to ban TikTok from government phones.
Missouri’s Republican Senator Josh Hawley has sought the ban to be extended to all government phones.
“We also ought to require, the federal government ought to require TikTok to be separated from the Beijing-owned ByteDance parent company,” Hawley said.
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