Robert Scheer: “The Banning of TikTok is an Attack On the Free Market”

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On this episode of Scheer Intelligence, David Greene, the Civil Liberties Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins host Robert Scheer to discuss the new bill that would ban the massively popular online social media platform, TikTok, in the U.S. In their conversation, they point out the hypocrisy of singling out one Chinese company for mass data collection, when there’s no evidence that TikTok collects data in any different way, or for any other purpose, than other social media companies. 

Scheer notes that the banning of TikTok would be “a betrayal of the whole notion of free trade, market economy” — a sign that America cannot stand the competition of an actually free market. Further, he points out that while there is no evidence that China is using TikTok to spy on Americans, a recent Reuters report reveals that the Trump administration used a “fake information program using Chinese social media to slam leaders of China…and create a great deal of ferment.” 

Watch the TikTok CEO deny allegations of being linked with the C.C.P. at U.S. Senate Hearing (Jan. 31, 2024) :

Both Scheer and Greene agree that the U.S. “actually set the standard of observing people through technology.”

Greene says one of the harms America will suffer if the bill is passed is “the U.S.’s loss of moral authority” to chastise other governments for inhibiting the free flow of information around the world. 

Greene states “If they were serious about protecting privacy as a freedom, they’d pass a data privacy law—but this is not that.” Further, he points out that if social media companies were limited in the data they could collect from users, then there’d be no threat of TikTok giving the data to China in the first place (because TikTok, and all other social media companies, wouldn’t even have the data to begin with). 

The precedent this bill instead would set is the total control of the internet by the federal government — enabling American leaders to banish entire websites and limit the modes of internet communication to which users prefer to have access, like the 170 million users that use TikTok. 

As Scheer notes, “The big takeaway here is we can’t stand real competition in the marketplace and we’re going to use politics to destroy it which is what every totalitarian government has done.”

So, the question remains: If the Chinese government is using TikTok as a spying device to undermine American national security, where is the evidence? 

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Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Max Jones

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy. 

Robert Scheer:  Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from, my guest, in this case, David Green, the Chief Civil Liberties Attorney, For the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Is that the right title?

David Greene: That’s close enough. Civil Liberties Director, but I think it says the same thing. 

Scheer: I wanna tell you, we’re here to talk about H.R. 7521 that the US over Congress overwhelmingly passed. I think there was like 350 to 50 or something — 59 votes — bipartisan support, and it’s called Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. And that’s something you could have had in the old Soviet Union.

Protecting  the Soviets from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. It’s a mouthful, it’s intimidating, and yet overwhelming support.  Oddly enough President Biden said he’s going to sign it if it comes to his desk, if it gets through the Senate, and Donald Trump actually criticized it and said it gave unfair advantage to Facebook.

The reason I turned to EFF,  the Electronic Frontier Foundation, When I was writing my own book, They Know Everything About You, on what was happening to the internet, I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and I spent a lot of time in your building, and I came away thinking, this is the one group, go-to group that I trust in this country to deal with freedom on the internet.

And and one reason I trust you folks is you come out of the culture of Silicon Valley. You were started by people who actually helped invent the internet. You’ve had economic support, financial support from people in the valley. You’re part of the culture and yet you have a consistent, solid commitment, which often people in Silicon Valley claim they do and talk about they believe in a free market and free ideas and maybe even be libertarians of some kind or another.

But when profit gets involved in government power and Push comes to shove, they forget about all that. I think of an organization like Palantir as one such group that turns out it was started by the CIA and it was its only customer for three years. But, they, and that’s where Peter Thiel is, they made a big claim about really believing in the free market.

I want to start with that. We have a situation here now with saying we believe in international trade. We believe in the comparative advantage of trade and letting other countries. And here, a Chinese company that is privately owned is now being baited. You can’t be trusted with social media because they won’t protect the information.

As far as I know, there’s no evidence that the Byte company has exploited TikTok’s private evidence. But we know that all of these companies, in a way, do. We know they’re all there to mine data. They’re all there to sell stuff. We had Edward Snowden showing how extensive all that data collection was with government observation and interference.

