Alan Rosenstein
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Alan Rosenstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It doesn't matter what the laws in China say. At the end of the day, China is an authoritarian police state. in which the Chinese government and specifically Xi Jinping, the head of China, decides all the important issues. So if Xi Jinping wants ByteDance to sell TikTok, ByteDance will sell TikTok. If Xi Jinping does not want it to, with or without the algorithm, ByteDance will not sell TikTok.
But it's not a question fundamentally of Chinese law. It's a question of geopolitics. And so I think what Trump can do most productively if he wants to is not try to get a U.S. buyer, right? There are plenty of U.S. buyers lining up to do this. The problem was never getting a U.S. buyer.
It's doing whatever diplomacy is necessary to do with Xi Jinping in order, if the law is upheld, for this transaction to go through. And the question is... Both one of desire on Trump's part, does he want to use his political capital in this way, especially since he likes to be seen as very tough on China and he's potentially preparing a whole trade war and tariff war with China?
And then the other question is capacity. Can Trump do this, right? Can Trump do this kind of diplomacy?
So a couple of points here. So the first is you're right. Some of the evidence is classified. We won't know that ever. So the government during the debates in Congress about the law. delivered a set of classified briefings to the House and the Senate. Some of these at least were very powerful.
There was one famous example where I think the briefing was given to the House and a bunch of representatives walked into that briefing and they talked to journalists beforehand saying how skeptical they were of the law. And then they walk out of that briefing saying that they supported the law 100%. So clearly the government, the intelligence agencies and the FBI told Congress something.
Similarly, during the litigation at the D.C. Circuit, the government submitted classified information that was only available to the judges and not to the litigants, to TikTok, and obviously not to the public. TikTok was very upset about this and wrote a brief asking the judges not to use this evidence.
Notably, in the opinion, the judges explicitly said that they were not using that evidence, not because they objected to it, but because they didn't need to, that they were comfortable upholding the law based purely on what was in the public record. Which I think is notable. So what's in the public record? What do we know?
On the one hand, what we don't have, and the government has never pretended actually to its credit, what we don't have is smoking gun evidence. We don't have evidence of the Chinese government... telling ByteDance to either collect US person data from TikTok and give it to the Chinese government, or to modify the algorithm so as to boost some pro-Chinese content.
And these are the two concerns, data privacy and content manipulation. These are the two concerns that Congress cited when passing the law. So we don't have a smoking gun. But what we do have, I think, is everything short of that, right? We have a gun. It's on the table. It's loaded and it's pointed at us.
And what I mean by that is we know, and there's years of evidence about this, that China has both the means and the motivations to carry this kind of behavior out.
Yeah. Look, none of this is great. I want to emphasize this is not a good outcome. This is just a less bad outcome in the eyes of the government, at least in my estimation based on what I understand. But reasonable people very much can disagree here. I want to emphasize that. It's just a less bad outcome than the other outcomes.
With respect to John Oliver's point about data privacy, I would say the following. It is a mistake, and I don't think the government has justified this law in this way. If it has, it's been a mistake. The law is not justified as a general data privacy law. It is a data privacy law about the specific threat that China poses to the data privacy of Americans.
That's different than a generalized data privacy concern. Now, we can have that. That's a very separate conversation, which we can have, about is it a good thing that DoorDash, as John Oliver says, has a picture of your small intestine, right? I don't love that either. But that's not the concern at issue here. The concern here is not just that someone has your data, right?
The problem is that the Chinese government has your data, and the Chinese government is differently situated towards us and American interests, right? than a for-profit American company is. Now, should we have comprehensive data privacy legislation? Quite possibly.
But that's just a separate conversation from the conversation here, which is about national security and data privacy, which is why even if you're against this law overall, I don't think you can just say, oh, well, TikTok is no different than any other data-hungry company. It's very different because it ultimately answers to Xi Jinping.
And last time I checked, that's just not true of Mark Zuckerberg.
Yeah. So when it comes to the data, if you're just a normie American watching cat videos on TikTok, there's not a huge data concern. It's more for the millions of Americans that do have potentially sensitive positions in the government where their viewing history might tell whether Chinese intelligence agencies something useful about them.
Now, it is true that other platforms have a lot of information about them, but those are other platforms and they're not controlled by the Chinese. Now, it's also true that those platforms can sell that data to third-party data brokers, and so the information can get to the Chinese government one way or the other.
But it's actually notable, and this has, I think, been underreported, that simultaneously with the passage of the TikTok law, Congress also passed a law prohibiting the sale, including from data brokers, of information on Americans to countries like China. So Congress actually did try to tighten up the kind of leaky data pipeline.
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