TikTok Whistleblower Says US Data Can Easily Be Accessed From China: Sen. Hawley

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) Sen. Josh Hawley (R. Missouri) has asked the Treasury Department to thoroughly review the new whistleblower accusations regarding TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-video app.

On March 8, Hawley wrote to Janet Yellen, Secretary of Treasury. He stated that a TikTok whistleblower had come to him with direct information about the operating procedures of the app. Hawley claimed that these are his claims. “deeply concerning” They appear to contradict public statements by TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance about the handling of U.S. users’ data.

The Revelations leaked recordings Concerns in Congress have been raised by the fact that Chinese engineers had accessed U.S. data on the platform several times since January last year.

TikTok’s Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas September 2022 testified to senators that they have “strict controls in terms of who and how our data is accessed,” You vowed this “under no circumstances would we give that data to China,” According to the whistleblower, access controls were described as “superficial” According to Hawley, they are at the very least not possible.

TikTok employees and ByteDance workers can “switch between Chinese and U.S. data with nothing more than the click of a button using a proprietary tool called Dorado, Hawley said, quoting the whistleblower who likened it to a “Light switch”

Another tool the whistleblower cited is called Aeolus, which he said will allow a China-based employee access to U.S. data with authorization from a manager and a dataset owner.

“Firsthand, I’ve seen engineers based in China switch to non-China data and create tasks to back up, analyze, and aggregate the data.”

The whistleblower also described close coordination between TikTok and ByteDance, both of which he said “They rely on software that they developed in China. This reduces foreign scrutiny, and allows Chinese engineers to create software backdoors.” Hawley wrote in the letter.

“ByteDance is functionally the exact same company as TikTok. The managers keep in touch with them and they use the same chat apps and data analysis software.” Hawley cited the whistleblower as saying.

‘Highly Disturbing Allegations’

Hawley sees the “Highly disturbing claims” as the latest reason for a complete purge of TikTok from the United States, which is most popular among American teens.

“TikTok keeps reassuring members of China’s Communist Party that they don’t have U.S. access, yet it seems increasingly likely that they do.” he wrote. He requested Yellen provide information on what TikTok has shared with the foreign transaction review panel—the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS)—that she chairs regarding its software tools, dataset facilities, internal products, the declared access ability for TikTok staff in China through these tools, and the internal approval process that CFIUS is aware of.

Asked by The Epoch Times, a TikTok spokesperson argued that the whistleblower “This appears to be a misinformed assumption.”

“The tools described in Sen. Hawley’s letter are primarily analytic tools—they don’t independently grant direct access to data,” TikTok told The Epoch Times. The company spokesperson added that “[a]The United States manages access to U.S. users data. [TikTok] U.S. Data Security can leave Oracle Cloud Environment only under certain, controlled circumstances, as stipulated in the proposed agreement with CFIUS.”

TikTok said “It is common for technology companies to create their tools and services in order to satisfy internal business requirements.” and that “[n]A majority of the tools in this category are examined externally.” In a bid to remain in the United States, TikTok has been working on a program called “Project Texas” by partnering with U.S. computing giant Oracle, whose cloud infrastructure will host TikTok’s U.S. data. Under it, TikTok said, “Every line of code is subject to inspection, testing, and verification by third-party parties in order to make sure there are no hidden backdoors.”

The push to ban TikTok, which has more than 113 million U.S. users each month, has been gaining momentum in the United States and elsewhere as threats stemming from Beijing’s global ambitions to challenge the liberal democratic world order receive wider recognition.

Action in Congress

On March 1, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to advance a bill targeting the TikTok.

“Anyone with TikTok downloaded on their device has given the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] a backdoor to all their personal information. It’s a spy balloon into your phone,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the committee chairman who introduced the proposed legislation, told The Epoch Times’ sister outlet NTD.

More than half of U.S. states have moved to ban TikTok from government devices. The measure is also enforced on a federal level under part of a $1.65 trillion spending bill passed in December.

In a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on Wednesday, FBI director Christopher Wray reaffirmed that TikTok poses national security and privacy concerns, and could be used as a tool by the CCP to manipulate the thinking of millions in America.

However, answering the committee’s vice chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who wants to know whether Beijing could use the app to sow public discord and promote certain narratives, Wray said it could be difficult to “see many of the outward signs of it happening if it was happening.”

“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, the difference between the private sector and the public sector—that’s a line that is nonexistent in the way the CCP operates,” Wray said.