POLITICO
(“An updated TikTok bill changes the game in Washington“):
A bill to potentially ban TikTok could be passed and signed into law as soon as next week, depending how quickly the Senate moves — which would mark a sharp ending to four years of attempts by two presidents to curtail the influence of the Chinese-linked app.
If President Joe Biden signs the bill as promised, it would mark an abrupt close to a frantic and high-powered pressure effort by the popular social media app to stop the bill. So far, the company’s efforts to deploy the clout of its users, including urging TikTokers to swamp lawmakers’ phones
and bringing creators to Capitol Hill,
have largely backfired.
A direct effort by Chinese diplomats
to lobby Hill staffers, reported by POLITICO, instead only hardened the sense of Washington China hawks
that the app was a dangerous proxy for Beijing.
With the House of Representatives set to pass the TikTok bill as part of a major aid package over the weekend, the ball would be in the Senate’s court, where friction already seems much lower than it was in March, when the TikTok bill first moved through the House.
If the bill passes, TikTok is then expected to shift its fight to the courts, arguing the law is unconstitutional, unfairly targeting a single company and violating the First Amendment.
[…]
The House’s TikTok bill was wrapped this week into a set of large aid and national security bills to support Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, considered priority legislation for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The House could approve the package and send it to the Senate as early as this weekend.
Already, Senate friction seems to be vanishing. Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, who earlier had said the bill likely wouldn’t hold up in the courts, now says she supports the updated version. The original version had called for a forced sale within six months, and the new version extends that timeline up to a year.
“As I’ve said, extending the divestment period is necessary to ensure there is enough time for a new buyer to get a deal done,” Cantwell (D-Wash.) said this week. “I support this updated legislation.”
[…]
One potential sticking point: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has opposed the bill
from the start as government overreach, and has First Amendment concerns for the 170 million Americans who could potentially lose access to the app. He also opposes the larger foreign aid package the bill is now attached to.
He could block the bills if they were brought up for an expedited unanimous consent vote or could filibuster them. To end a filibuster, Schumer would have to make a motion to invoke cloture, requiring 60 votes, to stop debate on the bill and bring it to a roll call vote.
Naturally, China is already retaliating:
In a sign of potential retaliation from a geopolitical rival, China reportedly ordered Apple to remove Meta’s WhatsApp and Threads
from its app store Friday. While the move was largely symbolic — since both apps are already technically illegal in China — it hints that the door could be open for a wider crackdown on American companies.
I don’t have strong views on whether banning TikTok—or forcing its sale to a non-Chinese party—is good public policy. I’m skeptical of the alleged harm to national security. Still, they’re hardly without foundation.
Here’s what General Paul M. Nakasone
, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, told Congress last April:
“If you consider one-third of the adult population receives their news from this app, one-sixth of our children are saying they’re constantly on this app, if you consider that there’s 150 million people every single day that are obviously touching this app, this provides a foreign nation a platform for information operations, a platform for surveillance, and a concern we have with regards to who controls that data.”
The danger is mostly theoretical but, certainly, the app has considerable reach. Rodman Ramezanian
, Global Cloud Threat Lead at Skyhigh Security, contends “There’s Nothing Confusing About TikTok’s Security Risks.”
Nation states and security professionals alike are sounding the alarm. They see TikTok as significantly more risky than other apps, not only because of the quantity and type of data that it collects but also because of where that data is stored, what it could be used for, and who can ultimately access it.
[…]
According to its privacy policy, TikTok collects personally identifiable information (PII) that includes the user’s name, age, email, phone number, and social media account information. Additionally, it collects digital data, such as payment methods associated with transactions, social network contacts, IP addresses, geolocation data, and device information. And it collects biometric identifiers and biometric information, including faceprints and voiceprints from uploaded user content, as well as connected metadata.
[…]
Though TikTok denies that it would provide U.S. user data to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), leaked audio from internal TikTok meetings show that U.S. user data has been repeatedly accessed from China, where ByteDance servers are located. Under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, TikTok, as a subsidiary of ByteDance, has a legal obligation to support CCP security and intelligence initiativesOpens a new window
and could be compelled to exercise its access. Since the data is stored outside the U.S., American laws wouldn’t be enforceable, and TikTok would be in a position of policing itself.
