TikTok: Why We Aren’t Here, Why We Don’t! What Did We Learn about the US and What Should We Do About It?

The public discussion of the US pushing to force TikTok to divorce its Chinese parent company was largely over for almost a year. In the course of just over a week, it jumped suddenly from the pile of forgotten ideas to getting halfway through the process of becoming enshrined in law.

Read Makena on the bill that would ban TikTok, and read Vittoria Elliott’s update on Wednesday’s vote. Get your videos off of TikTok is one of the instructions we have. Read the entire TikTok coverage of WIRED.

Makena says to go to the office. Really. Mike recommends Ener-C powdered vitamin drink mix. Kate knibbs had previously recommended American fiction, which just won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

GadgetLab: From a podcast to an interactive discussion on data privacy and the passing of the Data Privacy Protection Act (CivilLaw)

Makena Kelly can be found on social media @kellymakena. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. There is Michael Calore. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is being produced by a man namedBoone Ashworth. The music for our theme is by Solar Keys.

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Some members were concerned about the speed with which the bill was passed. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a member of the Select Committee on the CCP alongside Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi, voted against it and called the process “rushed” in a statement. He said that Congress should listen and work on a data privacy bill instead of banning it.

Members had access to classified briefings ahead of the vote to better understand the risks. For some members, these sessions seemed instrumental to their decisions to vote for the bill’s passage. Representatives from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Justice were in the room when the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to pass the legislation last Thursday.

Now that the legislation’s fate is in the hands of the Senate, the process could slow down considerably. Chuck Schumer hasn’t committed to action besides reviewing the bill and it’s not yet a companion bill.

How the House quietly revived the TikTok ban bill: Creating a moment of national security for the benefit of a foreign adversary

​​”They’re flooding our offices, often from kids who are about as young as nine years old, their parents have no idea that they’re doing this, they’re calling in, and they’re basically saying things like, ‘What is Congress? Can I get my TikTok back? Krishnamoorthy told The Verge.

“One person threatened self harm unless they got their TikTok. Another impersonated a member of Congress’ son, scaring the bejesus out of the congressman, by the way,” said Krishnamoorthi. “And this is exactly the kind of influence campaign which, in the hands of a foreign adversary in a moment of national peril, could sow chaos and discord and division in a way that could really harm our national security to the benefit of a foreign adversary.”

The approach that was adopted Wednesday wasn’t the right bill because of the legal hurdles. HR 7521 takes a different approach, making it illegal for app stores or web hosts to distribute social media services that are “controlled by a foreign adversary.” It gives companies six months to give up their foreign stake in order to remain in the US.

The authors worked with stakeholders and the White House in order to address concerns about whether the legislation could violate the constitution. Krishnamoorthi told reporters that the bill got 352 votes, despite all the work.

“It was a 12 page bill,” Gallagher said of the speed right after the vote. “I mean, it wasn’t like an omnibus that we just shoved in people’s faces. Even a member of Congress could read 12 pages in a matter of hours.”

Source: How the House quietly revived the TikTok ban bill

The Case for a New Lobbying Platform: The Case Against TikTok in the House of Representatives and the Senate Majority

A staffer for a Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee said their office has not seen any lobbying activity from TikTok since its CEO testified last year. The onslaught of calls took them by surprise.

For four hours, the office’s four phone lines were constantly full, with others going to voicemail. The staffers would take turns working on the phones as others used the bathroom.

The callers were also unusual as far as congressional call-in campaigns go, based on conversations with five congressional staffers who were not authorized to speak on the record about internal matters. There was no sort of script for them. They’d hang up when they realized they had reached a live person. Even stranger, most sounded very young. Several staffers who spoke to The Verge estimated that callers sounded like they were 14, 15 years old, and sometimes even younger. TikTok has said the notification went to users over 18.

After this staffer asked a caller to give their name to record their message, the young caller asked if they could leave their comment without giving out their information. The senior staffer explained to them that protecting the caller’s private information was their purpose in calling for the legislation.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), an E&C member, told The Verge her office had received about 200 calls on the legislation last Thursday but only about eight to ten had left any information. “When the others heard someone answer the phone, they hung up.”

