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American lawmakers are sounding the alarm about privacy concerns with China and TikTok — at the exact same time US-based social media companies are unaccountably vacuuming up just as much data.

Rep. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA) questions TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, March 23, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images)

Members of Congress inveighing against online “harm”; a nervous tech executive defending his company’s policies; thinly veiled threats about regulatory changes. If you tuned into C-SPAN last Thursday, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were looking at the rerun of a pre-2022 hearing, when Democrats used their control of Congress to haul Facebook personnel before them to harangue. Almost, but not quite.

Instead, this particular grilling was made possible by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and instead of Facebook, it was TikTok CEO Shou Chew in the firing line. And as a result, there’s now a US ban on TikTok being seriously discussed in the corridors of power.

Over five hours long, the hearing was at times a darkly hilarious reminder that the lawmakers most gung ho about clamping down on tech platforms are not exactly tech-savvy. Rep. Richard Hudson and Chew had an extended back and forth as the GOP House member demanded to know if TikTok “access[es] the home WiFi network.” “How do you determine what age they are then?” Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter asked, before being told that, like many social media platforms, users are asked their age. Meanwhile, Rep. Dan Crenshaw seemed to think Chew was a Chinese citizen, despite the fact that he’d mentioned four times earlier that he hails from and lives in Singapore.

It was refreshing to hear some lawmakers raise concerns to a tech executive about his company’s censorship policies and their unintended consequences, instead of pressuring him to do more of it. Even so, this line of questioning was not the norm, with committee members from both parties — even the GOP, who have attempted to rebrand as opponents of censorship (despite going into overdrive in pushing their own censorship measures) in recent years — pressing Chew, as per usual, to do more to remove “potentially harmful content” from the platform, whether misinformation and hate speech for the Democrats or the promotion of drugs for Republicans.

But given this is 2023, this was very much a showcase of hostility to China, with committee members mostly using the hearing to raise nonstop concerns about the dangerous implications of TikTok’s role as a medium of information and its collection of users’ data, given its relationship to Beijing.

“That is 150 million Americans that [the Communist Party of China] can collect sensitive information on and control what we ultimately see, hear, and believe,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, warned.

“TikTok has been functioning as a massive surveillance program collecting vast swaths of personal data for more than a billion people worldwide,” said Hudson. “Engineers in China have access to personal data of thirteen-year-olds in the United States,” fretted Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, while Rep. Debbie Dingell spoke of the very real “dangerous implications” of what happens when you collect people’s geolocation data.

They’re not wrong. As even Chew acknowledged, TikTok, like other social media companies, does vacuum up and store its users’ personal data, and he wouldn’t explicitly rule out collecting users’ health and location data in the future, one of many instances where he evaded questioning a little too skillfully. Social media, like any form of media, can be an effective instrument of social control. And there are legitimate concerns around TikTok at least being influenced by the Chinese government.

Even so, the hyperventilating underway in Washington over this is hard to take seriously for several reasons. It’s true that the world shouldn’t be sanguine about one extremely powerful government’s special level of influence over a globally popular tech platform or the surveillance implications that result. But this is the same argument that one can make about the United States and the various tech companies — Google, Facebook, Twitter, to name a few — headquartered there.

As the “Twitter Files” reporting and recent disclosures have shown, the US government has a shockingly intimate relationship with, and powerful influence over, tech platforms like these, guiding or even directly shaping their censorship policies, right down to what kind of content and which accounts are to be censored. This isn’t totally new: among the revelations of the Edward Snowden documents was that Washington uses social media to push what the National Security Agency (NSA) itself labeled “propaganda” and “deception.” Several recent major studies found that bots pushing US government–aligned messaging were vastly more active than those of US adversaries, even if we don’t hear about them as much.

