The ban of TikTok from government devices is meant to guard against the possibility that Chinese Communist Party members or officials could gain access to the personal data of U.S. officials.
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On March 23, lawmakers crowded into a packed Capitol hearing room to harangue the CEO of the social app TikTok about the company’s Chinese ownership and the risks it posed to U.S. national security. Months earlier, President Biden had signed a bill banning TikTok from federal employees’ devices, to prevent sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.
What the members of Congress didn’t know was that state secrets had been trickling out for months on social media and were beginning to circulate in ever-wider online forums — not on TikTok, but on U.S.-owned Discord. In the two weeks after the TikTok hearing, those classified documents would make their way into public view on U.S.-owned Twitter — and remain there for days, as owner Elon Musk mocked the idea that he ought to remove them.
The leaks, which included assessments of the Ukraine war and revelations of U.S. spying, didn’t stem from any foreign adversary’s sinister plot. Rather, they appear to have stemmed from a 21-year-old U.S. National Guard member’s desire to impress his online pals.
The Discord document dump is the latest in a colorful 21st-century tradition of secrets spilled online, from WikiLeaks’ earliest uploads to Russian operatives’ hack of the Democratic National Committee. At a time when swaths of the U.S. government are fixated on Chinese spycraft, it serves as a reminder that information leaks in the internet age can come from just about anywhere — a risk the U.S. government has generally accepted as a price of free speech, said Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University and an expert on technology regulations.
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“The internet was never designed with national security at its heart,” Chander said. “It’s inherently vulnerable.”
The hypothetical threats posed by TikTok’s Chinese ownership aren’t about leaked classified documents. They include fears that China’s government might demand or covertly gain access to data on the app’s American users, or persuade the company to secretly manipulate its algorithms in ways that promote or suppress certain ideas. In particular, the ban of TikTok from government devices is meant to guard against the possibility that Chinese Communist Party members or officials could gain access to the personal data of U.S. officials.
There’s no hard evidence that any of those things have happened. Both the Chinese government and TikTok insist they never will, and TikTok has taken unusual steps to limit the exposure of Americans’ data, such as not tracking their precise location using GPS, as countless other mobile apps routinely do. And the Pentagon has official guidance for troops on how to use TikTok safely.
According to reports from the Washington Examiner and other outlets, a 21-year-old suspect named Jack Teixeira was arrested in relation to the Pentagon leak.
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