October 25, 2022
China’s growing technological dominance should “scare the heck” out of democratic nations such as Australia and is a more worrying short-term threat than its rapid military build-up, says the head of the high-powered United States Senate intelligence committee.
Mark Warner, one of the most senior Democrats in the US Congress, said he harboured deep concerns about the privacy and national security risks of popular Chinese-owned social media app TikTok.
“This is not something you would normally hear me say but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago,” Warner said during a visit to Australia to meet with local intelligence chiefs, politicians and business people.
In 2020, Trump threatened to shut down TikTok’s US operations unless Chinese company ByteDance agreed to divest ownership of the application, citing national security concerns. A Trump executive order banning the app from online stores was halted by a US judge just days before it was due to come into effect.
“If your country uses Huawei, if your kids are on TikTok, if your population uses WeChat as a social media platform, the ability for China to have undue influence is, I think, a much greater challenge and a much more immediate threat than any kind of actual, armed conflict,” Warner said.
“China having this kind of technology domination in a number of countries ought to scare the heck out of us because we’ve seen the kind of Orwellian surveillance state they’ve already created within China.”
As head of the powerful Senate intelligence committee, Warner has access to classified assessments from the nation’s top spy agencies and is legally required to be informed of covert actions and significant intelligence failures.
China’s National Intelligence Law requires organisations and citizens to “support, assist and co-operate with the state intelligence work”.
Noting the US Armed Forces has ordered American service members not to download the video-sharing app, Warner said he would not want it on any of his devices.
Australian parents should be worried about how much their children’s data was being harvested by the app, he said.
“The level of code in TikTok is exponentially higher, for example, than the lines of code in Facebook,” said Warner, who was a successful technology entrepreneur before entering politics.
It would be hard to ever describe the app as “fully safe” while that code is written in China, he said.
TikTok is estimated to have 1 billion monthly active users globally, including around 7 million in Australia.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has announced her department will investigate TikTok’s data harvesting, but was not considering banning the app.
TikTok’s Australian director of public policy Brent Thomas said earlier this year that staff in China were able to access Australian data, but said strict protocols were in place.
“We have never provided Australian user data to the Chinese government, we have never been asked for Australian user data by the Chinese government, and we would not provide it if we were asked,” Thomas wrote in response to questions from opposition cybersecurity spokesman James Paterson.
Warner recently led a successful effort to secure $82 billion in funding to revive an American semiconductor manufacturing industry to reduce reliance on Chinese imports. Semiconductor chips are necessary for everything from cars to iPhones to electric toothbrushes.
He said he was now focused on preventing China from dominating cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, which includes the development of genetically modified foods and new medical drugs.
“There are national security reasons not to allow China to dominate these spaces,” he said. “We need to make sure that we have Western competitors.”
Warner said Australia “punches way above its weight” as a member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership with the US, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand.
“We think this relationship is more important than ever,” he said.
Concern about Chinese military operations heightened in February when a Luyang-class guided-missile destroyer aimed a military-grade laser at a RAAF surveillance aircraft, and again in May when a Chinese J-16 fighter jet intercepted a RAAF P-8 surveillance aircraft in international airspace.
Warner said Australia was a “world leader” in seeking a more independent approach from China, including by banning Huawei from participating in the nation’s 5G network.