And when it comes to the peoples of the world having their intimate data sucked up, what the Washington Post once termed “Top Secret America” is a far more egregious offender. The Snowden leak, after all, revealed that through the US tapping of undersea Internet cables and various other means, the governments of the Five Eyes network collect and can access “nearly everything a user does on the Internet.” This isn’t exactly new either: these tech companies have been called “surveillance intermediaries” for years now because of their willing complicity with governments’ requests for people’s data, with the US government not the least among them. The government gathers up so much data about its own and the world’s citizens, in fact, that even NSA workers have complained that it’s hard to sift through it all and actually detect threats.

But for Americans who were meant to watch Thursday’s hearing and come away feeling very, very afraid of the threat China poses to their personal safety, it’s worth remembering a far more important point: that people everywhere have more to fear from the spying their own governments and businesses do than from the surveillance that foreign adversaries do, however unsavory those other governments might be.

Say you’re a Cop City protester in Atlanta, dozens of whom are currently being prosecuted as domestic terrorists by the state government in Georgia. Is TikTok your biggest worry or is it the sprawling post-9/11 national security state, which has repeatedly surveilled and harassed a variety of government critics and which is reportedly keeping tabs on you? Likewise, if you’re an undocumented immigrant, what the Department of Homeland Security does with the enormous breadth of personal information it quietly collects from commercial brokers — including the geolocation data Dingell correctly raised concerns over — will worry you a lot more than what Beijing may or may not do with the same data.

Or turn this thinking around. Can anyone say with a straight face that the average Chinese citizen is more threatened by overseas data collection — one of the justifications the Chinese government has used for its own Internet crackdowns — than they are by that of their own government, which uses this surveillance to ruthlessly stamp out dissent and control its population? Or if Vladimir Putin told the Russian people they should be most worried about US-based tech companies gathering their personal information, all while his government kept tabs on critics and tracked down and arrested dissidents. Would we think they should take his words seriously? Of course not.

But in any case, it’s worth noting that a TikTok ban may not even matter all that much, since in our decentralized, data-saturated world, the Chinese government has a million ways to Sunday for getting its hands on your private information if it really wants to.

As Paris Marx recently argued, what this entire matter is really all about is the gradually erupting and entirely unnecessary new cold war with China that US officials are seemingly hell bent on, creating a climate in which lawmakers want to show “how much Western governments are willing to drive a wedge between themselves and China instead of making any real difference to security or privacy.” Far easier to point the finger at the potential misdeeds of a foreign bad guy, after all, than to do the job of holding one’s own government to account — especially if you’d quietly prefer that most Americans didn’t think about the vast surveillance state they live under or the repression it might enable.

As with all social media, there are constructive policy changes and regulations that should be made in regards to TikTok both to protect its users’ privacy and their mental health. But so far, the US efforts against the platform are looking like they might be the worst of all worlds: unpopular, authoritarian, and pointless.

Hassidic rapper Nissim Black joins a Fox meteorologist to give the North Carolina weather report before an interview with the local cable channel.

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Opponents called it a “Ben-Gvir law-approved militia.”

By World Israel News Staff

In exchange for his backing over the judicial reform delay, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir will be in charge of a civil “national guard” aimed at bolstering public safety.

Ben-Gvir had previously threatened to quit the government if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went ahead with stopping the reform.

Later on Monday, Netanyahu announced that he was halting the reforms in order to prevent “civil war.”

He blamed an “extreme minority” for almost “tearing Israel apart.”

“There must not be civil war,” he said, noting that he had for three months called for his “brothers” in the opposition to enter into a dialogue but was refused.

“We are at the start of a crisis that jeopardizes our basic unity and such a crisis requires us all to act responsibly,” he went on.

Members of the opposition have slammed the agreement to form a National Guard.

Labor MK Gilad Kariv called it a “Ben-Gvir law-approved militia.”

Former Israel Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi said Ben-Gvir was “dismantling Israeli democracy” by forming “a private militia for his political purposes.”

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“There cannot be civil war,” the prime minister said, blaming an “extreme minority.”

By World Israel News Staff

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would delay the judicial reform, blaming an “extreme minority” for almost “tearing Israel apart.”

“This minority has violent tendencies,” he said.

“It ignites fire. It threatens elected officials. It talks about civil war. And it calls for refusals to serve, which is a terrible crime,” Netanyahu said.

