The fact that something, anything, can be declared a national security risk without offering any proof for it whatsoever should worry everyone.
Pretty sure EU car manufacturers like Daimler or VW would like to buy up Tesla's European operations for cheap. Just need the government to simply declare them to be a national security threat and force them to sell or lose access to the largest market on the planet.
I don't think this is an isomorphic situation. Chinese companies are different from EU/American ones because:
(1) The CCP is a secretive, authoritarian government with an established disregard for human rights.
(2) China already imposes draconian restrictions on American (and EU!) companies, far in excess of the proposed restrictions on TikTok, e.g. forced "joint ventures" with Chinese firms resulting in wholesale theft of IP.
(3) Unlike the EU, China is involved in a wide-reaching and pre-existing geopolitical power struggle with the US.
Okay, right now/recently China is sterilizing millions of muslim refugees and placing them in "re-education" facilities. While pretty much wholesale taking over a territory that had much more freedom.
I'm not sure there are recent examples of US actions that even compare in scale or scope.
-- edit:
This also doesn't even get into the scale of the nation state cyber espionage activities. If you work in any government agency, or work with the government, your networks are under constant attacks.
> right now/recently China is sterilizing millions of muslim refugees
Big claims like that's require evidence? Do you have any? The UN human rights commissioner has been repeatedly invited to Xinjiang for years yet still hasn't gone.
Why are a large group of Muslim countries publicly supporting China's efforts in the region to reduce extremism?[1]
The more you look past the sabre rattlers the shakier all this supposedly common knowledge looks. Trace it back far enough and it all leads to Adrian Zenz, whom the BBC called a "world leading expert on Xinjiang", except Zenz can't read or speak Chinese, he's an Evangelical missionary whose "scientific" paper on Xinjiang that's so often quoted by the media contains strange Bible references, his published books are on how to survive the coming rapture and contain lot of bigoted statements against homosexuals.
Most of this is white supremacist propaganda has already been disproven the rest I suspect will also be disproven in due time. Even the Turkish president taking refugees says is in the scope of thousands not millions.
Secondly IRAQ war or Afghanistan regime changes kill MILLIONS. Gitmo. Hypocritical at best. CIA has funded guerilla efforts to sabotage BRI if you want to know what that truly is about
> They also used depleted uranium, which is banned by international law
Uh, no it's not. It's not even covered by one of the treaties banning weapons that the US hasn't signed up to (such as the cluster munition or landmine treaties).
While I strongly disagree with my country's preference to not sign up to international treaties on the basis that it might find itself on trial, as I pointed out, this doesn't even fall under the case of such a treaty.
If you disagree with me, please cite precisely which clause of which treaty prohibits the use of depleted uranium in weapons.
While you're right that depleted uranium specifically isn't covered, it's interesting to me that you focus on the legal status as opposed to the horrific effects of the weapon on the civilian population. There's also a pretty strong case that it falls under existing laws prohibiting superfluous injuries or unnecessary suffering.
He's focusing on the incorrect statement you made. The straightforward thing to do here, if you think the rest of your argument is more important than your mistake, is to concede the point and move on.
While I've already acknowledged that it's not explicitly covered, I've linked an article explaining that it's in a gray area at best and falls under existing laws prohibiting superfluous injuries or unnecessary suffering.
I think this comment is a bit too downvoted for how well-referenced it is. Can people who disagree comment instead of downvoting? I'd be interested to know if some/all of the claims are untrue, but driveby downvoting doesn't help discussion.
A few of them are untrue (I pointed out one claim in my sibling comment), or at the very least, written in such a way as to give an impression that is not true.
The downvoting here is, I assume, largely because it's sanctimonious whataboutism. And in general, you're combining two logical fallacies (both the sanctimonious part and the whataboutism), and many such lists can tend to delve into "I'm cherry-picking only the evidence that I want to see and ignoring anything that disagrees with my viewpoint."