And so I’m just wondering, how do they do this with a straight face, singling out one Chinese company rather than okay, maybe all of these companies should be questioned and challenged. What are the protections? Obviously that’s a live issue, but I just think this is a going back to the philosophy of so many people I interviewed in  Silicon Valley.

This would seem to me a betrayal of the whole notion of free trade, market economy, that you have a company that is obviously successful and a lot of the, I guess 170 million people who use it successfully say, don’t you touch this. They’ve made a consumer decision. They’ve made a buyer beware decision.

Where does the Congress get off  deciding and why won’t this be a model for every country in the world? Why? Obviously China keeps companies out. They’ve kept Google out and so forth doesn’t just make that even legitimate.  

Greene: Yeah there’s a lot to unpack there, Bob. Let me start with the last one while I have it in mind.

I, I really, I think it’s a really important point that one of the real harms we’ll suffer if this bill becomes law is the U. S. ‘s loss of moral authority around the world, to chastise authoritarian and even democratic foreign governments when they try to shut down internet services for whatever reason.

Most famously the government of Nigeria actually shut down Twitter in that country for, went on for six months. And the claims there by the president of Nigeria was that it was spreading, it was being used to spread disinformation and propaganda and foreign propaganda. And so he shut down Twitter and the U S state department issued a statement, immediately condemning that is undemocratic and against the principles of the free flow of information around the world. And that was the right thing to do from the state department. And we’ve consistently this country has consistently called for the free flow of information around the world as a democratic principle.

We’ve actually seen this really consistent policy of the US over the last  almost 60 years. So  we will lose the moral authority to do that, if we pass a law that,  that says that TikTok either in its current form cannot exist, it can’t  exist under its current ownership, and really under its current editorial policy.

So we’ll lose that moral authority. So I do think that’s really important, and I’m glad you brought that up. Why is Congress doing this? I don’t presume to be inside their heads and know why anything there gains momentum. It seems like it’s so hard to get good ideas through Congress.

It’s always amazing to me when a really bad one gains momentum like this. But I think there’s a few things going on. One, there’s a general hate for Big tech companies in in Congress and a need that they want to do something to regulate them. And so I think a lot of ideas get floated and occasionally one will pick up a lot of steam.

So I think there’s a general Big Tech and especially social media company animus floating around out there. We’ve seen this with a lot of laws that have been proposed, both at the federal  and the state level. The other thing we’ll see is that I think this is a really good example of national security being thrown out there as some type of talisman for government authority to regulate all sorts of things.

And what is really interesting, as you point out, is that that concern for, and really an undifferentiated, unexplained concern for national security, seems to be overriding on the Republican side, the free market side, at least what was a really sort of essential free market principle, right?

That  people, that companies get to own the market, determines who uses them and who owns them and things like that. I think this is, so I think this is a good example of a national security concern  that first of all, we as the American people aren’t receiving nearly enough information about. They haven’t fully explained what the national security concern is, but also the, how easily members of Congress will bend it to national security concerns. 

What I’ve heard, and again I don’t have inside information, but what I’ve read publicly is that this may have been pushed by the administration coming out of the Department of Justice because of national security concerns. And maybe that explains why this effort seems to have caught fire and gathered a ton of support, whereas previous efforts did not.

Scheer: But in every country in the world, that wants to suppress free speech or free thought makes a national security argument. In fact George Washington, I quote this all the time in his farewell address. He said, “beware the impostures of pretended patriotism.” And the people who were against the American Revolution and still favored the crown claimed to be patriotic, but to another crown to another authority. And the irony is the great thing about the internet and particularly in its wild west days is yes you would have bad stuff and good stuff and stuff you didn’t like and everything, but you had a lot of it out there and you could correct it with other stuff.

And increasingly we have this demand to control it, including controlling American companies. And banning people, from Twitter or something. I think it was Congressman Greene who voted against it, Republican, because she was banned on Twitter. And and I think Trump is, at one point, wasn’t he banned? 

Greene: Yeah, he was kicked off of Twitter after January 6th, and kicked off of Facebook also. 

Scheer: Yeah, but at least when a private company does it, you can say they’re making their own decision. They’re a private company. That’s why they have freedom and so forth. We can argue about that.

