Eric Smalley, The Conversation and Matt Williams, The Conversation

TikTok headed to court on Sept. 16, 2024, in a bid to overturn a law that would force the video app to divorce from its China-based parent company or be banned in the U.S.

During the appearance before a panel of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, lawyers for TikTok said imposing such a prohibition would have “staggering” consequences for free speech.

The court hearing is the latest development in a lengthy saga over the fate of an app that is widely popular, especially among young Americans, but that many politicians in Washington fear poses or is a security risk.

Whatever the outcome of the oral arguments presented by lawyers from the U.S. government on one side and TikTok and parent company ByteDance on the other, it’s unlikely to be the end of the story. Many analysts expect the case will head to the Supreme Court.

But why is TikTok controversial? Are the claims of it being a national security risk valid? And what will the case mean for free speech? The Conversation’s contributors have been on hand to answer these and other questions.

1. An agent of the Chinese state?

Politicians who want to ban TikTok, or at least sever its links to China, fear that the app provides a way for the Chinese Communist Party to influence Americans or use their data for malicious purposes. But how much influence does the Chinese government have at TikTok? That question is addressed by Shaomin Li, a scholar of China’s political economy and business at Old Dominion University.

Li explains that the relationship between TikTok, ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party is nuanced – it isn’t simply a matter of officials in Beijing telling ByteDance to jump and the parent company dictating how high its subsidiary will leap. Rather, as with all companies in China, employees are under certain obligations when it comes to advancing national interests. In China, private enterprises, such as ByteDance, operate as joint ventures with the state.

“Regardless of whether ByteDance has formal ties with the party, there will be the tacit understanding that the management is working for two bosses: the investors of the company and, more importantly, their political overseers that represent the party,” Li writes. “But most importantly, when the interests of the two bosses conflict, the party trumps.”

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2. Exploiting user data

The risks TikTok poses to U.S. users are similar to the risks posed by many popular apps, principally that the app collects data about you. That data, which includes contact information and website tracking, plus all data you post and messages you send through the app, is available to use or misuse by ByteDance and any other entity that has or gains access to it.

Iowa State University cybersecurity researcher Doug Jacobson writes that U.S. officials and lawmakers are concerned that the Chinese government could exploit TikTok user data to spy on U.S. citizens. Government hackers could use the TikTok data to trick users into revealing more personal information.

But if the goal is to counter Chinese hackers, banning TikTok might prove too little, too late. “By some estimates, the Chinese government has already collected personal information on at least 80% of the U.S. population via various means,” Jacobson writes. “The Chinese government – along with anyone else with money – also has access to the large market for personal data.”

3. The security risks of a ban

Banning TikTok could also make U.S. users more vulnerable to hackers of all stripes. Rochester Institute of Technology computer security expert Robert Olson writes that many of the more than 100 million U.S. TikTok users could try to get around a ban on the app, with negative consequences for their digital safety.

If TikTok ends up banned from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, users could try to access the app elsewhere via sideloading. This practice of getting around Apple and Google app stores leaves users vulnerable to malware posing as the TikTok app. TikTok users might also be motivated to circumvent Apple and Google security controls in order to keep the app installed, a move that would make users’ phones more vulnerable.

“I find it unlikely that a TikTok ban would be technologically enforceable,” Olson writes. “This … legislation – aimed at improving cybersecurity – could motivate users to engage in riskier digital behavior.”

4. First Amendment concerns

In its legal challenge to the U.S. government, ByteDance claims the government is violating its First Amendment rights. Technology law scholars Anupam Chander of Georgetown University and Gautam Hans of Cornell University write that ByteDance has grounds for its claim, and that the implications go beyond this case.

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TikTok is a publisher, an online publisher of users’ videos. Forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok is a form of prior restraint – the government preventing speech before it occurs.

“By forcing the sale of TikTok to an entity without ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Congress’ intent with the law is to change the nature of the platform,” they write. “That kind of government action implicates the core concerns that the First Amendment was designed to protect against: government interference in the speech of private parties.”

5. What about the others?

Security and legal issues aside, the forced sale to a U.S.-based company or ban of TikTok in the United States is a questionable approach to solving the problems the law aims to address: potential Chinese government influence in the U.S., harm to teens, and data privacy violations, writes Arizona State media scholar Sarah Florini.

The Chinese government – and other U.S. adversaries – has long used social media apps owned by U.S. companies to attempt to influence American public opinion. TikTok is hardly alone in posing harm to teens, as the Facebook whistleblower case amply demonstrated. And vast amounts of Americans’ personal data are already available to any buyer on the open and black markets.

“Concerns about TikTok are not unfounded, but they are also not unique. Each threat posed by TikTok has also been posed by U.S.-based social media for over a decade,” Florini writes.

Eric Smalley, Science + Technology Editor, The Conversation and Matt Williams, Senior International Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Richard Forno, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Electronic pagers across Lebanon exploded simultaneously on Sept. 17, 2024, killing 12 and wounding more than 2,700. The following day, another wave of explosions in the country came from detonating walkie-talkies. The attacks appeared to target members of the militant group Hezbollah.

