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A key lesson from the leaks, absorbed by China and everyone else, is that low-ranking individuals in this country have access to high-value information. Authorities have arrested a 21-year-old junior enlisted member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, Jack Teixeira, who apparently was able to obtain hundreds of pages of highly classified intelligence — including finished CIA products, our secret assessments of Taiwan’s vulnerability to a Chinese attack, and U.S. knowledge of Chinese military and cybertechnology advances. The U.S. government failed to catch on for almost eight months — and might never have found out if the documents had not begun circulating on social media.
Beijing knows there are millions of potential Teixeiras out there — ordinary Americans with access to nonpublic information Chinese officials want. And TikTok could allow the Chinese government to collect personal and potentially compromising information on its American users that could one day be used to trick or coerce them into providing secrets to Beijing.
Downloading TikTok is like downloading a Chinese spy onto your phone. As Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, recently testified, “TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool” that allows Beijing to collect search and browsing history, keystroke patterns, text messages, unsent draft messages, images, videos, location data, metadata, fingerprints and voice prints of millions of Americans. All this information is at the beck and call of the Chinese Communist Party.
What could China do with this information? The possibilities are endless.
Most Americans think their conversations on messaging apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal are safe because they are encrypted. But China does not have to break the encryption to collect the content of those communications, because the TikTok app could allow the Chinese regime to follow and record users’ keystrokes. For Beijing, your Snapchat conversations never disappear; they can be collected and stored for future exploitation. Trackers within TikTok compile personal and potentially embarrassing information on millions of our citizens. Beijing can learn these Americans’ deepest secrets — from details of extramarital affairs, say, to private images and videos they share, to the angry messages they composed but never sent to loved ones. All of that could later be used for blackmail or deception.
Beijing could one day harness artificial intelligence to exploit the information it is collecting from your phone. Just last week, ABC News reported that an Arizona mother got a call from an unknown number and heard her 15-year-old daughter’s voice on the other end sobbing that she had been kidnapped. It turned out the voice was an AI-produced “deep fake.” At this moment, China could use TikTok to collect voice prints of millions of Americans, which could allow China to one day clone their voices in a similar fashion for national security or commercial espionage.
Which brings us back to Teixeira. All China needs to gain access to commercial or national security secrets is to find one low-level employee with access to the information it wants. TikTok will help it do so. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 67 percent of American teens have installed TikTok on their phones. Those teens will grow up and take entry-level jobs in major corporations, research institutions, defense contractors, and military and governmental organizations — giving them keys to information networks and potentially, eventually, to highly sensitive information. China could one day use the data it collects from TikTok to map out personal and professional relationships among Americans, identify individuals of interest, and then target them for information.
China could use that access not just for intelligence or commercial espionage purposes, but also to potentially gain access to computer networks controlling critical U.S. infrastructure. That could allow Beijing to target our power grid, telecommunications, banking or transportation systems in the event of a conflict. And if the targeted individuals share their information — even unwittingly — only with Beijing, not in an online chatroom, the U.S. government might never find out.
TikTok represents an unparalleled economic and national security threat to the United States. But instead of moving to ban TikTok, the Biden administration is recruiting an “army” of social media influencers to help President Biden win a second term — even planning to give them their own dedicated briefing room in the White House. This makes Biden the first president to knowingly use a sophisticated surveillance tool controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to influence a U.S. election. That is a mistake. The longer Biden uses TikTok to target young Americans, the longer he allows Beijing to do the same.
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