But we always get our backup legitimately when there are state actors, because state actors can arrest you. They can throw you in prison forever and so forth. And the message we’ve been preaching to the world ever since I’ve been alive, which is a long time, is that there is something inherent to a free market even when it gets controlled by cartels, even when it gets big, still consumers have rights. And what you have right and right now is a situation where I gather these congressional offices are being flooded With messages from people who use TikTok, we say, don’t touch it.

We know what we got here. This helps my small business. This is what I like. So we really have a clash here between government power and consumer choice, consumer freedom. And the whole justification of our system is leave it up to the individual, leave it to the consumer. So if the government knows something about how, what is going on that would cause this, they would have an obligation to reveal it. And as I understand it, there’s no evidence that they’ve come up with, or anyone, that TikTok does anything with its data that is different than what other companies do with their data. And if TikTok were to be sold to an American company, which is the demand, they have a half a year to sell it.

That company would be able to do whatever they want with their data, with the data. And that company, if we take Snowden’s revelations clearly, if they didn’t want to turn their data over to the U. S. government, the U. S. government would chop into their fiber optic cables or come in the back of your iPhone and get the data anyway.

And the irony is today, as we go to talk, there’s a story in Reuters today and it seems to be well documented,  exclusive, “Trump launched CIA covert influence operation against China” and evidently it’s a program that still is going on in which, this was a fake information program using Chinese social media to slam leaders of China and then to say they’ve got foreign holdings and create a great deal of ferment.

And in the story they say that’s what we used to do all the time. The CIA has done it forever and so forth. So we actually set the standard of foreign, of observing people. through technology, right?

Greene: We did. Yeah, we certainly did. We’re really good at it and we do it a lot.

And one of the things that, that supporters of the bill keep on and other efforts to ban or to ban TikTok or to force its sale, keep on saying is China is different because there’s this law in China that requires Chinese companies to turn over all this data that they collect from their users.

And I say, that’s really not exceptional. The U S has several laws that require that, we have a whole system of national security letters which require much the same thing. We have  surveillance under executive order 12333, where the government doesn’t even need permission, may not even tell companies that they’re getting their data.

We’ve had surveillance programs under section 215 when they existed and under section 702. And 702 is actually up for renewal now. And there’s a great, and very few people are saying we shouldn’t do it again. And the U S does this, other nations do this really. The only exception might be Europe because or members of the EU, at least because there are, there’s much greater data protection laws there.

But even countries there will have programs where the government can get information. And it’s true, Facebook  and many other online services were sued in European courts  Because they did not adequately protect your, because those companies, because they operate in the U.S. and held European user data in the U. S., were not doing enough to protect European users’ data because of the U. S. national security surveillance programs. And so there was two, at least two big cases about that in European courts where that complaint was upheld. And so yes, this is not the idea that China is the only country in the world that does this is just not true. That doesn’t mean that China, because they’re a formidable adversary right now and they probably do create really legitimate national security interests in many ways, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned the government’s powerless to do anything about China.

But I do think we have to start looking really closely at their justifications for a law office. 

Scheer: No, but what we’re talking about is whether you’re really serious about protecting people’s freedom. 

Greene: Yeah. And I agree. And I think if they were serious about protecting privacy as a freedom, they’d pass a data privacy law, but this is not that.

Scheer: Tell us about that. 

Greene: There’s ways to protect privacy, right? You pass a law that regulates or limits the ability of companies, just take social media companies, for example, to collect data from the users, to retain that data and then to share it with others. There’s that type of regulatory scheme does exist in other places in the world, particularly in Europe.

But we have nothing like that on the federal level. There’s a few states that have some type of data privacy regulation. We don’t have that in the U.S. If TikTok, or Facebook, or Instagram or YouTube  or whatever, whatever social media one you want to need. If they were limited in their ability to collect user data in the first place and then retain it and then share it, if they were limited to that, we wouldn’t be concerned about TikTok,  what we’ve been told, having an obligation to then provide that information to the Chinese government.

If they don’t have the information in the first place Then there’s no threat of them giving it to China.  So if we’re really concerned about that, then we should do privacy regulation, but not this. 

