FBI Director Chris Wray shocked U.S. senators this past Wednesday upon hearing when he unveiled that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had the power to take full control of “millions” of phones owned by Americans via the insanely popular app TikTok.
“If you look at the Chinese government’s gobbling up of information and data, and then the use of AI and other tools, ultimately supercomputing, things like that, to marshal all that data to conduct targeting for espionage, targeting for IP theft, targeting for the all the things that I and others on this panel have been calling out about the Chinese government,” stated Wray to the gathered Senate Intelligence Committee. “Data is the coin of the realm, those who have the best information have the power and that’s what that enables them to do.”
Wray explained that the Chinese Equifax hack let them illegally obtain via theft the Personal Identifiable Information (PII) of close to half of the population of the United States.
“So it’s the control of the data to conduct all sorts of big data operations,” he explained. “It’s the control of the recommendation algorithm, which allows them to conduct influence operations. It’s the control of the software, which allows them to then have access to millions of devices. So you put all those three things together, and again, come back to the starting point, which is, this is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government and it to me screams out with national security concerns.”
Seemingly in response to an intense line of questions coming from ranking member Marco Rubio (R-FL), Wray claimed that communist China can utilize TikTok to leverage control on the data of millions of users, to control the software installed on millions of devices and that they can use it to push narratives that try and divide the American public against one another.
Wray also warned that not only can the CCP utilize TikTok to control the story in the U.S., but also that officials in the United States are “not sure that we would see many of the outward signs of it happening if it was happening.”
“And I think the most fundamental piece that cuts across every one of those risks and threats that you mentioned that I think Americans need to understand is that something that’s very sacred in our country, that difference between the private sector and the public sector, that’s a line that is non existent in the way that CCP operates,” concluded Wray.
Rubio then spoke out about the differences in what many users on the app in China see as opposed to what the users from the U.S. see on the platform. “For example, in the U.S. kids are being encouraged to choke themselves out, we’ve had kids die,” finished Rubio. “In China, they’re encouraged to focus on math and science and building the country.”
