Top 10 Sexiest Trends on TikTok

What's interesting is that, you know, obviously, the perpetrators of these attacks are the Chinese and the Russians. But you mention in the book that, you know, Americans have all kind of contributed to this problem, from the private sector, to the government, to individual Americans. And you kind of touched on some of the things the private sector and the government are doing. What about individual Americans? How have we contributed to the problem? Well, during the pandemic, Americans started working remotely, understandably. I'm not quarreling with that. And they started using their personal devices to access the corporate networks, or they bring a corporate device home and leave it plugged in overnight. So the whole idea that you could have a secure perimeter for these large corporate IT systems has been shattered because Americans have mixed their personal devices up with their corporate devices. So the corporate world is having to recognize that they have to go to something called zero trust. They have to build in more checks and balances within their internal systems so they can prevent the Chinese from getting in and then escalating their privileges to a system-administrated level where they can largely control the systems. But individual Americans also are clicking on phishing software and they're using single-factor authentication when they should be using multiple-factor, two-factor authentication. I mean, Americans, and TikTok is the ultimate in American cooperation and our own destruction. 150, 140 to 150 million Americans are using TikTok. And this is an algorithm from China, written in China and controlled from China that can see your face, biometric signals on your face where your eyes go wide or whether you hyperventilate, where you breathe harder, when you see some content. They can measure how long you look at the content, how deeply you engage with it. They ping you, your system, once every hour so they know where you are. And they get lists of your contacts. They get lists of all the other applications your system may be using. So Americans have flocked to this and others, the Shine and T-Moon. Americans are flocking to these things. And they're so intensely involved and emotionally engaged with these systems that politicians don't dare take action. I mean, if I were president, I would say TikTok is banned as of tomorrow. Unplug all the servers. Everybody go home. It's over. Let LinkedIn take over, let others take over these functions. But the reason no one does that, Gina Raimondo explained it in her trip in Beijing that any political leader that shut down TikTok would lose the votes of all Americans under the age of 35. Americans under the age of 35 believe that their rights, that this is their right to use this platform, even if it has national security implications. National security, that's the government's problem. This is us. This is us now. We now want to have fun on this highly addictive algorithm application. And we don't care what it means to national security. So that right there in a nutshell is that Americans are either not sophisticated enough to understand this game or they don't care. I think that is the biggest challenge to getting this issue addressed is just your average American. You talk about Chinese cyber espionage and their eyes kind of glaze over. And they don't want to know. I mean, on the other hand, Pew says that some percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of China. So it's not that they think that like, oh, China's super trustworthy or whatever. But I think- It's just something about talking about like the cyber. It's just what? The cybers. The cybers, I'm bored. Let me, I got to get back on TikTok and see something. Well, I wonder if also we've just gotten into a culture of sacrificing security for convenience, basically. Like- Yeah, the whole IT system is built on that concept that we want to have fun on the internet. We want to have the joy of accessing and communicating with people all over the world. But, and companies want to make money from the IT systems, of course. And so we have these short-term preoccupations with fun, profit, reaching out. And as a result, we have not built our system. Our system's architecture is very open. Our software is very open. Our cloud computing system is vulnerable. And we haven't cared. We have not cared about that. And so it might, you know, traditionally in America to get people to wake up, it takes a real crisis, a real bang moment, a real 9-1-1. So the Chinese and Russians have been careful enough that they know that, and they have avoided that. So I agree with your point that Americans are having trouble wrapping their brains around this. My wife's a psychologist. Every author should be married to a psychologist. So when I express my frustration to her about why can't I get people to take these things seriously, she says, listen, Bill, we've just come through a pandemic. Everybody's worried about their health. We're worried about wildfires and floods and climate change. I mean, that's increasingly, people are preoccupied with that. We're worried about mass violence in our cities and schools and temples and churches, people getting killed virtually every week. And we're worried about the toxic, bitter political divide on virtually every issue. We just can't handle, Bill, we just can't handle talking about this. My co-author's wife, Theresa, also says, I love you, honey, but I just don't care. So you're right that we are preoccupied with these other things, and that it's really hard to get Americans to pay attention. Yeah, I'm trying to think of like, what am I gonna title this episode to get people to click? I'm thinking maybe something like top 10 sexiest trends on TikTok. Yeah. There you go. Well, it's interesting because you talk about all these things that are like, occupying our minds more than Chinese and Russian cyber espionage. But like, also, like 15 minutes ago, you were talking about how the Russians are creating these opposing websites that are stirring up controversy, that are getting Americans to pay attention to that. So I think it's a really, it's a beautiful circle of life. No, they're more skilled at making Americans pay attention than we are. The American media, the American governing system, so they know how to grab people. So you talk about TikTok and the political fallout that would happen for banning. I mean, is there a way to ban TikTok? Because like, India did it, and that was three years ago. Right, they did it, right. They banned 50 or 60 different Chinese applications because they could recognize that the Chinese were building a whole ecosystem, a whole digital ecosystem that would be funneling data back to Beijing. So the Indians said, just cold turkey, they shut down all the Chinese activities in India, all the Chinese IT cyber kind of activities. So, and they're one of the only nations in the world that has done that. So that's the, I mean, the Chinese are expanding their influence to this Belt and Road Initiative in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. And with their HIC vision cameras, which are watching smart cities. So the cameras and computers are monitoring traffic, monitoring water, monitoring electricity, smart cities, helping the managers manage their cities. But they're also, through the back door, feeding that data back to Beijing. So the Chinese are able to observe a lot of things that are going on in the world. Let me tell you one story. This story encapsulates the power of their data. They've stolen so much data. From the federal government, Office of Personnel Management, 22 million employees had their security documents stolen. Then from Marriott and United Airlines, they stole other data about passports, passport numbers, frequent flyer miles, all that. Healthcare, our healthcare system is wide open, and they've been able to get any healthcare information they want. Essentially, it's unprotected. Then from the Equifax, they got tens of millions of personal financial records. So they can add up this point, and let's take an individual, oh, he's got problems with his credit rating, his health is not bad, or his wife's health is not good. And they can draw a profile of prominent Americans involved in the intelligence and military sectors. And so my co-author, Mike McLaughlin, told me, I would never have guessed this, that the Chinese can create a portrait, a digital portrait of our top military and intelligence people. That means that they cannot go to China because they'll be tracked and monitored. They cannot go and beat any Chinese national, even if it's for just information gathering or relationship establishing kind of visits, because the Chinese government can track the Chinese natives, individuals, as well as the foreign intelligence or military. So our capacity to be active in China and the world, their facial recognition systems in East Africa, for example, they would be able to recognize the faces of certain American military or intelligence personnel if they found them in Kenya or Uganda. And that information would go back to China. So there's incredible power involved in the collection of this data and the use of the data to track and identify and track different prominent Americans. And I just still can't believe it. All this is happening. And you said the US doesn't even have a cyber czar looking after this anymore. No, no, we really, what my coauthor and I advocate is we need to concentrate these digital functions that are now spread through the government into one department of digital services. And this department would be able to increase the training. We need more training. The US government doesn't have enough people to manage and monitor its systems. Some US government systems were built in the 70s or 80s. So can you imagine? And so we need a department that can build up the IT capabilities of people, of getting cooperation going between the FBI, CIA, NSA, SISO within Homeland Security. They don't necessarily share information with each other about the threats that they see and the networks that they monitor. So, and they certainly don't share it with the private sector. I mean, so imagine the US government, different parts of the US government know about certain bad actors, but they don't tell the private sector about it.