Oh fuck off. They wanted it to spy on their own citizens and those of its allied nations. They wanted the same backdoor google, Facebook, Microsoft and all our telecom companies give them.
I’ve seen a lot of bad takes but this takes the cake. There isn’t anything virtuous about mass spy programs and no way was any actual chinese data even on the table.
They wanted the same backdoor google, Facebook, Microsoft and all our telecom companies give them.
None of those companies give “backdoor access”. All information has to be obtained legally via a warrant. Why do you think they’re all throwing E2E encryption in their apps? Nobody wants to work with the government here, it’s bad for business.
I suggest you read all about FISA courts.
They issue court orders which companies cannot divulge they’re under and those things are often not limited to surveillance of specific individuals in the course of investigating a crime but are often mass surveillance orders.
This is how the NSA had servers directly in some US phone providers feeding directly from their core systems.
All this was brought out as part of the Snowden revelations, so you should know better than parrot the description of what has been a fantasy version of how the Law works in the US since 9/11 and the Patriot Act.
Still today it’s a core rule for companies anywhere in the World which have trade secrets that might be of benefit to US companies to not use any systems hosted or owned by US companies (or, in fact, UK ones, were such laws are even worse) exactly because said US companies can silently be complied BY LAW to give the local spy agencies access to that data.
This isn’t “backdoor access” being given by definition, as FISA courts still require legal warrants even though they’re secret.
Not trying to argue the sketchyness of the US government though, I mostly agree with everything you’ve said, but the distinction is the context of the conversation. TikTok is still required to comply to FISA requests if they want to operate in the US, no additional access to user data is given by those American tech companies, or at least we have no reason to think that yet.
