Before coming back home to West Virginia, I spent nearly a decade serving as an Air Force intelligence officer. During those years, I served with several agencies within the U.S. Intelligence Community in Washington, DC, in Germany at Ramstein Air Base, and with a small, joint Army-Air Force team in southeast Afghanistan. As a result of these experiences, I am all too familiar with the significant threats America faces from cyberattacks by foreign actors attempting to gain access to both sensitive, personal information and classified government materials through any means possible.
If I learned anything else from my time in uniform, it’s that the nation investing the most into its weapons of cyber warfare is the People’s Republic of China. Through its military, intelligence organizations, and third parties backed by the Communist government, in recent years China has been desperate to steal American information. That is why there is a growing concern among American security and defense officials regarding the popular video sharing app TikTok, owned by the massive Chinese tech company ByteDance. The focus of these concerns is that the app is being covertly used to collect user data that is completely unrelated to its purported purpose from the phones and other devices on which it’s been downloaded.
This raises a major red flag due to the fact that under Chinese law, the Communist government has the authority to compel TikTok to provide it with the data the app already collects or may be able to collect from its users. This seemingly harmless app can and already has been weaponized as a tool for the Chinese government to gain access to the information we keep on our phones, including personal and financial information, emails, photos, and location services.
Just last week, multiple reports surfaced that TikTok employees were using the app to spy on two American journalists who were, ironically, writing stories that focused on security concerns surrounding the app. While these startling revelations were at first categorically denied by TikTok, the company has since admitted that its employees had used the app to track the physical movements of these journalists in an effort to discover the identities of their confidential sources.
TikTok is now facing tremendous scrutiny at the federal level through recent legislation passed by Congress that bans the use of the popular app on federal government devices. The Biden administration is also considering further action by forcing the Chinese owner of TikTok to divest itself from its U.S. operations. Although this would be unprecedented, it makes complete sense in light of the company’s tracking of those two American journalists.
It is clear that Communist China sees the United States as the top threat to their efforts to assert their power across the globe. Because of that, we should be doing everything in our power to stop them – even something as seemingly small as deleting an app on our phones.
Due to the security concerns and controversies surrounding TikTok, I recently called on Governor Justice to ban the app from being downloaded or used on state government cell phones and other devices. Thankfully, he agreed with me and plans on introducing legislation to put that ban into law. Along with Governor Justice, two of our state’s constitutional officers, State Auditor JB McCuskey and Commissioner of Agriculture Kent Leonhardt, responded to my letter by implementing an immediate ban on TikTok for their employees.
I applaud their swift response. With the legislative session beginning in just a few weeks, I look forward to working with my Senate and House colleagues on codifying this ban and continuing to find other ways to heighten cybersecurity in the Mountain State. To date, at least 16 other states have stood up to the Communist Government of China and banned the use of TikTok on their government devices. I am happy to lead this charge here in West Virginia.
Senator Weld represents the 1st Senatorial District and serves as the Majority Whip as well as the Chair of the Military Committee and Vice Chair of the Judiciary Committee in the West Virginia Senate. He also is an attorney with the firm of Spilman, Thomas & Battle in their Wheeling office.