The pagers attack involved explosives planted in the communications devices by Israeli operatives, according to U.S. officials cited by The New York Times. Hezbollah had recently ordered a shipment of pagers, according to the report.

Secretly attacking the supply chain is not a new technique in intelligence and military operations. For example, the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted computer hardware bound for overseas customers, inserted malware or other surveillance tools and then repackaged them for delivery to certain foreign buyers, a 2010 NSA internal document showed. This differs from accessing a specific person’s device, such as when Israel’s Shin Bet secretly inserted explosives into a cellphone to remotely kill a Hamas bombmaker in 1996.

Hezbollah, a longtime adversary of Israel, had increased its use of pagers in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. By shifting to relatively low-tech communication devices, including pagers and walkie-talkies, Hezbollah apparently sought an advantage against Israel’s well-known sophistication in tracking targets through their phones.

Cellphones: The ultimate tracker

As a former cybersecurity professional and current security researcher, I view cellular devices as the ultimate tracking tool for both government and commercial entities – in addition to users, criminals and the mobile phone provider itself. As a result, mobile phone tracking has contributed to the fight against terrorism, located missing people and helped solve crimes.

Conversely, mobile phone tracking makes it easy for anyone to record a person’s most intimate movements. This can be done for legitimate purposes such as parents tracking children’s movements, helping you find your car in a parking lot, and commercial advertising, or nefarious ends such as remotely spying on a lover suspected of cheating or tracking political activists and journalists. Even the U.S. military remains concerned with how its soldiers might be tracked by their phones.

Mobile device tracking is conducted in several ways. First, there is the network location data generated by the phone as it moves past local cell towers or Stingray devices, which law enforcement agencies use to mimic cell towers. Then there are the features built into the phone’s operating system or enabled by downloaded apps that may lead to highly detailed user tracking, which users unwittingly agree to by ignoring the software’s privacy policy or terms of service.

This collected data is sometimes sold to governments or other companies for additional data mining and user profiling. And modern smartphones also have built-in Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities that can help with locating and tracking user movements around the world, both from the ground and via satellites. https://www.youtube.com/embed/CxC1KCoGbIM?wmode=transparent&start=0 Your phone contains many sensors that make it useful – and easy to track.

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Mobile devices can be tracked in real time or close to it. Common technical methods include traditional radio direction-finding techniques, using intelligence satellites or drones, deploying “man in the middle” tools like Stingrays to impersonate cellular towers to intercept and isolate device traffic, or installing malware such as Pegasus, made by Israeli cyberarms company NSO to report a device’s location.

Nontechnical and slower techniques of user tracking include potentially identifying general user locations from their internet activity. This can be done from website logs or the metadata contained in content posted to social media, or contracting with data brokers to receive any collected location data from the apps that a user might install on their device.

Indeed, because of these vulnerabilities, the leader of Hezbollah earlier this year advised his members to avoid using cellular phones in their activities, noting that Israel’s “surveillance devices are in your pockets. If you are looking for the Israeli agent, look at the phone in your hands and those of your wives and children.”

Researchers have shown how these features, often intended for the user’s convenience, can be used by governments, companies and criminals to track people in their daily lives and even predict movements. Many people still aren’t aware of how much their mobile devices disclose about them.

Pagers, however, unlike mobile phones, can be harder to track depending on whether they support two-way communication.

Why go low-tech

A pager that only receives messages does not provide a signal that can facilitate tracking its owner. Therefore, Hezbollah’s use of pagers likely made it more challenging to track their operatives – thus motivating Israeli intelligence services’ purported attack on the supply chain of Hezbollah’s pagers.

Using low-tech tactics and personal couriers while avoiding the use of mobile phones and digital tools also made it difficult for the technologically superior Western intelligence agencies to locate Osama bin Laden for years after the 9/11 attacks.

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In general, I believe the adversary in an asymmetric conflict using low-tech techniques, tactics and technology will almost always be able to operate successfully against a more powerful and well-funded opponent.

A well-documented demonstration of this asymmetry in action was the U.S. military’s Millennium Challenge war game in 2002. Among other things, the insurgent Red forces, led by Marine General Paul van Riper, used low-tech tactics including motorcycle couriers instead of cellphones to evade the Blue forces’ high-tech surveillance. In the initial run of the exercise, the Red team won the contest in 24 hours, forcing exercise planners to controversially reset and update the scenario to ensure a Blue team victory.

Lessons for everyone

The preference for terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and al-Qaida to avoid using smartphones is a reminder for everyone that you can be, and likely are being tracked in various ways and for various purposes.

Israel’s purported response to Hezbollah’s actions also holds a lesson for everyone. From a cybersecurity perspective, it shows that any device in your life can be tampered with by an adversary at points along the supply chain – long before you even receive it.

Richard Forno, Principal Lecturer in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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UPPER DARBY, Pa. /PRNewswire/ — Upper Darby School District (“UDSD”) is providing notice of recent events that may have affected the privacy of personal information related to certain individuals. The information involved in these events may include data related to current and former employees, as well as some student data.

