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A TikTok ban is closer than it’s ever been following the Tuesday introduction of a bill that would make it easier for the Biden administration to restrict access to the popular video sharing app.
The bipartisan bill, led by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), would empower the secretary of Commerce to ban foreign technologies and companies from operating in the US if they present a threat to national security. While TikTok is not explicitly named in the bill text, the measure covers companies in adversarial countries including China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.
“Today, the threat that everyone is talking about is TikTok, and how it could enable surveillance by the Chinese Communist Party, or facilitate the spread of malign influence campaigns in the U.S. Before TikTok, however, it was Huawei and ZTE, which threatened our nation’s telecommunications networks,” Warner said in a statement Tuesday. “We need a comprehensive, risk-based approach that proactively tackles sources of potentially dangerous technology before they gain a foothold in America, so we aren’t playing Whac-A-Mole and scrambling to catch up once they’re already ubiquitous.”
The bill comes just after a separate proposal that singled out TikTok
The bill creates a formal process for government agencies to “deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate” services they deem threatening, as long as they have access to “sensitive personal data” from more than 1 million US persons. That could potentially mean forcing American companies — including app store operators like Apple and Google — to cut off relations with TikTok or similar entities. The bill also provides the Commerce secretary with a handful of lesser tools to mitigate risky transactions, like the ability to force companies to divest services.
The Warner bill comes just a few days after the House Foreign Affairs Committee pushed through a separate measure to restrict access to TikTok. The Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries Act, or DATA Act, would direct President Joe Biden to sanction or ban TikTok if the administration determined it shared US user data with individuals associated with the Chinese government.
Unlike the House bill, Warner’s Senate measure would create a framework for evaluating and punishing foreign companies that pose a risk to US security, rather than simply targeting TikTok as a company.
“We shouldn’t let any company subject to the Chinese Communist Party’s dictates collect data on a third of our population – and while TikTok is just the latest example, it won’t be the last,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), a co-sponsor of the bill, said in a statement Tuesday. “The federal government can’t continue to address new foreign technology from adversarial nations in a one-off manner; we need a strategic, enduring mechanism to protect Americans and our national security.”
Responding to the Warner bill, TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter argued that the measure was unnecessary. “The Biden Administration does not need additional authority from Congress to address national security concerns about TikTok: it can approve the deal negotiated with CFIUS over two years that it has spent the last six months reviewing,” Oberwetter said in a statement to The Verge on Tuesday.
TikTok has proposed walling off most of its US operations from ByteDance
TikTok has repeatedly denied that it stores US user data in China, a primary fear of federal officials. Despite these claims and promises to limit safety risks, the company has been stuck in negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to stay operational in the US for more than three years.
On Monday, a TikTok official presented a keynote detailing Project Texas, the company’s most substantial effort to mitigate foreign threats to US data. The proposal would wall off most of TikTok’s US operations from ByteDance, its Chinese parent company. Larry Ellison’s Oracle would play a role in auditing American data flows.
“We appreciate that some members of Congress remain willing [to] explore options for addressing national security concerns that don’t have the effect of censoring millions of Americans. A U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide,” Oberwetter said.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is expected to appear before Congress for a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing later this month
Any time the government promises to make you “safer,” beware of their intentions. The media-amplified hysteria over TikTok — a video social media platform built and run by communist China — has handed the power opportunists in Washington D.C. a cover story to try to control all online speech through the introduction of the S. 686 RESTRICT Act, sponsored by an anti-free speech zealot on the Left, Sen. Mark Warner.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The bill, introduced on March 7th, 2023, uses TikTok’s popularity as an excuse to criminalize American-run websites, platforms and blogs that merely disagree with the government regime on literally any topic: Vaccines, Russia, elections, bank runs, currency, transgenderism, climate change and so on.
The weaponization potential of the bill is unlimited, as it can be applied to anything merely deemed to be in the “national security interest” of the United States.
The bill text explicitly states that the government may enforce, “any mitigation measure” against “any person” or “any property” by merely deciding that an article, video, podcast, platform or other content item contains content they don’t like.
This is not a law that targets Chinese communists or TikTok… it’s a law targeting Americans and threatening them with prison time if they say anything the current regime in power doesn’t like.
