Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

If Tiktok was European/Japanese/Korean/Canadian this would not happen, as those countries are free democracies and work with a similar/common rule of law

1. China doesn’t play with the same rules, and it has been proven to be a malicious player

2. They don’t allow western companies to operate freely in their country, why should we let them to?

3. The US and to a lesser degree Europe, are in a de-facto new Cold War, and informational warefare is big part of it

You can view either on the reciprocity Point of view, or data-safety point Of view, the US would be foolish/dumb to allow TikTok to flourish in the US., while American companies just can’t in China.

Now, if the US was banning an app from another western country, that would be a true scandal.

In this case they are doing the right thinks

View on HN

If the government wants to restrict the ability of Chinese business to grow in the US, that's fine, but it should be under the existing framework of law that we follow. This should be passed through Congress and the SC as a law, not an executive order.

We have Checks & Balances for a reason.

I doubt that is the case.

Look up how Japanese companies are treated in late 80s and 90s.

When one felt under threat, all rules will be forgone.

Free Market for me, not for thee

Is China a free market for non-Chinese companies?

Don't know why this is getting downvoted - it's a legitimate (albeit rhetorical) question highlighting that China has never allowed western companies to compete fairly in their market.

See: Google, Facebook, etc. etc.

Thank you. I have resorted to asking rhetorical questions as we are now at a stage where stating obvious true facts about certain topics is taboo.

We are now witnessing the beginnings of the great social media struggle session.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

https://www.wsj.com/articles/get-ready-for-the-struggle-sess...

Does China even pretend to be?

What comes to your mind when you think of China - Adam Smith or Karl Marx?

Does it matter? This is a discussion about the law of the United States, and last I checked we do not follow Chinese law.

I'll reiterate my point from above-- if the US government wants to ban Chinese services, that's fine. I support that decision. What I do not support is doing this via executive order as that is not how laws are passed.

If the US were to ban Chinese companies, it should be a law passed through Congress, signed by the president, and approved by the USSC. It should have clear parameters as to what exactly is being banned. It should, again, not be an executive order banning TikTok explicitly as there is nothing inherently bad about being an app called TikTok.

tldr if the US government wants to play the "fight fire with fire" card, they should be fighting the whole fire, not just the one that upset the president.

I think game theory can offer some insight. A tit-for-tat approach has been shown to be an effective long-term strategy over multiple iterations of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Player A will be discouraged from acting adversarially if they have reason to believe that player B will respond in kind.

Executive orders aren't magic, there's some law they will reference as giving the president the power to issue such an order.

The recent history of executive orders in the US blatantly contradicts this. Sure, you can claim that they have to be supported by law to be put into effect, but that's not actually true: Executive orders are put into place all the time, and if you're lucky the worst ones get suspended by a judge temporarily and are eventually decided in a court hearing months or years later.

The US president can say 'we're doing X' and if the relevant agencies' personnel are willing to listen to him, it'll be in effect the next day. We've seen this with travel bans and family separations.

Except for there being this joker called "national security" which magically allows practically anything to be ordered by the executive, because you can obviously reframe anything into a matter of national security, even short video clips of dancing teenagers.

Let's be clear apps like TikTok are a threat to national security.

Widely deployed apps that capture location data can and have been used to determine the location of military bases and assets.

If an app is a national security threat, maybe people shouldn’t be carrying them around military bases :shrug:

TikTok has been banned by the military since last year.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/12/30/army-follows-...

Many of those bases will have baby + home security cameras which are far more obviously a security risk, because they (potentially) send WiFi passwords home.

Trump's move is pure theatre. He has no clue about real security and he's throwing his weight around like an attention-seeking child, because that's what he does.

This is an entirely orthogonal issue to something that's been missing in the West for decades - a coherent program of IT security and IoT and app standards which define exactly what products and apps can and can't do, and which enforces a testing and certification process to make sure products and services stay within the lines.

And also... mandated protections for user data - something the EU is moving towards, but which the US still seems to be having issues with.

Between IoT, IT infrastructure, poor corporate security, and unregulated data capture, there are much more serious security threats than the TikTok app.

I fail to see how domestic US regulations will help in this case, if users are willingly installing this spyware app on their phone in the first place and giving it the requisite permissions to access everything on the devices. Do you think China will comply with US protections?

This is a parity of a NatSec threat. Any base that is legitimately secret would disallow it’s personal from using apps like this. And that data is trivially replaced by satellite photography. Non secret bases are supported by hundreds of “Third Country Nationals” that do everything from trash collection to serving food in the chow hall. TikTok is not a natsec threat unless our military personnel are posting natsec information to it. Pretty easy to solve that problem and not ban it for everyone.

But what is happening is that personal devices are being used by military personnel on those bases. We’ve seen plenty of examples in the past of where location information has been leaked e.g. Strava.

And satellite photography can’t be used to extrapolate troop numbers, movements etc. Especially given that it can be done in real time.

> And satellite photography can’t be used to extrapolate troop numbers, movements etc. Especially given that it can be done in real time.

Estimates can be made regarding troop capacity and capabilities based on the billeting and vehicles in the photos.

Is there any proof that TikTok captures any more data than any other popular app of its type ?