[…]
In 2015, China announced its Digital Silk Road plan as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. The CCP sees data as a way to gain market advantage, power, and influence, as well as a way to develop machine learning models. The party went so far as to officially declare data as a national resource in 2019, on par with land, labor, capital, and technology.
It’s not a stretch to assert that the CCP could use its collected data sets for future applications and questionable purposes. A case in point is the former ByteDance executive who claimed that TikTok was being used by the CCP to spread propaganda and hateful content. He was promptly fired for misconduct and has since filed a wrongful termination complaint against ByteDance.
NYT national security reporter David E. Sanger
argues “TikTok’s Security Threats Go Beyond the Scope of House Legislation.”
In the four years this battle has gone on, it has become clear that the security threat posed by TikTok has far less to do with who owns it than it does with who writes the code and algorithms that make TikTok tick.
Those algorithms, which guide how TikTok watches its users and feeds them more of what they want, are the magic sauce of an app that 170 million Americans now have on their phones. That’s half the country.
But TikTok doesn’t own those algorithms; they are developed by engineers who work for its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which assembles the code in great secrecy in its software labs, in Beijing, Singapore and Mountain View, Calif. But China has issued regulations that appear designed to require government review before any of ByteDance’s algorithms could be licensed to outsiders. Few expect those licenses to be issued — meaning that selling TikTok to an American owner without the underlying code might be like selling a Ferrari without its famed engine.
[…]
No one was contemplating the possibility that Chinese engineers could design code that seemed to understand the mind-set of American consumers better than Americans did themselves. By the millions, Americans began to put Chinese-designed software, whose innards no one really understood, on their iPhones and Androids, first for dance videos, then for the memes and now for news
.
It was the first piece of Chinese-designed consumer software to go wildly viral across the United States. No American firm seemed capable of displacing it. And so it wasn’t long before its ubiquity raised worries about whether the Chinese government could use the data TikTok collected to track the habits and tastes of American citizens. Panicked, state governments across the United States started banning the app from state-owned phones. So did the military.
But officials know they cannot wrest it from ordinary users — which is why the threat of banning TikTok, especially in an election year, is faintly ridiculous. In a fit of remarkable candor, Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, told Bloomberg
last year that if any democracy thinks it can outright ban the app, “the politician in me thinks you’re going to literally lose every voter under 35, forever.”
Political impact and wisdom as public policy aside, I strongly suspect that it would survive judicial challenge. While there have only been a relative handful of big cases, the Supreme Court has recognized national security exceptions to the First Amendment
for more than a century. The question will mostly be whether the severity of the restriction here is reasonable to mitigate the alleged risk. I would think the courts would defer to the judgment of elected policymakers in that regard.
That’s especially true, I would think, given that TikTik is a Chinese entity (owned by a company called ByteDance) and indirectly controlled (as with any large enterprise in the country) by the Chinese Communist Party. The restriction on the freedoms of US persons here is relatively minimal: there are plenty of other platforms for sharing memes.
“Beginning tomorrow, we ask that all candidates and committees who choose to use President Trump’s name, image, and likeness split a minimum of 5% of all fundraising solicitations to Trump National Committee JFC. This includes but is not limited to sending to the house file, prospecting vendors, and advertising,” Trump co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita wrote in the letter, which is dated April 15.
[…]
Trump officials insisted that the purpose of the 5 percent request was not to raise money for themselves but rather to dissuade “scammers” from using Trump’s brand without his permission and diluting his ability to raise cash.
Color me skeptical about the alleged motivations. And, moreover, this is not a healthy way for a presidential candidate to treat members of his party. Not only can it drain resources from down-ballot candidates with fewer resources than the presidential campaign, but it actually is a bit of a disincentive for candidates to associate themselves with Trump, the party’s leader.
I somehow doubt this is enforceable. The article notes some possible routes to obtain compliance.
Donald Trump’s
main 2024 White House campaign fundraising operation sharply increased spending at the former president’s properties in recent months, funneling money into his businesses at a time when he is facing serious legal jeopardy
and desperately needs cash.
Trump’s joint fundraising committee wrote three checks in February and one in March to his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, totaling $411,287 and another in March to Trump National Doral Miami for $62,337, according to a report filed to the Federal Election Commission this week.
