Information—you may have heard this one before—wants to be free, and on the global Internet, it flows more freely than ever. Governments are frequently less than sanguine about this fact—often for bad and censorious reasons, but also on occasion with perfectly valid motives, such as the desire to protect national security or the personal privacy of their citizens, which are in many cases overlapping interests. The past month saw developments in two fronts of the perennial struggle to reap the benefits of a borderless network while still maintaining a modicum of control over private data—and I believe it is illuminating to consider them together.
TikTok and WeChat
In June, President Biden formally revoked a pair of his predecessor’s ill-starred executive orders, which had sought to effectively ban the popular Chinese-owned social media apps TikTok and WeChat. Both orders had already been temporarily blocked by courts on First Amendment grounds. Biden’s replacement order, however, made clear that this was a prelude to developing a more systematic approach to foreign-owned apps, and directed the Department of Commerce (in consultation with other agencies) to prepare a report “recommending additional executive and legislative actions to address the risk associated with connected software applications that are designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons owned or controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of, a foreign adversary.”
The primary “risk” in question is that modern apps routinely collect enormous amounts of data about their users—often including real-world data like geolocation—which might be of significant intelligence value to a foreign power, especially if the app in question is used by a government employee or contractor, or a member of their family. This is a bit odd in the case of WeChat, however, given that it is primarily used to communicate with people in China… and it should not be surprising to anyone that unsecured communications to China are at risk of being intercepted by the Chinese government.
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