'..But even though Project Texas’s goal is to cordon off access to the most sensitive details about Americans that exist on TikTok’s servers, one policy employee had doubts that will actually prevent ByteDance’s employees in China from accessing this data.
“It remains to be seen if at some point product and engineering can still figure out how to get access, because in the end of the day, it’s their tools,” they said in a September 2021 meeting. “They built them all in China.” ''The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn
testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.
“Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)
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..Ultimately, the tapes suggest that the company may have misled lawmakers, its users, and the public by downplaying that data stored in the US could still be accessed by employees in China.
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..Additionally, four of the recordings contain conversations in which employees responsible for certain internal tools could not figure out what parts of those tools did. In a November 2021 meeting, a data scientist explained that for many tools, “nobody has really documented, uh, like, a how-to. And there are items within the tools that nobody knows what they’re for.”
The complexity of the company’s internal systems and how they enable data to flow between the US and China underscores the challenges facing the United States Technical Services team, a new dedicated engineering team TikTok has begun hiring as part of Project Texas.
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But while the mandate of this team is to control and manage access to sensitive US data, the USTS team reports to ByteDance leadership in China, as BuzzFeed News reported in March. In a recorded January 2022 meeting, a data scientist told a colleague: “I get my instructions from the main office in Beijing.”
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As TikTok continues to negotiate over what data will be considered protected, the recordings make clear that a lot of US user data — including public videos, bios, and comments — will not be exclusively stored in the Oracle server. Instead, this data will be stored in the company’s Virginia data center, which may remain accessible from ByteDance’s Beijing offices even once Project Texas is complete. That means ByteDance’s China-based employees could continue to have access to insights about what American TikTok users are interested in, from cat videos to political beliefs.
It also appears that Oracle is giving TikTok considerable flexibility in how its data center will be run. In a recorded conversation from late January, TikTok’s head of global cyber and data defense made clear that while Oracle would be providing the physical data storage space for Project Texas, TikTok would control the software layer: “It’s almost incorrect to call it Oracle Cloud, because they’re just giving us bare metal, and then we're building our VMs [virtual machines] on top of it.” Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, TikTok’s national security lawyer hopes the negotiation will have ripple effects in the tech industry and beyond. “There is going to be national security law that comes down from the Commerce Department,” they said, referencing the Biden administration’s development of regulations to govern apps that could be exploited “by foreign adversaries to steal or otherwise obtain data.”
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..But even though Project Texas’s goal is to cordon off access to the most sensitive details about Americans that exist on TikTok’s servers, one policy employee had doubts that will actually prevent ByteDance’s employees in China from accessing this data.
“It remains to be seen if at some point product and engineering can still figure out how to get access, because in the end of the day, it’s their tools,” they said in a September 2021 meeting. “They built them all in China.” '
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Leaked Audio From 80 Internal TikTok Meetings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China, June 17, 2022
Context'Americans are too naïve .. the CCP regime has always been a totalitarian, one-party dictatorship .. is the greatest threat to American security and world peace, and the CCP regime has no moral compass.' - Cai Xia'..Xi .. Leninist version of Marxism .. “Document 9,” which condemned the core values and key institutions of liberal democracy.'(Boycott China and Chinese made goods) - China has already decided to send economic aid to Russia in Ukraine conflict, US officials fear