U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and other U.S. senators unveil laws that will allow the Biden administration to “ban or prohibit” foreign technology products resembling the Chinese-owned video app TikTok during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 7, 2023.
Bonnie Money | Reuters
The White House threw its support behind a latest bipartisan Senate bill on Tuesday that will give the Biden administration the ability to ban TikTok within the U.S.
The laws would empower the Commerce Department to review deals, software updates or data transfers by information and communications technology during which a foreign adversary has an interest. TikTok, which has develop into a viral sensation within the U.S. by allowing kids to create and share short videos, is owned by Chinese web giant ByteDance.
Under the brand new proposal, if the Commerce secretary determines that a transaction poses “undue or unacceptable risk” to U.S. national security, it may be referred to the president for motion, as much as and including forced divestment.
The bill was dubbed the RESTRICT Act, which stands for Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally unveiled the laws on Capitol Hill alongside a bipartisan group of Senate co-sponsors. The White House issued a press release publicly endorsing the bill while Warner was briefing reporters.
“This bill presents a scientific framework for addressing technology-based threats to the safety and security of Americans,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a press release, adding that it might give the federal government latest tools to mitigate national security risks within the tech sector.
Sullivan urged Congress “to act quickly to send the bill to the President’s desk.”
“Critically, it might strengthen our ability to handle discrete risks posed by individual transactions, and systemic risks posed by certain classes of transactions involving countries of concern in sensitive technology sectors,” said Sullivan.
A TikTok spokeswoman didn’t respond Tuesday to CNBC’s request for comment.
Sullivan’s statement marks the primary time a TikTok bill in Congress has received the specific backing of the Biden administration, and it catapulted Warner’s bill to the highest of a growing list of congressional proposals to ban TikTok.
As of Tuesday, Warner’s laws didn’t yet have a companion version within the House. But Warner told CNBC he already had “plenty of interest” from each Democrats and Republicans within the lower chamber.
Warner declined to say who he and Republican co-sponsor Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., might look to for support within the House, but added, “I’m very pleased with the quantity of interest we have gotten from a few of our House colleagues.”
Earlier this month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill that, if it became law, would compel the president to impose sanctions on Chinese firms that would potentially expose Americans’ private data to a foreign adversary.
But unlike Warner’s bill, the House laws, generally known as the DATA Act, has no Democratic co-sponsors, and it advanced out of committee along party lines, complicating its prospects within the Democratic-majority Senate.
Senators introducing the bill on Tuesday emphasized that unlike another proposals, their laws doesn’t single out individual firms. As an alternative, it goals to create a latest framework and a legal process for identifying and mitigating specific threats.
“The RESTRICT Act is greater than about TikTok,” Warner told reporters “It should give us that comprehensive approach.”
The brand new Senate bill defines foreign adversaries because the governments of six countries: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. It also says it should apply to information and communication technology services with at the least 1 million U.S.-based annual energetic users or which have sold at the least 1 million units to U.S. customers prior to now 12 months.
That would reach far beyond TikTok, which in 2020 said it had 100 million monthly energetic users within the U.S.
The corporate has been under review by the Committee on Foreign Relations within the U.S. stemming from ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, which was a precursor to the favored video-sharing app.
But that process has stalled, leaving lawmakers and administration officials impatient to take care of what they see as a critical national security risk. TikTok has maintained that approval of a latest risk mitigation strategy by CFIUS is the very best path forward.
“The Biden Administration doesn’t need additional authority from Congress to handle national security concerns about TikTok: it may approve the deal negotiated with CFIUS over two years that it has spent the last six months reviewing,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said in a press release before the bill text was released.
“A U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus individuals who use our service worldwide,” the corporate said. “We hope that Congress will explore solutions to their national security concerns that will not have the effect of censoring the voices of thousands and thousands of Americans.”
TikTok’s interim security officer Will Farrell described in a speech on Monday the layered approach the corporate plans to take to mitigate the danger that the Chinese government could interfere with its operations within the U.S.
The so-called Project Texas would involve Oracle hosting its data within the cloud with strict procedures over how that information could be accessed and even sending vetted code on to the mobile app stores where users find the service.
Farrell said TikTok’s commitments would end in an “unprecedented amount of transparency” for such a technology company.
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