President Biden has given America’s top adversary a stunning open door to capture the personal data of millions of American citizens and businesses.
The Biden administration this week removed the former Trump White House’s executive order preventing U.S. operations of TikTok and other Chinese-founded and owned apps such as WeChat and urged for a security review of these apps.
Courts have succeeded in stopping the former administration’s Aug. 2020 executive order banning the apps’ operations in the U.S.. The order had mentioned national security worries due to a 2017 Chinese law that forces any Chinese company to share their data with the government if it is requested.
“President Biden removed and replaced three executive orders that were done to stop transactions with TikTok, WeChat, and eight other financial and communication technology software companies. Two of these orders could be subject to litigation,” Biden’s Wednesday order says.
In their place, Biden gave his own executive order ordering “a criteria-based analysis framework and rigorous, evidence-focused investigation to deal with the risks of communications services and technologies involving transactions with” Chinese-controlled software “that might give an unacceptable risk to America’s national security and to the American public.”
TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, though the executives at the social media app have routinely said they do not share data with the CCP.
The U.S. pressure on the Chinese company forced it to sell the app’s U.S. division to Oracle and Walmart during Trump’s administration, but the app eventually decided in February to not sell this ownership.
With that being only one moth after Trump “lost” the 2020 presidential election, critics have wondered if the Chinese company ever intended to sell it’s U.S. division at all. Instead waiting to see if Trump would lose the election. A wait that paid off for the large tech company.
Author: Blake Ambrose