It is amusing to me what is not on this list. I'm surprised there's no mention of Smedley Butler's War is a Racket, or Noah Chomsky's well-known views on the Vietnam War and the US media's involvement with it. I'm especially bemused by the lack of any mention to the drone assassination program, most tied to Obama--perhaps because every media mention of it inevitably criticizes it, so it doesn't work well as a "your government is doing evil stuff that you don't know about" example?
Saying whataboutism is simply trolling and not a form of argument. Claiming a country does X implies that what it's doing is somehow an outlier, and that "good" countries don't use such tactics. Nobody is refuting the points about China, however those have to be seen in context of what other countries, such as US are doing. When it's not in any way abnormal behaviour then singling out China is just pure hypocrisy, and it's a disingenuous argument.
The context of discussion here is the parent comment asking whether there are recent examples of US actions that even compare in scale or scope. So, it's a little weird to screech about whataboutism when those examples are provided.
Meanwhile, it would take multiple books to list all of the known US atrocities, so I just picked a small sample there.
You can very well make the argument that all the cameras in Tesla's cars can be used for surveillance and hence, pose a threat to national security. No evidence needed - the precedence has been set.
Here is the secret: Teslas factories already are built out of machines mostly out of the European car manufacturing ecosystem. Tesla is already a European success, quite the opposite of being a threat.
A lot of things are considered national security risks despite lacking what you might consider proof of wrongdoing.
It’s quite frankly baffling that people can’t see why one of the most popular social media platforms wouldn’t be considered a national security risk, especially after what we saw during the last presidential election.
Off-topic, but if you're inside a building or outside the 1/2 mi central radius, you won't be vaporized. At which point you want to make sure you are protected from the fireball which is coming; ideally you go inside a solid structure. This will protect from 3rd degree burns from the fireball, from the air pressure wave coming afterwards (hence solidity to prevent collapse), and from the highest radiation.
Wasn't it shown that TikTok (and LinkedIn to be fair) was accessing camera and/or clipboard when it didn't need to?
I have no dog in this fight, but isn't there at least a little evidence that TikTok may be collecting data on a large scale? I haven't been following it all that closely, but I thought that's what the original bans for military members was about.
Edit: So, yes, but that’s ok because others were too.
> Wasn't it shown that TikTok (and LinkedIn to be fair) was accessing camera and/or clipboard when it didn't need to?
There's a gigantic list of apps that were revealed to be accessing things like the clipboard in iOS 14. I just installed the beta, and I found that my credit union's app reads the clipboard every time I open it. My third-party reddit app does the same thing.
TikTok doing it isn't really even news. There are dozens to hundreds of apps doing it, and it's likely a bug.
Given how this administration behaves, it's just occurred to me that it's also equally likely that TikTok is being singled out because it was used to coordinate the bogus Trump rally ticket reservations.
Any time a firm, app, or organization does something to offend or inconvenience the man, he launches an attack against it. There's certainly a pattern of this behaviour.
This is what I think it really is. Tiktok was used to embarrass Trump. Tiktok is now a national security target. @jack @ Twitter was his target for a week once they tagged his posts as noT factual.
Many apps are doing that (Tik Tok for sure is too), I have recently analysed a lot of apps on android.
But it's nothing new really, just happened to become a "mainstream headline" now. Another thing that most people don't even realise, is that on android, every app can access the clipboard. Many apps do it continually, even in the background.
I think I have some past comments here on HN explaining more about how I restrict this type of behaviour if you're interested.
Well, the user can only control the bare minimum by default. On first launch (on Android), TikTok also reads the Sim Country Iso, a list of the available sensors, the network operator (ISP), a list of installed applications, the wifi BSSID and the Android ID.
It is kind of easy to build a user data profile on Android because the user doesn't even know that all of these datapoints can be gathered without any permissions. The actual implememtation of the permission system really is more "for show" imo.
Pretty sure EU car manufacturers like Daimler or VW would like to buy up Tesla's European operations for cheap. Just need the government to simply declare them to be a national security threat and force them to sell or lose access to the largest market on the planet.