Federal law and FEC regulations allow donor funds to be spent at a candidate’s business so long as the campaign pays fair market value, experts say. Trump has been doing it for years
, shifting millions in campaign cash into his sprawling business empire to pay for expenses such as using his personal aircraft
for political events, rent at Trump Tower and events at his properties, which has included hotels and private clubs.
I am going to go beyond the “experts” in the headline and say that it is bad. I recognize that it is legal, but I don’t think it should be. It is clearly self-dealing.
But those kinds of stories aren’t even the main thing that caught my eye–they just add to the overall dysfunction of it all. What struck me were these stories:
Taken as a whole threes underscore to me that the contemporary GOP is clearly fractured. The GOP-controlled AZ House (as opposed to the GOP-controlled AZ Senate) is showing the split between the hardcore anti-abortion faction and one that is less stringent. Regardless of one’s views of the two factions, the AZ House faction that is currently winning is likely going to increase the odds that a pro-abortion rights constitutional amendment will be on the ballot, and national patterns have indicated that would be good for Democrats. As a general matter, as I noted the other day
, Republicans are the dogs who caught the car with abortion and are now struggling with the political reality they have created.
The foreign aid issue also shows a division between more mainline Republicans (historically speaking) and the isolationist/nationalist/MAGA wing of the party.
The Mayorkas situation is an illustration of how the MAGA is driving nonsense that is pointless. See, also, James Comer and Jamie Raskin
arguing over Biden’s impeachability (and Comer’s ongoing inability to say anything intelligent about it whatsoever).
The party is continually demonstrating itself to be in thrall to a grifter and allowing his, say we say nonlinear approach to reality and language, to influence significant parts of its behavior. Moreover, it clearly lacks anything approaching policy coherence or goals.
I will say that being isolationist (and anti-foreign aid) is a real position (although I think it is the wrong one). The problem is that the party as a whole doesn’t agree, yet it has to power to utterly gum up the works on some very critical decisions.
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain photo via Max Pixel
POLITICO Europe opinion editor Jamie Dettmer
declares, “Ukraine is heading for defeat.”
Just ask a Ukrainian soldier if he still believes the West will stand by Kyiv “for as long as it takes.” That pledge rings hollow when it’s been four weeks since your artillery unit last had a shell to fire, as one serviceman complained from the front lines.
It’s not just that Ukraine’s forces are running out of ammunition. Western delays over sending aid mean the country is dangerously short of something even harder to supply than shells: the fighting spirit required to win.
Morale among troops is grim, ground down by relentless bombardment, a lack of advanced weapons, and losses on the battlefield. In cities hundreds of miles away from the front, the crowds of young men who lined up to join the army in the war’s early months have disappeared. Nowadays, eligible would-be recruits dodge the draft and spend their afternoons in nightclubs instead. Many have left the country altogether.
As I discovered while reporting from Ukraine over the past month, the picture that emerged from dozens of interviews with political leaders, military officers, and ordinary citizens was one of a country slipping towards disaster.
Even as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine is trying to find a way not to retreat, military officers privately accept that more losses are inevitable this summer. The only question is how bad they will be. Vladimir Putin has arguably never been closer to his goal.
“We know people are flagging and we hear it from regional governors and from the people themselves,” Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff, told POLITICO. Yermak and his boss travel together to “some of the most dangerous places” to rally citizens and soldiers for the fight, he said. “We tell people: ‘Your name will be in the history books.’”
If the tide doesn’t turn soon in this third year of Russia’s invasion, it will be the nation of Ukraine as it currently exists that is consigned to the past.
For a war of such era-defining importance, the scale of Western leaders’ actions to help Kyiv repel Russia’s invaders has fallen far short of their soaring rhetoric. That disappointment has left Ukrainians of all ranks — from the soldiers digging trenches to ministers running the country — weary and irritable.
There’s much more, but you get the idea.
Nor is Dettmer alone. There have been a series of articles in recent days sounding the alarm.
International relations professors Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko
(“Ukraine is losing the war and the west faces a stark choice: help now or face a resurgent and aggressive Russia,” The Conversation):
Ukraine is now experiencing a level of existential threat
comparable only to the situation immediately after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. But in contrast to then, improvements are unlikely – at least not soon.
