Happy Wednesday. My thoughts are with Baltimoreans today. Today’s newsletter was reported with assists from my colleagues Tony Romm and Cristiano Lima-Strong. Send news tips to: will.oremus@washpost.com.
Below: The retiring NSA cyber chief says AI is bolstering U.S. defenses. First:
The bill makes clear that TikTok and parent company ByteDance are its primary targets, mentioning both by name. It requires that either ByteDance sell TikTok within 180 days or the app effectively will be banned from the United States.
Yet the bill’s title and text also give it a wider scope ― one whose contours have received relatively little public scrutiny.
Called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the bill would target not just TikTok, but also other ByteDance subsidiaries for divestment or prohibition, aides familiar with it told The Technology 202. That probably includes both Lemon8, described last year by my colleague Taylor Lorenz as “a mash-up of Pinterest and Instagram,” and CapCut, a leading video-editing tool for social media creators, the aides said.
The bill doesn’t stop there. As written, it also enables the U.S. president to impose future divest-or-ban orders on any other “foreign adversary controlled application” that meets certain criteria. (You can read the bill’s full text here.)
Just what other companies besides ByteDance could be affected is not obvious from the bill’s text.
At first blush, the criteria might seem to encompass any app or website with at least 1 million users that hosts user-generated content ― theoretically exposing a number of other popular Chinese-owned apps to future jeopardy, from the “everything app” WeChat to the Twitter-like Weibo to the popular shopping apps Temu and Shein.
But there’s also an exemption for websites and apps “whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.” While that might sound like it applies only to apps like Yelp and Tripadvisor, aides for several lawmakers acknowledged they aren’t sure exactly what the exemption’s true intent is or why it’s in the bill.
“There’s obviously something afoot,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who opposed the bill, told your co-host Cristiano Lima-Strong last week. “You don’t airdrop a paragraph into a piece of legislation exempting one category of business that has nothing to do with the thing that you’re supposedly banning, so for me it raises a flag. I don’t know who the exemption is for.”
On Tuesday, aides for the lawmakers responsible for the bill explained for the first time to The Technology 202 what they see as the intent behind the language.
The bill really has two main targets, they said: TikTok and its sister apps, and any future foreign adversary-controlled social network that might come along in TikTok’s wake to fill a similar role. The exclusion was intended to ensure it is not interpreted more broadly to apply to e-commerce apps, whose user-generated content tends to come mostly in the form of reviews.
“The bill is very targeted and designed to deal with a very particular kind of threat, where the risks are going to be the highest because of the unique combination of national security risks that social media poses,” said an aide for the Republican majority on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which is chaired by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), a co-author of the bill.
A spokesperson for Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.), the committee’s ranking Democrat and a co-author, separately told The Tech 202 that the bill is meant to loosely mirror U.S. rules about foreign ownership of broadcast media companies because of the influence both can have on public opinion. The TikTok bill, like the broadcast ownership rules, would apply to companies in which foreigners from designated adversary nations own at least a 20 percent stake.
Supporters of the bill acknowledged that its language could perhaps be interpreted to apply to other Chinese social media companies, such as WeChat. But they said that’s not the goal.
A spokesperson for the committee had previously referred questions on the bill to Brendan Carr, the senior Republican commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission and an outspoken supporter of the TikTok bill. Reached by phone last week, Carr offered a similar narrow interpretation of its scope, noting that the bill also requires the president to publicly make a case that an app is a national security threat before imposing a divestment order. “The concern that some have raised about potentially sweeping in a lot of applications is simply not correct,” he said.
Some lawmakers argued, however, that the bill’s ambiguous language is an indicator that it’s poorly crafted.
“The rush to pass this bill that could potentially censor the speech of 170 million Americans and that have favorable exclusions for certain companies highlights Congress’s lack of seriousness on tech policy,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who voted against the bill, told my colleague Tony Romm on Tuesday. “We need more narrowly tailored approaches that actually solve the problem, such as a data privacy bill, transparency on algorithms for all social media companies and a comprehensive ban on transferring Americans' data to nations like China.”
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Retiring NSA cyber chief says AI is bolstering U.S. defenses
Artificial intelligence so far has not greatly boosted the bad guys in cyberspace, but it has helped defenders find malicious activity, a top U.S. intelligence official said this month. My colleague Ellen Nakashima reports:
AI has helped the National Security Agency spot activity by Chinese military hackers in a major campaign known as Volt Typhoon, in which hackers are seeking to burrow into U.S. critical infrastructure, said Rob Joyce, outgoing director of the National Security Agency’s Cybersecurity Directorate.
China’s goal, he said, is to be able in a major conflict to disrupt U.S. water and power plants, transportation and logistics systems as well as sow societal panic.
Volt Typhoon “has been really hard to identify,” he said at a roundtable with reporters at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. “But AI is one of the tools that [helps analysts] look across a large volume of activity on [a] network and understand what is normal and what is abnormal.”
In the near term, AI “definitely advantages defense,” he said, referring to those seeking to keep hackers out of a network.
Offense is another matter.
“AI makes good people better,” he said. “[But] I don’t think the random, unskilled entity gets magical capabilities with AI over the next several years. … The technology just isn’t there for button-press, automated exploitation or automated cyberattack.”
The same holds true for foreign efforts to use AI to influence American society and elections, he said. It helps nonnative English speakers, for instance, devise more culturally fluent messages. But it’s not a silver bullet.
“I think we’re seeing more promise than impact at this point,” he said, adding: “But what is clear is everybody is learning, practicing and developing their capabilities.”
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- The Federal Communications Commission hosts an event, “Communications Equity and Diversity Council Meeting,” today at 10 a.m.
- The R Street think tank hosts an event, “Making 2024 the Year We Secure American Data,” today at 2 p.m.
That’s all for today — thank you so much for joining us. Make sure to tell others to subscribe to The Technology 202 here. Get in touch with Cristiano (via email or social media) and Will (via email or social media) for tips, feedback or greetings.