The House Energy and Commerce Committee holds a hearing that includes tough and informed questioning about foreign regime control of source code and its affect on American citizens at home.
The focus is on the Chinese-owned TikTok social media platform, consumer privacy and data security practices, the platform’s impact on children, and TikTok’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. While it did not devote attention to electronic voting systems, the source code aspect of the hearing applies to Smartmatic, Dominion, Sequoia, and others.
Partial transcript
A partial transcript of the video below is Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH), a software entrepreneur, addressing TikTok CEO Shou Chew.
“Mr. Chew, I’m an information technology professional, I’ve been doing it for most of my life. You’ve been evasive in many of your answers.”
“Let’s talk about the Citizen Lab Report. This is something your team frequently mentions in hearings as a way to exonerate yourself. For example, in the limitations section, it reads, ‘We could not examine every source code component and test in the apps in every circumstance, which means our methods could not find every security issue, privacy violation, and censorship event.’ So, it’s an incomplete assessment.”
“The report notes that ‘TikTok’s data collection using third-party trackers was in apparent conflict with the GDPR’ and that ‘multiple themes were censored by TikTok.’ What is shocking to me is the shared source code between TikTok in the United States and CCP-censored Douyin. The Citizen Labs Report says that ‘many of the functions and classes were identical’ and that the differences in behavior between TikTok in the United States and Douyin in China are slight changes in hard-coded values.’”
“Incredibly, specific censorship parameters from Douyin are present in TikTok, but just turned off. The authors say that ‘for unknown reasons, the parameter variable itself is preserved.’ While Citizen Lab may have been afraid to say the obvious conclusion, I am not: TikTok’s source code is riddled with backdoors and CCP censorship devices.”
“Here’s the truth: ‘In a million lines of code, the smallest shift from a zero to a one, on just one of thousands of versions of TikTok on the market, will unlock explicit CCP censorship and access to American data.’”
Source:
1. https://billjohnson.house.gov
1. What lessons can we learn from concerns about TikTok source code, and how can we apply them to electronic voting systems source code?
2. If “TikTok’s source code is riddled with backdoors,” why wouldn’t we expect for a Venenzuelan-origin election source code to be designed with undetectable backdoors?
3. What other parallels can we draw between TikTok and foreign-sourced electronic voting systems software?
Comments are closed.