Not only have conditions along the frontline significantly worsened
, according to the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, but the very possibility of a Ukrainian defeat is now discussed in public
by people like the former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command, General Sir Richard Barrons.
Barrons told the BBC on April 13 that Ukraine could lose the war in 2024 “because Ukraine may come to feel it can’t win … And when it gets to that point, why will people want to fight and die any longer, just to defend the indefensible?”
This may be his way of trying to push the west to provide more military aid to Ukraine faster. Yet the fact that the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, publicly accepts
that to end the war Ukraine will have to negotiate with Russia and decide “what kind of compromises they’re willing to do” is a clear indication that things are not going well for Ukraine.
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner
(“Ukraine could face defeat in 2024. Here’s how that might look“):
The former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command has warned that Ukraine could face defeat by Russia in 2024.
General Sir Richard Barrons has told the BBC there is “a serious risk” of Ukraine losing the war this year.
The reason, he says, is “because Ukraine may come to feel it can’t win”.
“And when it gets to that point, why will people want to fight and die any longer, just to defend the indefensible?”
Ukraine is not yet at that point.
But its forces are running critically low on ammunition, troops and air defences. Its much-heralded counter-offensive last year failed to dislodge the Russians from ground they had seized and now Moscow is gearing up for a summer offensive.
Defense One’s Patrick Tucker
(“Europe is already planning for what happens if Ukraine loses. It’s ugly.“):
A Ukrainian loss, which could happen very soon if U.S. weapons don’t arrive, would ramp up Russian efforts to destabilize the governments of NATO countries and increase defense spending across the alliance, among other disastrous effects, Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s Defense Minister, told reporters Friday.
When U.S. officials like President Joe Biden talk about why Ukraine matters, they rely on broad notions of democracy and the continuation of the international order—without specifically explaining what a Ukraine loss would mean for ordinary Americans. Perhaps because of this, Americans are evenly split on the question of whether the United States is doing too much for Ukraine.
Pevkur said one of the deliverables from last year’s NATO Summit in Vilnius was new battle plans for Eastern European countries should Ukraine fall.
“These plans address these different scenarios,” he said. “Of course, for obvious reasons I cannot be very specific, but I can assure you that these plans are shaped by looking at the possible Russian posture in our neighborhood.”
One of the likely consequences of a loss, he said, is a much larger and more dangerous Russian military.
“Russia has published on their plan for the reconstitution and build up their army. It says that they will have 1.5 million people in the army,” including a new Army corps in the country’s northwest corner, near Estonia, he said. That will mean two to seven times as many tanks, armored personnel carriers, air defense systems, etc., very close to the border of Europe, hesaid.
That military buildup will continue to put pressure on Western democracies, including the United States, to increase their defense spending, he said. “We see that the Russian war budget today is around 30 or 31% of their state budget. But this is only the military spendings. When we add to that what they are also the spending on…some other state services, which are directly linked to security, then we will see that this budget goes to 35 to 40% of the state budget.”
Russia has basically adapted its entire economy and society for war. That increases the likelihood of a direct confrontation in order to justify the buildup.
“The Russians have actually managed to really ramp up the defense industry capability, put it on a war footing. Then the unfortunate and quite dark logic arises from that: Once you’ve done all these things, once you’ve ramped up your economy or put it on a war footing, then there’s not an easy way of going back. So they will probably have to maximize,” he said.
The Economist’s Charlemagne columnist, Stanley Pignal
(“What happens if Ukraine loses?“):
To ask “what if Ukraine loses?” was once a tactic favoured by those looking to berate its Western allies into sending more money and weapons. Increasingly the question feels less like a thought experiment and more like the first stage of contingency planning. After a gruelling few months on the battlefield, gone are last year’s hopes of a Ukrainian counter-offensive that would push Russia back to its borders and humble Vladimir Putin. These days it is fear that dominates: that an existing stalemate might crumble in favour of the invader, or of Donald Trump coming back to power in America and delivering victory to Russia on a silver platter. Although a vanquished Ukraine has become a less far-fetched prospect, it is no less frightening. Sobering as the return of war on the continent has been, a successful invasion reaping geopolitical rewards for Mr Putin would be much worse.