"Security" also happens to be the favorite purported justification of most authoritarian measures in evil regimes. Just look at China: ubiquitous surveillance, censorship, concentration camps, suppression of dissent are all justified internally as "security measures".

Should white nationalists be allowed to march and exist in the public space?

Yes, that's quite literally a textbook case of First Amendment rights.

Why not? They look like idiots doing it, people nearly always counter protest. It's always nice to see proof that the master race they ain't.

There is an important difference in this instance - the US is applying these to a foreign company, not on its own citizens like China.

I'm pretty sure when China banned Google & Facebook, it cited the reason as "not obeying local law" and "posing a national security threat".

It was less national security and more not obeying local law, particularly the law mandating censorship of certain stuff.

I don't like the Chinese approach to managing the public opinion by censoring valid information and opinions at all. But the opaque and uncontrollable pockets of power created by the US approach of misusing "national security" as an excuse for practically any action, most of them being more politically motivated than anything else, is equally disturbing and problematic. Both of these ways of governing lend themselves equally well to dictatorships, which I consider problematic, especially in modern democracies, which the US certainly claims to be (the Chinese government at least doesn't claim to be a democracy in the first place).

I don't see any reason to think this will be the case. The White House issued an executive order meant to intimidate Twitter after they labeled some of his tweets. That order did not cite any relevant body of law.

I haven't seen the EO, but didn't it cite section 230, which regulates how websites can filter content to maintain safe harbor status?

What checks and balances? The Senate and the judiciary have been rubber stamping everything the President has done over the past four years.

Whatever is wrong with China, and there is plenty, the US and particularly the president's behavior is dictatorial here.

Perhaps the administration could outline the new intel that has come to light in the last month that has made this such an urgent issue right now, as opposed to any other time in the past year.

Otherwise, as a layman, I might think that the humiliating "million ticket reservation" prank of the president's Tulsa, OK rally that adolescents orchestrated on TikTok is what triggered it.

It's well within the rights of the president to negotiate these matters, and congress has increasingly over the decades encouraged it:

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44707.pdf

Has there been tariffs in the past levied against specific companies?

I don't disagree with you. I think we've all found that a lot of the structure of US society and government have assumed non-malicious and non-criminal actors past a certain point. Frankly, I think the system assumes a capable enough public to elect competent and decent people, and should that ever fail there is nothing really worth saving, anyway.

Rule of law is not conditional on reciprocity, societies strive to give due process even to literal murderers.

The US should respect it's own laws and deal with chinese companies fairly. The actions of the chinese government should have no bearing on this.

> 1. China doesn’t play with the same rules ...

> 2. They don’t allow ..., why should we let them to?

Because, as you said in your first point, we play by different rules. Do you want everyone to start playing by China's rules instead?

This is a good point.

American exceptionalism is based on the premise of taking the high road (free, open democracy, rule of law, basic freedoms, "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...", etc) and being a success because of that.

To now play by China's rules basically says America has been doing it wrong the last 100 years.

You’re skirting around the argument. The parent’s argument is that no single politician should have this power. It isn’t an argument for or against the government stepping in here—it’s an argument against who’s doing it.

Genuine emergencies (IEEPA expressly addresses seems conflict with special provisions, and arguably mostly is made for that and conditions imminently threatening it) may need responses inside the legislative cycle, which is why IEEPA exists. Certainly, it's arguably been stretched beyond the basic intent in the past (but Congress hasn't reasserted itself in response), and even by the standards of past use this is somewhat ludicrous, but I think that the basic concept is one which makes the case that it's not the President having the power to exercise judgement in this area that is the problem but the judgement actually exercised.

I don't think it matters whether China is a democracy or not. The US has been a malicious player for the past few years -- Canada has similarly been labeled a threat to national security.

What does matter is that China is starting to become strong enough to be a regional power, which is a threat to American dominance in East Asia

Sadly this splitting of tech into China and the West is a huge trend, one which we are not going to stop.

In the future tech will bifurcate into two camps and we'll have a new cold war.

I am tired of the FAANG dominance of tech ... time for new products and companies.

Easy to say that a country doesn't play by the rules when you make up the rules as you go along.

If it is sold to Microsoft, is any of that still applicable?

Except Trump is blocking the move that would alleviate all of those concerns because it's politically inconvenient to admit that the owners of Tiktok don't really care about harvesting sensitive personal data to appease their political overlords in Beijing, they mainly care about the same thing every other tech CEO cares about which is harvesting sensitive personal data to build a fantastically profitable advertising platform.

Trump's wish to ban it has nothing to do with China and everything to do with his Tulsa rally. Gov agencies have already put internal bans in place to prevent it being used as for data gathering tool which is appropriate and legal. The users will find something else and move on, but this is a bad precedent for an open democracy.

1. There's the First Amendment in the US

2. Tens of millions of Americans use Tiktok as a platform for speech.

3. Now Trump wants to prohibit the platform which enables the free exercise of political speech against him.

What's more important, geopolitical considerations or the Constitution?

The first amendment doesn't preclude the government liquidating a news business or publisher for unrelated reasons, such as fraud or tax violations. In this case Bytedance is basically being accused of (being accomplice to) espionage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com