Scheer: Yeah. And instead we made a decision very early on that these huge companies, first of all, we didn’t have to worry about monopoly or really a free market because there was an efficiency  and they’re getting very large and gobbling up all their competition.

And we also assumed that they would be neutral like utilities carrying water, but none of that’s true. And the real irony is their main profit source, certainly for Google and Facebook is mining our data. Because we’re really not their customers. We’re the mark, right? We were given this service for free and then in return we’re willing to tell them everything about us, our pants’ size or our college education or whatever. And so they can market to us. And the whole argument has always been that’s a self regulating system because they care about profit and because they care about profit, they’re not going to betray us and all of them have said they resent the U. S. government having gone in and grabbed this data, which I don’t know how much they resented.

That is also true of TikTok. The reason TikTok is successful is they’re a successful capitalist company in that they serve  consumer needs. And particularly now with this adverse publicity, people have a choice to stop using it.  You would think if there is information I would show you it’s dangerous and bad to go on TikTok.

The US government could just release that information if it’s honest information and let consumers decide.  And what we really have is capitalism is good for us, but not for other people.  That somehow we can be trusted — because this is really what’s going on here. China has become, in effect, the most successful capitalist country in the world right now if you take manufacturing.

It’s about 30 percent of all world manufacturing. They’re obviously very successful at building fast trains. They’re even now getting into airplanes. And the great threat from China, which nobody wants to admit it, is they may be better at marketing, packaging, selling, delivering, and doing all the things that a company wants to do.

So what are we doing? Instead of meeting them, meeting that challenge, deciding, okay, if we want to produce things here, what conditions, what rules, what work, what, so forth, we want to just stamp them out. And the consumers of TikTok are saying, why isn’t this our choice rather than yours? And they’re quite plaintive. They say we have a small business here. We’re dependent upon TikTok.  Why do you want to cut us off and why should you make that decision rather than us? And here you have at the US Congress. Obviously they claim they’re committed to a free market. They claim they’re committed to capitalism. We’re promoting this for the world but when some other company does well, we don’t apply the same standard.

As I understand this, and this is why the ACLU and EFF and a lot of these organizations that are committed to individual freedom are saying, no you’re mocking the free market model that we have.  Is that a fair assessment? 

Greene: I’m a lawyer, Bob, not an economist, but I agree with you that the government could, if the government is concerned about what the content that people get on TikTok, there’s lots of things it can do before it shuts down the company, before it interferes with the market choices that consumers are making and forces a sale of the company which we have no idea whether forcing a sale will actually address any of these problems. So I agree that this is, this type of market interference is, does seem to be an extreme measure when there are some really, seem to be some very simple type of things that the government can do if it’s truly, if it’s truly concerned.

I think what we saw over the alst two days a real shift in the narrative for the justification for this law. Previously it’s always been talked about like, well, China will have all this data about US users and they’ll use that to undermine our national security. And when people would ask, “Well how would they use that data to undermine our national security?” And not asking the skeptical way, just wanting to know there was never any answer to that.

What we’ve seen over the last two days, I think based on statements, the sponsors have made statements. What was in the one little sentence in the last public National intelligence report was that the concern seems to be that China is trying to interfere in U. S. elections and pushing up Chinese propaganda  through TikTok  to U.S. users and if that’s the case, then that seems to be something that the U. S. government can actually talk about quite publicly right and bring to people’s attention and maybe people will use TikTok differently or choose not to use it at all or be much more conscious about the what they get on the site.

But we’re not getting that. We’re still getting a little trickle of information about what the concern is. 

Scheer: No, but let’s take that concern. So now after we had, it wasn’t only Snowden, but clearly Snowden released so much information. It couldn’t be denied. It’s accepted that every one of our flagship companies, Apple and Google and so forth were forced by our government to turn over people’s data and to and they claimed they would, sometimes they were lied to, but they were forced to. They had to do it. Why wouldn’t that be an argument for any country in the world, beginning with China,  to say, we’re not going to let you sell an Apple iPhone here. We’re not gonna let you sell a Tesla or let alone make them here because after all, when you drive a Tesla, you’re giving off a lot of information all day long about where you’re eating, who you’re talking to and so forth. And I know I happen to have one and I can track where it is and what it’s doing on its own.