A defeat of Ukraine would be a humbling episode for the West, a modern Suez moment. Having provided moral, military and financial succour to its ally for two years now, America and Europe have—perhaps inadvertently—put their own credibility on the line. That they have sometimes dithered in delivering this support would make things worse, not better: further confirmation, among sceptics of liberal polities, that democracies lack what it takes to stand up for their interests. In Russia but also China, India and across the global south, Ukraine’s backers would be dismissed as good at tabling un resolutions and haggling over wording at eu and nato summits but not much else. The colouring by atlas-makers of Ukrainian land into Russian territory would cement the idea that might makes right, to the benefit of strongmen far and wide. George Robertson, a former boss of nato, has warned that “If Ukraine loses, our enemies will decide the world order.” Unfortunately for the Taiwanese, among others, he is probably right.
Nowhere would feel the brunt of this humiliation more than the eu, the pinnacle of liberal international norm-setting. Ukraine’s neighbours moved less fast than America in providing support. But in the European slow-but-steady way they feel they have done as much as could be asked of them. By sending arms (including using eu money to pay for weapons, a first), propping up Ukraine’s finances, taking in millions of refugees, applying a dozen rounds of sanctions against Russia and weaning themselves off its piped gas, the bloc’s politicians have pushed out the boundaries of what initially seemed possible. If it proves not to have been enough, plenty will ask whether the union at its core is fit for purpose. Populists—and Putin fans—in the mould of Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Marine Le Pen in France will crow that theirs is the best way. Currently there are divisions between the hawkish eastern fringe and others in the bloc. If Ukraine loses, those will metastasise into recriminations and bitterness. Emmanuel Macron in France, a newly minted hawk, has set the tone by warning of “cowards” holding Europe back.
The geopolitical fallout of a Ukrainian defeat would depend on the shape of any peace settlement. This in turn would hinge on military dynamics or the mindset of Mr Trump, should he be elected again. If Ukraine’s ammunition-constrained army crumbles and somehow Russia controls not just its eastern territories but the whole country, perhaps under a Belarus-style puppet regime, its aggressor will in effect share over a thousand more kilometres of borders with the eu. Should defeat be more limited—including annexation of territory, but a still-functioning “rump” Ukraine—nerves would still be set jangling. How long would it be before Mr Putin finished the job? Millions more Ukrainians might seize the opportunity to leave. The future shape of the eu would change: the promise of enlargement to Ukraine presupposed a comprehensive victory. The western Balkans, whose own bid to join was revived by the war, would surely be left in limbo too.
Beyond the feeling of culpability and shame, a sense of fear would pervade Europe. Might there be a further attack? Would it be on a nato country, forcing allies into action? Further attempts at conquest would at least be a possibility. Mr Putin has alluded to Nazism in the Baltics, echoing the pretext he used to invade Ukraine; the trio also have a large Russian-speaking population. A year ago the joke was that Russia’s claim of having the best army in Europe was ludicrous: it didn’t even have the best army in Ukraine. Fewer think that today, given Russia’s ability to keep supplying its men—not to mention supplying more men—faster than its adversary. A victorious Russian army would leave Mr Putin commanding the only fighting force with the battle-hardening and 21st-century warfare skills to take territory; if he controlled the Ukrainian state he would control two such military machines. Against him stand war-shy Europeans, perhaps with flaky American backing and depleted armouries. Might Poland or Germany find they will need their own nuclear deterrent?
On the one hand, depending on unlimited and indefinite external support for one’s war effort is a pretty good indication that you’re destined to fail. On the other, most of the countries that have pledged such support are pretty wealthy and have a strong interest in seeing Russia weakened, if not defeated—to say nothing of the moral and humanitarian interests at stake.
While Barack Obama infamously ridiculed Mitt Romney for saying Russia was our number one geopolitical foe, it was almost certainly correct at the time. (As Romney himself has acknowledged
, China has clearly assumed that mantle since.) Both the Trump and Biden national security strategies have placed Russia in that status, with the latter calling them “an acute threat.” Yet various aid bills with bipartisan support have failed to make it through a Congress held hostage to some reactionaries with an unfathomable Putin fetish.
But, of course, the United States isn’t the only power of aiding Ukraine, much less the one that has the most to lose from a Russian victory. Our NATO allies haven’t exactly matched their rhetoric with support, either.