Under the proposed law, any content that the regime decides poses an undue risk to, “the safety of United States persons” can be removed by any means necessary, including domain seizures by the DHS or other forms of sabotage (i.e. “mitigation”) which might include the government fire bombing data centers or assassinating Americans.
To annihilate all Christian content on the web, the Biden regime can simply declare that Bible scripture compromises the “safety” of the trans community and therefore must be removed by any means necessary. We could literally see the US government burning down churches to destroy web hosting data centers that are held there. (The US government has been running sabotage operations against food and energy infrastructure for at least the last two years, so this isn’t a stretch at all.)
All your assets can be seized without any due process whatsoever
Those merely deemed in violation of the RESTRICT Act — utterly without any court hearings or opportunity for a legal defense — may have all their assets, properties, computers, websites, servers, bank accounts, databases and other items confiscated at gunpoint by the government, with zero recourse or due process.
Even worse, the act specifically prohibits FOIA requests (Freedom of Information Act) from being honored in order to make sure the tyrannical government can keep the list of RESIST Act targets a secret.
What the US government did to Julian Assange, they are about to do to millions of American citizens. Perhaps even you.
From the bill text itself, the RESTRICT Act grants authority to seize or “mitigate” (i.e. destroy or sabotage) all the following:
(A) internet hosting services;
(B) cloud-based or distributed computing and data storage;
(C) machine learning, predictive analytics, and data science products and services, including those involving the provision of services to assist a party utilize, manage, or maintain open-source software;
(D) managed services; and
(E) content delivery services;
This would, of course, include all websites, including all e-commerce sites. Thus, if you sell anything the government doesn’t like, they can confiscate all your bank accounts, web domain, company servers, product inventory and anything else they deem to be related.
The RESTRICT Act would criminalize all decentralized cryptocurrency (i.e. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.)
In addition, the RESTRICT Act threatens total government control over cryptocurrency and other vast technologies such as quantum cryptography, which is a promising tech that could allow private individuals to prevent corrupt governments from spying on their private messages.
To ban all Bitcoin, the government would merely need to claim that somebody in Russia or China used Bitcoin to carry out some horrible (false flag) terrorism in the United States, and that Bitcoin enabled the funding for the attack. With one declaration, Bitcoin could be outlawed across the country and anyone who transacts in Bitcoin could face 20 years in prison (plus total confiscation of all their wallets, computers, bank accounts, house, etc).
It’s not just crypto, either, that’s threatened by this insane power grab. Proving that this bill isn’t limited to TikTok, here are all the tech sectors named in the bill text which would be controlled, censored or otherwise lorded over by the tyrannical US government:
(A) artificial intelligence and machine learning;
(B) quantum key distribution;
(C) quantum communications;
(D) quantum computing;
(E) post-quantum cryptography;
(F) autonomous systems;
(G) advanced robotics;
(H) biotechnology;
(I) synthetic biology;
(J) computational biology; and
(K) e-commerce technology and services, including any electronic techniques for accomplishing business transactions, online retail, internet-enabled logistics, internet-enabled payment technology, and online marketplaces.
Note that this includes all e-commerce, all online banking transactions, payment systems, cryptocurrency and so on.
In effect, the RESTRICT Act is an attempt to seize total control over the entire online economy, online speech and online freedom.
It should be called the ONLINE TYRANNY Act, as it is the manifestation of absolute tyranny over the American people.
The tyrants in power want to make sure that all spying is conducted by them, not by China
The power-hungry tyrants in Washington D.C. are not actually opposed to apps and software systems spying on you, by the way. After all, thanks to the Twitter Files and other leaks, we now know that both the White House and the Department of Homeland Security quite literally ordered Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and other online platforms to censor a long list of websites and individuals who questioned covid vaccine safety.
The tyrants in Washington absolutely want to spy on the American people and censor all speech they don’t like. They are doing it now. They aren’t opposed to TikTok’s spying on the American people; they just want to be the ones in charge of the spying and censorship.
It was a moment of peak hypocrisy in the US House hearing recently when US members of Congress grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about being engaged in the suppression the free speech of Chinese citizens while seeming to be utterly tone deaf to the US government’s ongoing censorship of the American people.
https://www.brighteon.com/embed/e0a5f13a-920c-49a2-9df6-822c852b6ca2
Rose Rambles... 