And so We live in a world where information is out there. The question is, as a society, and I’m going to your lawyer civil liberties expertise here, the assumption of our society is that a private company will honor its consumers if there’s transparency because they want to keep the consumers happy.

They need, and even when the consumers are not paying, in the case of Google, they want people to continue to use Google and not some rival service. Right now, Apple, for instance, claims it’s more privacy oriented than some other companies. That becomes a selling point. We’re not going to willingly turn this over.

But everywhere in the world, people are going to ask that question, who can I trust? And right now, Apple has lost its primary position in China. And Tesla has lost its car  primacy to a Chinese company. So one of the problems about this kind of random attack on any successful, any other country that’s successful is you justify their—forget about locking us out of their market—you justify people, they’re thinking better the devil I know,  at least I’ll stick with China. And the fact is in the Chinese market now there is that preference and there is also their own nationalist patriotic feeling or whatever it is.

So it seems to me and speaking to someone who functions in Silicon Valley and so forth, this is a rather fundamental attack on the appeal of  a democratic capitalism. Let me link those two words together. The idea of  capitalism enhancing the human experience in a way of making people freer. That, after all, is the claim.

And we claim that even when we have monopolies, even when we have restraints of trade, even when we have protectionism, we still say you’re best off with transparency so consumers know what’s going on and the consumer deciding. It seems to me,  for Congress, to overwhelmingly pass something called Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act means that the American consumer cannot be entrusted to make decisions that protect them from anyone.  And then the argument should be you don’t have transparency. Then why don’t they give us the transparency? If they have some evidence how this data is being used, they seem to know a lot about what goes on the internet in the world. Where is the evidence? Where are the hearings? Where is the investigation? This came almost from nowhere, and this was pushed through in, with hysteria, absolute hysteria, which EFF, your organization, has pointed out, and the ACLU, and others. So basically, what this is an attack on consumer sovereignty, and that’s what those people are saying when they’re calling up the congressional office. 

I want to, we’re going to run out of time here, but it seems to me that’s the basic issue. Who really believes in a free market? Who really believes in consumer rights? And it seems to me, despite being run by a communist country, we don’t like Russia now. It’s run by an anti communist. That doesn’t seem to help them very much.

So we use these labels quite freely. We like communist China better than anti-communist Putin’s Russia. For a while there, now we don’t because they’re getting closer, but the real issue is what system Enhances human freedom. That’s what the Electronic Frontier Foundation is all about I think. And I think this Act is a classic and the fact that it required two thirds and they got it With people like Jamie Raskin, for instance, who always claimed he was interested in individual freedom and so forth voted for it.

I was shocked. I looked at people that are supposed to represent me who voted for it. So I really want to get to the heart of the matter. Do we really believe in capitalism? Do we really believe in a free market when others around the world are suddenly maybe better at it than we are? That’s the real issue here because you know darn well they sell TikTok to another company you could be as American, it could be the Mormon church, Okay, if they buy TikTok, they’re going to do the same thing….But every company is going to exploit private data to sell,To shop, to tell you about a new vacation, a new idea.

The question is, why would they be trusted more than TikTok, which after all wants to stay in business, and the best way to put TikTok to the test is to force transparency, but force it for every company. What do you do with the data? And take another step, give the consumer some power over it. Have opt in rather than opt out.

That’s what the European Union kept flirting with. Let the consumer decide. So that’s the big issue here. How do you make basically the market accountable to the consumer? And this is a joke. This is saying, oh, trust Uncle Sam, trust Big Brother. We’ll do it for you. And it’s a lie. No? 

Greene: Yeah no I agree with you. And I, look I’m not one To defend capitalism as a democratic principle, but assuming that it can serve that function. And I do think in the in talking about the online online communications industry, we do have some issues with consumer choice being undermined by a lack of competition and things like that.

So I don’t want to say that even without this law, we have a functioning free market system with when we’re really, especially the online ad market being really dominated by two companies and other indicia of a lack of competition, which I also think would be right for actually government attention, but assuming I agree with you…if the law does force the sale, which seems to be its primary goal. This morning, I think ABC reported that Steve Mnuchin, the former secretary of the Treasury, he’s trying to put together an investor group to buy TikTok. Is that going to make everybody, is that going to make everybody happy? Is that what the users of TikTok want? Are we going to see a user migration away from the service the way we did after Musk bought X and a real completely, a really huge turnaround with the user base because the new ownership has, uh, has different editorial priorities and things like that.

