On Wednesday’s edition of NBC’s “MTP Now,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) said that TikTok is “a national security threat,” because “the Chinese Communist Party can go to any company that is Chinese-owned and any company that is in China and say, give us all of this personal information on your user base. That happens every single day in China.”
Himes stated, “TikTok, like Huawei, like any number of other Chinese-owned assets or companies, is a threat in the sense that the Chinese government can go to a Chinese company and say, give us all of this information. … So, whether or not Americans who are not in sensitive government roles should use TikTok is, I think, an open question, something that can be debated. You can make your own prudential judgments on that, but the notion that it should not be on government phones, that, to me, doesn’t strike me as that controversial.”
He added, “Well, it’s a national security threat, and I want to use the language carefully, it’s not a national security threat in the sense that the people who use it are going to be at a personal risk, but it is a threat in the sense that the Chinese Communist Party can go to any company that is Chinese-owned and any company that is in China and say, give us all of this personal information on your user base. That happens every single day in China.”