“This was a preview of what could happen if the CCP wanted to use the app to prevent Congress from acting, say, on a debate over authorizing force to defend Taiwan. Or removing China’s permanent normal trade relations status,” Gallagher told reporters after the vote. The control of a prominent news platform by one of our adversaries is not the right thing to do because of the potential for dangerous propaganda.

It was the worst public relations stunt that TikTok pulled. “That was kind of the secret, not-so-secret reason why, for instance, the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a number of lean-yeses on the day of the vote that became hell-yeses by the time of the vote.”

The vice president of public policy at TikTok wrote a letter to the two politicians complaining about how they were being treated. If you’re a public servant, you might be well versed in the right to petition the government to deal with grievances.

Source: How the House quietly revived the TikTok ban bill

House–Tiktok Ban Bill Staffers Calls Congress: How the House Quietly revivified the TikTok ban bill

“If something presents a national security threat to the United States of America, I damn well better pay attention to that as a member of the Congress.”

Eshoo, who noted she’s attended many intelligence briefings after spending about a decade on the House Intelligence Committee, called the one ahead of Thursday’s committee markup “excellent.” She said hearing from intelligence officials helped ease any concerns she might have otherwise had about the process. She would object if it was brought up without an updated version of the information. It was a very thorough briefing, and I thought it was related to other briefings we have had.

Krishnamoorthi said it wasn’t necessarily any one single revelation that made the classified briefings impactful. “I think that it’s probably the level of seriousness with which people addressed the topic. The way it was done, was not partisan in any way. He added that the opportunity for lawmakers to have “candid conversations” with each other in a bipartisan, classified setting was also helpful.

Source: How the House quietly revived the TikTok ban bill

Defending Cybersecurity: How the House Quietly re-launched the TikTok ban bill (with a comment by Frank Pallone)

“One of the key differences between us and those adversaries is the fact that they shut down newspapers, broadcast stations, and social media platforms. We do not.”

Some members opposed the legislation because they saw it as too rushed or the wrong tool to fit their concerns. The top Democrat in the House Intelligence Committee was one of the members who opposed the bill. He said in a statement that, due to his position on the committee, “I have more insight than most into the online threats posed by our adversaries. One of the differences between us and those adversaries is that they shut down newspapers, broadcast stations and social media platforms. We do not. We trust our citizens to be worthy of their democracy. We do not trust our government to decide what information they may or may not see.”

The committee was scheduled to vote on the classified hearing last week, and Frank Pallone expressed concern as to how quickly it would be done. Pallone said he wanted to hear from the witnesses before making his decision. After emerging from the classified hearing, he joined the rest of his colleagues on the panel in voting for the legislation to pass. He later advocated for it on the floor before casting a vote in favor there, too.

To move forward, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) will need to usher the legislation through her panel. But Cantwell has served as a roadblock to popular bipartisan tech legislation in the past. She was the only one of the four committees that would have supported the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, they were the Republicans and Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senate Commerce Committee. It passed out of the House committee by a vote of 53–2 in 2022.

After the TikTok bill was approved by the House, Cantwell said she would try to find a path forward that protects civil liberties, but didn’t commit to moving the legislation.

“I am very concerned about foreign adversaries’ exploitation of Americans’ sensitive data and their attempts to build backdoors in our information communication technology and services supply chains.” “These are national security threats and it is good [that] members in both chambers are taking them seriously.”

Source: How the House quietly revived the TikTok ban bill

Trump’s bill to divestitate Facebook: Where do we stand? Where are we going? What do we really want to see in the next century?

After the vote, he tried to downplay Trump’s opposition. The aim of the bill is not to shut down TikTok, but to make its users join Facebook. He said that would be a bad outcome. In that respect, I agree with what Trump said. But our bill allows for a divestiture.”

If he’s re-elected, Trump may be able to fulfill the deal of the century, because he has an ego and self-crafted image as a dealmaker.