Why even Texas bans TikTok

9 February 20231 year ago babelfish

Texas has banned government employees from installing TikTok on government-owned devices, fearing Chinese espionage. All the details

After South Dakota, South Carolina and Maryland, Texas now also joins the list of US states in which public employees are explicitly prohibited from installing TikTok on government-owned devices or from conducting state business with potentially compromised private devices . Meanwhile, a second bill is presented to Congress which aims to outlaw its application at the national level. But according to a Democratic senator such measures are not necessary because TikTok is already collaborating with US intelligence to ensure that the platform is not used for spying .

Abbott's move

As reported byCBS , the turning point in Texas comes with a directive from Governor Greg Abbott to the Department of Public Safety and Information Resources to develop, within the mandatory deadline of next February 15, a policy relating to the use of all devices entrusted to the employees of the State administrations and to the private ones owned by them.

The new directive, recalls CBS in another article , comes after Abbott himself gave instructions to state agency executives last December to prohibit employees from downloading TikTok on publicly owned devices, citing the "threat by the Party Chinese communist to infiltrate the United States".

To justify the new move, Abbott used unequivocal words: “the security risks associated with the use of TikTok on equipment used to conduct our state's important business should not be underestimated or ignored… Owned by a Chinese company that employs Communist Party of China members, TikTok collects a significant amount of data from your device, including details about your internet activity.

What the Texas plan involves on TikTok

Based on the directive issued by the governor, it will now be necessary to proceed in a very short time to draw up a plan containing the binding indications for the staff of the agencies and public offices.

The objectives set for the operation are as follows:

ban and prevent the installation or use of TikTok and other prohibited technologies on any state-owned device, such as mobile phones, laptops, tablets, desktop computers and any device with an internet connection;
prohibit employees and contractors from conducting state business on personal devices with prohibited technology installed;
identify sensitive locations, meetings and staff of each agency that may be exposed (to capture by) personal devices on which prohibited technology is installed, and deny access to such sensitive areas to such devices and the consequent use;
implement network restrictions that prevent any device from using prohibited technologies on public agency networks.

The new bill in Congress

The drastic action by Texas comes in the same days in which two Republican lawmakers presented Congress with a bill that provides for a total nationwide ban on Chinese enforcement.

As reported by The Hill , the initiative by Senator Josh Hawley and Congressman Ken Buck would give the President the power to block and prohibit transactions with ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.

The new bill joins the similar bipartisan one presented last year with the first signatures of Senator Marco Rubio and Deputies Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, all Republicans.

The reply from TikTok also arrived shortly, whose spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter tried to shift attention from the alleged danger of a single application to the broader issue of the lack of US regulation on privacy and data protection.

“We hope – reads the spokesman's note reported by The Hill – that (the proponents of the law) focus their energies on efforts to address these issues in a holistic way, rather than pretending that banning a single service will solve the problems they are concerned about or making Americans safer.”

Is TikTok collaborating with US intelligence?

In contrast to these hostile initiatives were the declarations of the Democratic Senator Cory Booker according to which, to quote the title of the article with which The Hill reported it, "TikTok is working with US intelligence to ensure that China cannot use the platform to spy".

Booker does not deny the problem posed by TikTok in terms of a potential threat "to US national security and secrets" and admits that there is a "strong bipartisan view" in Congress that this issue needs swift and incisive action. But he also has his own very personal idea of how to find a solution.

“I think there are two ways to approach this,” Booker said on CBS' Face the Nation. “The proactive step of banning (TikTok) on government devices is something the federal government, states, and even individual municipalities are doing. But another approach is to involve companies directly. They are now working with intelligence officials to try to ensure that the appropriate precautions are taken so that the Chinese cannot gain access and spy."

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/tiktok-divieto-texas/ on Thu, 09 Feb 2023 08:55:38 +0000.