DATA Events

In February 2024, UDSD identified unusual activity on certain IT systems. UDSD promptly took steps to secure its systems and initiated an investigation into the nature and scope of the issue. Through the investigation, it was determined that certain files were potentially copied from the systems by an unauthorized person on or around February 4, 2024. Further, in June 2024, UDSD learned that certain files were potentially copied from its systems by an unauthorized person on or around June 2, 2024. In response to these issues, UDSD undertook comprehensive reviews of the relevant files to determine what information was present and to whom it relates. While these efforts are still underway, UDSD has been working on an ongoing to mail letters to those individuals whose personal information was found in the relevant files. The investigations to date have determined that the type of information that may have been impacted varies per person, but may include name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license number, other state identification number, medical and/or health insurance information.

UDSD takes these incidents, and the security of information in its care very seriously. UDSD has been working diligently to investigate and respond to these events, including moving quickly to initiate appropriate investigations, taking steps to assess the security of the network, and notifying potentially affected individuals on an ongoing basis as the investigations continue. UDSD is providing individuals with information and resources that they may use to better protect personal information.

UDSD encourages potentially impacted individuals to remain vigilant against incidents of identity theft and fraud by reviewing their account statements and monitoring free credit reports for suspicious activity and to detect errors. Any suspicious activity should be promptly reported to the affiliated institutions. Individuals may also contact the three major credit reporting agencies for advice on how to obtain free credit reports and how to place fraud alerts and security freezes on credit files. The relevant contact information is below. More information on actions individuals may take to better protect their personal information may be found in the Steps Individuals May Take To Help Protect Personal Information section available on UDSD’s website at https://www.upperdarbysd.org/cms/lib/PA02209738/Centricity/Domain/4/UDSD%20-%20Website%20Notice.pdf.

UDSD has established a dedicated assistance line to answer questions regarding these incidents. If you have questions, please call 1-866-362-1773 Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, excluding major U.S. holidays. Additionally, you can write us at 8201 Lansdowne Avenue, Upper Darby, PA 19082.

Steps Individuals May Take To Help Protect Personal Information

Monitor Accounts
Under U.S. law, a consumer is entitled to one free credit report annually from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. To order your free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call, toll-free, 1-877-322-8228. You may also directly contact the three major credit reporting bureaus listed below to request a free copy of your credit report.

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Consumers have the right to place an initial or extended “fraud alert” on a credit file at no cost. An initial fraud alert is a 1-year alert that is placed on a consumer’s credit file. Upon seeing a fraud alert display on a consumer’s credit file, a business is required to take steps to verify the consumer’s identity before extending new credit. If you are a victim of identity theft, you are entitled to an extended fraud alert, which is a fraud alert lasting seven years. Should you wish to place a fraud alert, please contact any one of the three major credit reporting bureaus listed below.

As an alternative to a fraud alert, consumers have the right to place a “credit freeze” on a credit report, which will prohibit a credit bureau from releasing information in the credit report without the consumer’s express authorization. The credit freeze is designed to prevent credit, loans, and services from being approved in your name without your consent. However, you should be aware that using a credit freeze to take control over who gets access to the personal and financial information in your credit report may delay, interfere with, or prohibit the timely approval of any subsequent request or application you make regarding a new loan, credit, mortgage, or any other account involving the extension of credit. Pursuant to federal law, you cannot be charged to place or lift a credit freeze on your credit report. To request a security freeze, you may need to provide the following information, depending on whether you make the request online, by phone, or by mail:

1. Full name (including middle initial as well as Jr., Sr., II, III, etc.);
2. Social Security number;
3. Date of birth;
4. Addresses for the prior two to five years;
5. Proof of current address, such as a current utility bill or telephone bill;
6. A legible photocopy of a government-issued identification card (state driver’s license or ID card, etc.);
7. Social Security Card, pay stub, or W2;
8. If you are a victim of identity theft, include a copy of either the police report, investigative report, or complaint to a law enforcement agency concerning identity theft.

Should you wish to place a credit freeze, please contact the three major credit reporting bureaus listed below:

Additional Information
You may further educate yourself regarding identity theft, fraud alerts, credit freezes, and the steps you can take to protect your personal information by contacting the consumer reporting bureaus, the Federal Trade Commission, or your state Attorney General. The Federal Trade Commission may be reached at: 600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20580; www.identitytheft.gov; 1-877-ID-THEFT (1-877-438-4338); and TTY: 1-866-653-4261. The Federal Trade Commission also encourages those who discover that their information has been misused to file a complaint with them. You can obtain further information on how to file such a complaint by way of the contact information listed above. You have the right to file a police report if you ever experience identity theft or fraud. Please note that in order to file a report with law enforcement for identity theft, you will likely need to provide some proof that you have been a victim. Instances of known or suspected identity theft should also be reported to law enforcement, your state Attorney General, and the Federal Trade Commission.

SOURCE Upper Darby School District

STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.

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