“Israel cannot exist without the IDF, and the IDF cannot exist with refusals to serve,” he said.

“There must not be civil war,” he said, noting that he had for three months called for his “brothers” in the opposition to enter into a dialogue but was refused.

“We are at the start of a crisis that jeopardizes our basic unity and such a crisis requires us all to act responsibly,” he went on.

According to the premier, National Unity party leader Benny Gantz had promised to “enter in good faith into a dialogue on all the issues. I know there are others who support that sentiment.”

“I stretch out my hand to them.”

He added that his coalition allies backed the move to halt the legislation amending the judicial appointments committee.

Earlier on Monday, the Otzma Yehudit party announced that Netanyahu and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had reached an agreement to freeze the legislation in return for the formation of a civil “national guard” under Ben-Gvir aimed at bolstering public safety.

Responding to Netanyahu’s televised address, opposition leader Yair Lapid expressed hope that a dialogue would end with writing a constitution but expressed doubt at Netanyahu’s authenticity.

“If the legislation really does stop, really and totally, we are ready to start genuine dialogue at the President’s Residence,” Lapid said.

“We need to sit together and write the Israeli constitution based on the values of the Declaration of Independence. We need to let the president determine a process for the dialogue and trust him to be an impartial mediator.”

Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman, an architect of the judicial reform, said halting the legislation is “a mistake.”

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Contrary to the New York real estate industry’s propaganda, reducing evictions and strengthening affordable housing protections actually reduces crime and violence.

Protesters calling for Governor Kathy Hochul to pass “Good Cause Eviction,” which would protect tenants from losing their homes. (Ed Jones / AFP via Getty Images)

As the New York legislature and governor engage in a high-stakes power struggle over the coming year’s budget, some voters in Flushing, Queens, among other neighborhoods, are finding strange flyers on their doorstep, warning them that a proposed measure to protect tenants from eviction was backed by “a group of self-professed socialist politicians” and “will devastate housing in New York.” The flier, printed by “Homeowners for an Affordable New York” also warned, “These are the same folks that caused crime to skyrocket with their bail reform law.”

Only one fact on this flier is true: “Good Cause Eviction,” which would protect tenants from losing their homes by preventing landlords from refusing to renew leases without good reason and includes some insurance against unreasonable rent increases. It was first introduced by socialist state senator Julia Salazar and is embraced by other socialist legislators in the senate and assembly. After organizing by housing groups, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), and other progressive organizations, Good Cause is now supported by a majority in the state legislature, despite millions spent on deceptive flyers like the one making the rounds in Queens.

The name of the group on the fliers sounds wholesome enough — few are more politically venerated in America than the homeowner. But it’s also misleading. “Homeowners for an Affordable New York” is an Astroturf group created by large real estate companies who own many other people’s homes. This group is less interested in crime or public safety than the fact that Good Cause Eviction would make it harder to evict tenants for common greedy reasons like raising rents and making more profits.

In fact, if these “homeowners” cared about bringing down crime in New York City, they’d support Good Cause Eviction. A study from Cornell University found that spikes in evictions in a given neighborhood are associated with spikes in crime.

The Cornell report, “No Shelter, No Safety,” found that forcing people to relocate frequently disrupted their families and communities, weakening social ties and social cohesion. Such alienation also gives people less reason to respect their communities and organize politically to fix problems in the area — and more reason to act out.

A 2022 Ohio study found that evictions led to more burglary and auto theft. Philadelphia research has linked it to higher homicide rates, too, even more alarmingly. Evictions, if unaddressed, stand to make New York’s crime problems much worse. The Cornell study recommended, as a public safety measure, that policymakers set a high priority on keeping New Yorkers in their homes, singling out Good Cause as one key reform for accomplishing this.

Inflaming fears about crime is a time-honored way to demonize humane, progressive reforms and push ordinary people to the Right.

Such data suggest the anti-socialist flyers distributed by the real estate industry are not only ignoring the evidence on eviction and crime — they’re also wrong about New York’s 2019 bail reform law, which has been studied extensively and found to have nothing to do with the pandemic-era spike in violence.

