Reports indicate that the United States government engaged in negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party-owned app TikTok to avert a potential ban of the app in the country, which would have given the Biden administration overwhelming capabilities.
A draft contract obtained by Forbes outlines a deal that would have provided significant control to federal agencies over TikTok’s operations and records.
The draft agreement, created in the Summer of 2022, was intended to address national security concerns related to TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
The proposed terms of the deal would have granted unprecedented access to multiple US agencies, including the Department of Justice and Department of Defense, surpassing what other social media companies typically provide.
The federal agencies would have been allowed to conduct searches of TikTok’s US headquarters, files, and servers without prior notice.
The draft agreement also included provisions that would have enabled US officials to prevent changes to the app’s terms of service, mandated TikTok to bear the costs of all audits, and even allowed for the shutdown of TikTok within the US under specific circumstances.
While TikTok did not confirm the specifics of the draft agreement, the company did acknowledge its cooperation with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) over the past year. TikTok emphasized its efforts to isolate US user data and its investment in safeguarding national security interests.
Critics of the potential deal raised concerns that the concessions demanded by the government bore resemblance to surveillance methods associated with Chinese officials.
The draft agreement’s provisions mirror some of the surveillance tactics that the Chinese Communist Party has been accused of exploiting.
TikTok’s relationship with the Chinese government has faced scrutiny, with allegations of ties to the Chinese Communist Party. In response, the FBI director expressed concerns about TikTok’s potential national security risk. The app has previously faced investigations related to data security, including reports of workers accessing user data without authorization and concerns over data privacy.
TikTok’s history with the US government extends back to the Trump administration, during which the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) began investigating ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. The investigations were prompted by fears that TikTok’s data could be exploited by Chinese government officials for espionage. TikTok subsequently entered into a data routing agreement with Oracle to address these concerns.