And I think these are all really, these are all really good. Good questions about when does government choose to interfere in this way in the market and not just even in the economy market, but also in the ideas market, where do people choose to communicate with each other?

Where do people choose to get their ideas and their information? And what the U. S. government seems to be really threatened by here. I mean, the national security concern I think we’ve learned over the last few days is that they don’t like the information people are getting from TikTok. Yesterday Representative Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois who’s one of the sponsors of this bill, told PBS that he’s concerned that, in China, kids get served on TikTok, STEM education and health information. And, in the U. S., the Chinese government serves kids material that’s really harmful to them. And so  we’re not only interfering with the market of consumer choice, we’re also interfering with the the marketplace of ideas, if you will.

And that’s really something that’s really  fundamentally anathema to our democratic system, the government trying to say, we don’t like the information you’re getting. Back in 1965, the U. S. Supreme Court rejected an effort by the Postal Service to deny delivering the mail to people who it thought it was getting, foreign propaganda in the mail, communist propaganda in the mail.

And the U. S. Supreme Court said, no, you can’t do that. U. S. people have a right to receive foreign propaganda if they want it. And so yes, I agree with you. This is all about undermining consumer choice, both in the marketplace, in the economic marketplace, as well as in the intellectual marketplace.

Scheer: Let me defend capitalism  more  seriously than you do because there is an argument.  Look, come on. I tried shopping in the old Soviet Union. I tried having some freedom in the old Soviet Union. It was extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. I was in China during the end of the Cultural Revolution.

I’ve, I’ve been in different countries and even though I’m more for government than say a lot of libertarian people in Silicon Valley are, I think we need regulation and so forth, but we don’t get it. We don’t get really serious regulation of banks or the military, industrial complex. We don’t get transparency, but nonetheless, as imperfect as it is, A market economy, and that’s what the internet is basically about, even though you have big companies, is, has involved an explosion. 

It’s the best and worst of all worlds, let me put it that way. And taking, yes, the worst, we can get distracted, amused to death and everything, the best of it is it’s still relatively free space. And, people can come in with limited capital and be influences, present their thing, design it, and so forth.

The appeal of TikTok seems to be it advances that idea of individual creativity, capitalism selling things, presenting yourself, finding an audience, and so forth, which was the original claim of Facebook and others. And that way, as long as government, this is the genius, you’re a lawyer, of the American Constitution, was it did not ban private enterprise from doing things, it banned government from doing things.

In other words, Congress should make no law. And what you have here, and what Snowden,  I keep bringing Snowden up, but he’s, the guy who revealed this, which is, as long as it stayed in the private sector, this mining data and sell, okay, you can say you’re doing it for the convenience of your customer.

Oh, now that I know you’re an old man and a bit overweight, I’ll sell you this medicine or this clothing and fine, then I don’t mind you’re having my information or, right? But when government gets involved, that is the key idea that everybody seems to have lost here. The key idea of the American experiment  is if it takes place in the private sector, that’s up to you to decide where you want to shop, and that company, Google or Facebook, can’t come with guns to your door and make you use their product.

Government can. And that’s what government is doing here now. Government is saying, and doing it more effectively than you could get away with it, maybe, in some other countries, because they would say, Oh here’s our totalitarian government once again telling me what I can’t do.

I would, I’ll try to do a workaround. I’ll try to get that information. That’s what seems to happen as the norm in authoritarian or totalitarian countries. People still want to get that information. But we have this experiment that we are mocking with something, it’s just almost like Saturday Night Live.

Protecting Americans from foreign adversary controlled, my typing came in vague.  Protecting Americans, I do have it right. Protecting Americans from foreign adversary Control applications act. It’s a mouthful H.R. 7521 first of all, we do a lot of business with foreign adversaries, right?