Nonetheless, over the next week, we will probably hear more from these “homeowners,” in a classic bit of grassroots fakery from local plutocrats. Last year, according to a report coauthored by Public Accountability Initiative, Housing Justice for All, and Community Voices Heard, the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and other large lobbying firms representing some of New York’s biggest real estate companies created folksy-sounding, seemingly grassroots groups in order to fight tenants’ rights and affordable housing measures like Good Cause Eviction: “Taxpayers for an Affordable New York,” “Affordable Rent for All,” and “Homeowners for an Affordable New York.” (It’s like when big polluters passed legislation called the “Clear Skies Initiative” to insure they could continue filling the heavens with smog, unimpeded.)

These front groups’ names evoke the average struggling family, but that family’s interests — affordable rents, strong tenant protections — exactly oppose the real estate industry’s political agenda. The lobbying groups hide behind these mom-and-pop names because most people wouldn’t be that sympathetic to the woes faced by moguls and tycoons. The average portfolio size of the board members of these lobbying firms is over seven thousand homes. Some own over thirty thousand. Sure, they’re “homeowners,” but they’re not grandma renting out an upstairs room. Maybe they should rename the group “New York Thousands-of-Homes Owners.”

REBNY has even bragged about the flyers and advertising they’ve created as “Homeowners for an Affordable New York,” touting it as “one of our largest public relations campaigns” ever.

But why the misleading messaging on crime? At first glance, it might seem strange, given that mass incarceration isn’t directly profitable to REBNY’s members. But there are a couple good reasons. If you’re a huge New York real estate company looking to make more millions, you don’t want Good Cause Eviction, and you don’t wish the socialist movement well. Inflaming fears about crime is a time-honored way to demonize humane, progressive reforms and push ordinary people to the Right. Best of all from REBNY’s perspective, attacks on bail reform obscure the real solutions to crime like strong housing protections, which will indeed take money out of Big Real Estate’s pockets.

So don’t believe the “Homeowners’” fake-activisty hype. Strengthening affordable housing in the state of New York — and everywhere else — won’t be good for real-estate developers’ bottom lines, but it will make everyone else safer.

In the 2002–3 run-up to war, mainstream media outlets systematically suppressed evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They couldn’t have gotten away with it in the age of Twitter.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks to reporters a during a press conference on December 16, 2003, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. (Joyce Natchalan / AFP via Getty Images)

When the Marines crossed into Iraq twenty years ago, it still existed, but just barely. You could find it in any college town and the big metropolises, but you had to purposely seek it out in slacker coffeeshops, underground video stores, countercultural bookshops. You had to read alt-weeklies like the Village Voice, but also Z magazine, sections of the Nation, and the full corpus of writings from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (my alma mater).

For lack of a better term, and at the risk of anachronism, I’ll call “it” the world of alternative facts.

At the moment the United States barreled into Baghdad, a typical American could comfortably access a maximum of, say, a dozen original sources for national and international news, give or take a few: five TV news bureaus (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox), NPR on the radio, the three national news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report), one or occasionally two regional newspapers, plus the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. (In most localities it had only just recently become possible to conveniently find a copy of the New York Times).

All these organizations, whatever their subtle differences of political shading or editorial quality, were staffed by journalists who lived in the same cities, went to the same schools, kept abreast of one another’s work, and knew one another socially. And each of these institutions was, in one way or another, part of the Establishment.

But most important, you couldn’t talk back to them. You could try, but no one would hear you.

It was, therefore, relatively easy and surprisingly common in those days for the media to engineer the wholesale suppression of newsworthy, verifiable facts, or to embed wholly fictitious accounts of historically significant world events into the public record. And the Iraq story — stretching from the first Gulf War (1990–91) to the 2003 invasion, and focused on the saga of Iraqi disarmament — was especially fertile ground for this kind of journalistic prevarication.

Why Did the Inspectors Leave?

