Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless SurveillanceIt’s great to have you with us. I mean, it was amazing to see this absolute bipartisan almost consensus in the particular hearing that the CEO of TikTok was being questioned at, being grilled and demanding that TikTok be sold to a U.S. company in order for it to be saved. Talk about what Bowman said, what AOC has said, and what you think are the major concerns here.
But what’s interesting is that TikTok has proposed a plan that would wall off U.S. data from China’s access. It basically has said to the government, “We would store all of our data about U.S. users at Oracle, a U.S. company, and we would actually submit to oversight by the Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.
And so, for the U.S. to suddenly say, “OK, we want to support freedom of expression around the world” — right? We do that not only through our private companies but through our foreign diplomacy and our USAID, etc. We now actually don’t want it at home, right? We’re going to actually basically censor TikTok here. It makes it really hard for us to justify supporting freedom of expression around the world.
Now, you asked me about VPNs. VPNs are virtual private networks, so, basically, it’s something you would put on your phone in order to route around your internet provider. It’s often used in places, like China, where the government is censoring internet traffic, and it’s a way to try to circumvent that censorship. And so, it’s interesting that you would think of restricting that, when in fact that’s something we tend to export to other nations in order to promote freedom of expression.