We have peace agreements. We have trade agreements. Now suddenly China, and it’s interesting. How did China suddenly get to be such an adversary? They’re doing business all over the world. We don’t like their trade deals. We don’t like their investments. One could actually say maybe it’s a bit cynical. Why aren’t you competing with them to get that business rather than smearing them? That seems to be the real issue here. But the fact of the matter is, this statement, it’s like the Patriot Act working. It inherently violates the whole spirit of the American Constitution. When you do this, why can’t they then do it to other companies? Why can’t they do it to any company that some lobbyist convinces some congressional people is a threat to their business, but they won’t put it that way.

Greene: And the law actually creates the, so the law says, specifically calls out TikTok and ByteDance as ones that are presently not able to have ownership of, the app of an app that’s offered in U. S. app stores. But the law actually creates a process that allows the president to identify other applications that pose a similar threat because of their ownership interest by foreign adversaries.

And so it does create this process for this to be applied to other companies.And you can imagine, Telegram, WeChat. There are other services that people use. A lot of the shopping services that come out of China such as Shine or anything—the Alibaba things.

There’s a ton of services that people use that are based in countries that are probably considered our foreign adversaries. 

Scheer: But think about what this does to the world economy. I mean look, you know, what are we’ve already done this now with we can’t sell your chips and you can’t do this So what is china doing?

They’re building advanced chips they’re building airplanes now. China never was in commercial airplanes before. They’ve now got airplanes that they’re marketing in response to these kinds of barriers, and then what will it stop with China? Of course, we have Russia and everything, but then what about countries that have Saudi Arabia or something, that we don’t like for one reason or another, or the wrong people get elected at Brazil, or, after all, there’s this BRICS alliance now that includes India and Brazil and South Africa.

Are they all the enemy now. And I don’t get it in the reporting of this. I don’t know whether Jamie Raskin, actually I knew him as a young person. I don’t know whether these people realize what they’re setting in place. They are basically attacking the main assumption of the American experience internationally.

We said free trade, commerce, that’s what George Washington said in his presidency, pursue influence through peaceful means, commerce, trade, exchange, not military. Here’s the General doing the same thing General Eisenhower said when he became president. Don’t rely on the military for your perspective. But that’s what we’re doing now.

We’re saying we’re feeling this competition from this other, basically, fapitalist producing country,  and we’ll end on this, but it seems to me the big takeaway here is we can’t stand real competition in the marketplace and we’re going to use politics to destroy it, which is what every totalitarian government has done.

Greene: Yeah, that might be the case and again, I look at it also not just with the economic marketplace, but with the communications marketplace as well and the free exchange of information and ideas around the world which I also think has been a fundamental value of this country for since its founding. 

Scheer: Okay on that note. I want to thank David Greene. People should check out EFF.org. Right? 

Green: That’s right. Yes, EFF.org

Scheer: ‘Cause I always make that mistake. I put in.com and I get something else . But I wanna repeat the endorsement I gave at the beginning. It’s like consumer reports or something.

It just does an honest job of evaluating the impact on individual freedom of what is going on with government and the courts and everything, and holding Silicon Valley accountable. Because after all, the pretense or the conceit of Silicon Valley from the very beginning of its rise to this enormous world, clout, has been it will enhance our freedom.

It’s always been the claim. You’ll know more, you’ll have access to more, you’ll make better choices, and you’ll be a more complete person. And they always said we don’t want government interference. Where are they now?  Why aren’t, why isn’t Apple, why isn’t Facebook, why aren’t these companies saying, wait a minute, you’re embracing an idea here that the consumers need the government’s protection from us.

We don’t believe that. We think the market holds us accountable. That’s what Byte is saying in their defense.  I’m saying, are you crazy? You think we’re going to do things to destroy our business by doing this to the government? Then we should sell, right? Because we’re going to damage our whole profit model here.

So I’ll leave it on that note, my little editorial, but if people want to know more about this, the EFF.org is a great place to go. And that’s it for this week’s edition of Scheer Intelligence I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW, the terrific NPR station in SAnta Monica for hosting these shows. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, Diego Ramos who writes the introduction, Max Jones who does the video editing and the J.K.W. Foundation in memory of a very fierce independent writer Jean Stein who gives us some funding to do these shows.

See you next week with another edition of Sheer Intelligence.  Bye.

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