To take a small example, in the fall of 2002, the Bush administration took its first steps toward an invasion by pushing for a United Nations resolution, backed by the threat of force, demanding the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. As every news report at the time explained, the inspectors at that point had not set foot in Iraq for almost four years. When debate on the proposal began in the Security Council in September 2002, it was the biggest news story in the world.

And yet if you wanted to know why the inspectors were absent for four years, things got complicated.

If you had the time, you could go back into the archives of, say, the Washington Post or New York Times and read its reporting from the time of the inspectors’ departure four years earlier, December 1998, when Bill Clinton’s administration waged a four-day campaign of air strikes against Iraq dubbed Operation Desert Fox.

Amid the torrent of important diplomatic and military news relayed in the editions of the Post and the Times during that time, you could find mention of a UN announcement, issued just before the bombing began, that it was withdrawing its inspectors because it couldn’t guarantee their safety during the bombardment. So there, it might seem, is your answer: the inspectors had been forced out of Iraq by US bombing.

But if you fast-forward to late 2002, when the inspectors’ hiatus from Iraq suddenly became the focus of the whole world’s attention, you’ll find those same respectable news organs reporting a new, alternative version of history: the Iraqi government had expelled the inspectors from the country, claiming they were spies. This new account didn’t just appear a handful of times in one or two news outlets, like an embarrassing factual error. It was in all the news outlets, because it had become the new official history.

And make no mistake: no matter how many letters to the editor you sent, no matter how many righteous tirades or well-documented exposés you published in your little dissident newsletter somewhere, the New York Times and Washington Post were not going to stop peddling their new history, even after they had it pointed out to them that the correct information had appeared in their own publications at the time of the events in question.

Because why would they? Outside the scruffy and sparsely populated world of alternative facts, nobody was going to read your newsletter, and if they did, they would have no way to communicate what they learned to the rest of humanity back on planet Earth.

This was what made it possible for the Clinton and Bush administrations and their lackeys in the press to mislead the world for so many years about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction — a triumph of misinformation that for a few glimmering years achieved the propagandist’s dream of fooling all of the people all of the time, until the ruse cosmically backfired on them once they actually had to produce a smoking gun.

“We Know Amongst Ourselves There Are No Weapons”

In the run-up to the war, one of the most popular stock talking points among its advocates and apologists was the claim that the Western governments now hypocritically opposing George W. Bush’s drive to war — like those of France, Germany, and Canada — had never actually questioned his contention that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. The Washington Post editorial page, in its February 2003 masterpiece, “Irrefutable” — a meditation on Colin Powell’s now-infamous presentation to the UN — repeated this well-worn line of argument, quoting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Any country on the face of the Earth with an active intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.”

Almost exactly a year later, I interviewed Frank Ronald Cleminson, one of the most senior arms control experts in the Canadian foreign service, who had served the UN’s Iraqi weapons-hunting agency as an inspector in the 1990s and then as a member of its supervising body of experts, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission College of Commissioners, in the early 2000s.

“I used to say, you know, we basically know amongst ourselves there are no weapons and we’re unlikely to find any,” Cleminson told me.

According to him, the most intractable obstacle to the completion of the UN’s disarmament mission in Iraq was not, in the end, Saddam’s stonewalling.

“My guess is that with full American cooperation and without all this politics, [the UN’s disarmament task] could have been wrapped up in three to four years,” by 1995, he explained. At that point, in UN jargon, the focus would have shifted from “disarmament” to the operation of a permanent system of “ongoing monitoring and verification” in Iraq to ensure that the banned weapons programs would never be reconstituted.

Nothing could be more emblematic of how the media functioned in those days: the same august news organs that published extravagantly expensive “investigations” into the murky shadow worlds of Iraqi bioweapons labs and clandestine terrorist rendezvous in Prague — like those of the New York Times’s Judith Miller, whose fraudulent scoops, we later learned, mostly came from the serial fabricators in Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress — were evidently unable to penetrate the pudding-like wall of secrecy surrounding Ottawa’s paper-and-pencil intelligence analysts.

