U.S. lawmakers have spent months focused on speculative risks that China will use TikTok to surveil and propagandize Americans. They’re so concerned that they passed legislation to ban the platform, ignoring the Pentagon Papers case’s clear instruction that vague national security fearmongering is not sufficient to justify censorship.
But while our government was distracted by panic over young people reading about wars it finances on TikTok, The Wall Street Journal reported on a “catastrophic” actual security breach known as Salt Typhoon. The hack, which seems to have taken the lawmakers supposedly protecting us from China by surprise, may have given the Chinese government monthslong access to U.S. wiretapping systems used by internet service providers.
On Global Encryption Day, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Senior Advisor Caitlin Vogus wrote for Tech Policy Press that Salt Typhoon should refocus Congress’s energy on serious measures to combat cyberattacks — like strengthening end-to-end encryption, as opposed to unconstitutional stunts like the TikTok ban.
Salt Typhoon should be a wake up call for Congress: Rather than pushing to expand the openings that adversaries can exploit — for example by requiring backdoors be added into end-to-end encrypted messaging services — lawmakers should start looking for ways to close or narrow them.
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Perhaps if senators and representatives were less worried about grandstanding and more worried about confronting the actual national security threats that China poses to our country, they would have taken a serious look at the backdoors that are threatening Americans’ private data, rather than wasting time on a TikTok ban.
