Today, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul gave the following remarks ahead of the markup of his bill, H.R. 1153, which mandates the administration to ban TikTok or any software applications that threaten U.S. national security. H.R. 1153 passed out of committee 24-16.
-Remarks as delivered-
While the nation looked at the sky in disbelief as a spy balloon from the Chinese Communist Party’s military traversed the U.S. gathering sensitive data and sending it back to the Mothership in Beijing, many Americans do not realize one of the greatest surveillance efforts from the CCP has been silently gathering personal data in their pockets. There’s no secret that TikTok is beholden to the CCP. In fact, President Biden, his National Security officials, have been sounding the alarm for months. Biden’s FBI Director said that TikTok’s parent company is “controlled by the Chinese government.” President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence explained that the PRC is “collecting foreign data to then use it to target audiences for information campaigns,” and Biden’s own Deputy Attorney General said, “I don’t use TikTok and I would not advise anyone else to.” And we just heard today from one of our witnesses, our Under Secretary for the Bureau of Industry and Security, stating that TikTok was a threat to the national security of Americans in the United States.
The United States Congress, literally the people in this room, agreed that TikTok is so dangerous that we banned its use on federal government devices and it’s not only Congress, more than 30 states have banned TikTok from state-issued devices including my home state of Texas. So why is Congress and the majority of States blocking access to TikTok? We’ve all seen what the PRC does with this type of data against its own people: interrogations, imprisonment, and shipping minority groups to genocide camps. TikTok is a modern-day Trojan Horse of the CCP used to surveil and exploit Americans’ personal information. This legislation is a first step in protecting Americans against subversive data collection. Currently, the courts have questioned the administration’s authority to sanction TikTok.
My bill empowers the administration to ban TikTok or any other software application that threatens U.S. National Security. And make no mistake, TikTok is a national security threat. It allows the CCP to manipulate and monitor its users while it gobbles up Americans’ data to be used for their malign activities. Anyone with TikTok downloaded on their device has given the CCP permission and a back door to all their personal information. In other words, it’s a spy balloon in your phone. And I have no doubt the PRC will look to weaponize this intelligence as they seek to upend the global balance of power in this great generational competition. It is time to act this is an issue that affects all Americans and it’s time to put an end to the hostile efforts of the CCP to exploit Americans and their personal privacy. And I urge my colleagues to support this again as we did impose this on all members of Congress.
Original source can be found here.