Those Canadian analysts, we now know, thanks to an article published in the Spring 2020 issue of the journal Intelligence and National Security, understood perfectly well that Iraq was unlikely to have weapons of mass destruction and said so clearly in their internal reports. But they shied away from stating the facts publicly so as not to anger American officials — who then turned around and used their apparent acquiescence (and that of the other allied intelligence establishments) to argue that “everybody” agreed with them that Iraq had WMDs.

The argument from Rumsfeld and his cothinkers in the press was, in essence: If you think the CIA is tailoring its conclusions about Iraq’s alleged WMD arsenal to fit the needs of its political masters in the Bush White House, how do you explain the fact that intelligence agencies in allied countries whose governments opposed Bush’s war reached the same conclusions?

The answer, at least in Canada’s case, is that they didn’t reach the same conclusions. They just kept those conclusions as quiet as possible. Recounting the internal controversies within Canada’s spy agencies in the run-up to the war, the article’s author, Alan Barnes — the former Middle East director of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat (IAS), Canada’s lead foreign intelligence agency — wrote:

The greatest resistance was over the IAS’s analysis of Baghdad’s WMD programs. This went beyond analytic disagreements which were debated vigorously in meetings of the Interdepartmental Experts Group. Officials who had no part in these analytic discussions expressed concern that disagreeing with the US on Iraqi WMDs — and consequently failing to support military action against Iraq — would lead Washington to reduce the amount of intelligence it shares with Ottawa and lead to the marginalization of Canada within the Five Eyes intelligence partnership.

All of this was happening a few hundred miles from New York Times headquarters, and it was a story that any enterprising intelligence reporter surely could have gotten; though politically awkward for the Canadians, it wouldn’t have required sources in Ottawa to divulge any highly sensitive secrets. Who knows what kind of impact the story would have had if it had run on the front page of the Times. Instead, it was kept under wraps, like all the other evidence that Iraq had no WMDs.

Today, I would argue, journalistic chicanery of that particular kind is no longer possible. There’s still plenty of bad and inaccurate news reporting out there. But there are two major differences between now and then.

First, there’s a much wider range of news sources with “mass” audiences than there was twenty years ago. Any attempt to reconstruct the pre-internet misinformation cartel today would likely founder because newer publications, more detached from the hive mind of the Greater Washington Bureau, would play the role of spoilers. (Even publications as essentially nonsubversive as Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post would probably fill this role.)

But variety and competition by themselves aren’t enough. The most important factor in breaking down the old semi-Orwellian media status quo was the interactive nature of the internet. The mere fact that the truth is being told — and that your news outlet’s lies are being exposed — in some competing publication isn’t enough to compel you to tell the truth.

It’s when there’s a chorus of eagle-eyed Twitter users noisily holding your reporting up to the light of contrary evidence, day in and day out, that the lying becomes untenable. We can only wonder how many lives in Iraq and beyond would have been saved back in 2003 if the world’s clout-chasing shitposters had had the kind of reach they do today.

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66% of those surveyed said they believed the legislation should go forward as planned, while 32% called to stop it.

By World Israel News Staff

A poll published on Monday found that two thirds of Israel’s religious public is in favor of continuing the judicial reform, despite intense pressure by the protest movement on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt it.

66% of the 1,300 participants in the survey, conducted by Direct Polls, said they believed the legislation should go forward as planned, while 32% called to “stop the legislation.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, chairman of the Religious Zionism party, addressed right-wing voters, saying: “Under no circumstances should the reform to fix the justice system and strengthen Israeli democracy be stopped. We are the majority. We cannot submit to violence, anarchy, refusals [to serve in the IDF] and wild strikes. We are the majority. Let’s make our voices heard.”

According to a statement released by Otzma Yehudit on Monday evening, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Netanyahu have agreed to postpone the judicial reform legislation until the summer.

Netanyahu in return agreed to the formation of a civil “national guard” under Ben-Gvir aimed at bolstering public safety, the statement said.

The prime minister has yet to issue a statement himself to that effect.

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