This

 

is EXACTLY how the rest of the world views us right now.

US says China can spy with TikTok. It spies on world with Google

3/28/23

"Taipei, Taiwan – During a five-hour grilling of the chief executive of TikTok last week, United States lawmakers railed against the possibility of China using the wildly popular, partly Chinese-owned app to spy on Americans."

"They did not mention how the US government itself uses US tech companies that effectively control the global internet to spy on everyone else."

"As the US considers banning the short video app used by more than 150 million Americans, lawmakers are also weighing the renewal of powers that force firms like Google, Meta and Apple to facilitate untrammelled spying on non-US citizens located overseas."

"Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the US Congress must vote to reauthorise by December to prevent it from lapsing under a sunset clause, allows US intelligence agencies to carry out warrantless spying on foreigners’ email, phone and other online communications."

( I donated to the EFF like...10 years ago...1st generation privacy rights advocate yo...Bumper stickers are still on my truck etc.)

"While US citizens have some protections against warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, the US government has maintained that these rights do not extend to foreigners overseas, giving agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) practically free rein to snoop on their communications."

"Though it is common for governments to spy abroad, Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet, including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft."

"For billions of internet users outside the US, the lack of privacy mirrors the alleged threat that US officials say TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, poses to Americans."

(The nerve of these people to use our own blueprint against us! How dare they do to us what we have been doing to everybody else for years! Thats sarcasm BTW, the highest form of humor :-).

"Although intended to target communications between foreigners, Section 702 in practice also captures the communications of US citizens who interact with foreigners."

(My dad used to say, "I was born at night, but it wasn't last night." I mean come on what do you really think is the "real" intention here?)

"The NSA and CIA are allowed to carry what critics describe as “backdoor” warrantless searches of US citizens’ communications that are collected incidentally if they believe it will yield information about foreign intelligence."

(You might as well just light the constitution on fire at this point. It's not worth the parchment it was written on if all we do is circumvent it 24/7.)

"The FBI can also search through these communications, but is required to obtain a warrant for criminal investigations not related to national security."

"While US officials insist that their focus is on national security threats, civil liberties advocates say “foreign intelligence” could include effectively any communications, including those of journalists, human rights advocates and ordinary citizens, deemed of interest to the US government."

“The problem is that fundamentally the standard is extremely low, it’s a very broad authority,” said Ashley Gorski, a lawyer at the ACLU’s National Security Project, adding that “targets” do not have to be suspected of any crime."

“They don’t have to have any connection to terrorism. They can be journalists. They can be human rights workers abroad.”

(They could be anybody, so yeah, f#@* section 702 of the FISA.)

"Some critics argue that TikTok’s collection of data is little different from other platforms and that the push for a ban is a distraction from a far bigger problem which Washington has shown little appetite to address: a glaring lack of legal protections for personal data.'

(Again, donated to the EFF like 10 years ago? Just for "a glaring lack of legal protections for personal data" those reasons.)

"Vedran Sekara, an assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, said the moves to restrict TikTok appeared to be “more political than good policy”.

(Pointing fingers at somebody else serves to keep the eyes of of what were doing dont ya think?)

“If politicians and lawmakers really were interested in protecting people from ‘evil’ or ‘nefarious’ tech companies, they should instead focus on regulating the entire tech and social media industries rather than just focusing on one company,” Sekara told Al Jazeera."

“Essentially, the US is creating a template for other despotic authoritarian or even protectionist governments to use national security as a guide to prevent competition in the market and to lay claims over proprietary technologies,” Jyoti Panday, an India-based researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Governance Project, told Al Jazeera."

"Washington giving US tech companies a “free card” while restricting foreign companies would be “basically signalling to other countries or nations that sovereignty is the ultimate game in regulating cyberspace”, Panday said."

(Law of unintended consequences much anybody?)

I love you baby :-).