From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt and our colleague Noel is on adventures. They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our superproducer Paul Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Matt, do you remember when TikTok came out. No I had to look it up myself. Now. Of course, our Palnel is I think a little more interested or native to social media than you and I are. But everyone around the world is aware of TikTok. And even if you yourself don't have TikTok on your mobile device, you've heard all sorts of business about this thing. It's a short form video social media platform. In the interest of transparency and full disclosure here on stuff they don't want you to know. We do have a TikTok account. Talk was started in our name and we make content with some other people that goes on that platform. Right, Yeah, we're not the wizards of that thing. We are not actively on there as our individual entities, but we've made some stuff and it gets distributed to TikTok. Maybe that's the way to say it, right. It's a platform like any of the other social media platforms, and since twenty seventeen, this particular platform has taken the world by storm. Currently it has been downloaded over two billion times, something like two point six billion times. And of course, you know, whenever something becomes this popular, people start asking questions. As we're talking to a multiple world governments have raised some valid concerns and they have said that TikTok is at the heart of a grand data scraping conspiracy. As we'll find today, some of those allegations have given rise to another set of alleged conspiracies. So what's going on? You know? Is this a short episode Matt Caine, Just solve TikTok conspiracies? Yeah, just deleted from your phone. It's that easy. Just turn it off and that's our show. Thanks so much for tuning in, everybody. Here are the facts. You know. Honestly, man, I think for most people who use anything in the dopamine casino, you're not going to be concerned about the back end of it, what's behind the curtain, right, You just want to do the thing you want to see and be seen. It's surprising that even folks who are TikTok celebrities might not be aware of the genesis of this thing, of its origin, story, where it came from, and how it how it attained the prominence it has today. Well yeah, and honestly, nor would you probably care, because in the end, when you're good at TikTok, it can be a pretty serious stream of revenue of perceived happiness, right with those of the dopamine and all the things that it unlocks. I mean, it could be just a great thing for your life if you're just a user and you can do it really well. There's no reason to look behind the curtain because machines working just fine. But there is some weird stuff behind that curtain, pretty weird stuff, it feels. Maybe it starts, let's say, kind of monoculous and starts as an application that's made in China for the Chinese population, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. D o U y n Duyan Douyan's it comes about in September of twenty sixteen and It's made pretty quickly by this Beijing based company called bike Dance bite with a y, get it like a computer byte anyway, Bike Dance originally was a little bit on the nose about what they wanted to do with this app. They called it a dot me right because social media ideas like look at me, and then they rebranded it just a few months later. Within one year of this thing launching, Dullian had one hundred million users, one billion plus videos viewed each day, and that still wasn't enough for the founder of bike Dance. It's got a quote that's quite prescient, I think, and pretty realistic. Yeah, yes, Zang ye Ming, And maybe is how you would say that. Here's the quote. China is home to only one fifth of Internet users globally. If we don't expand on a global scale, we are bound to lose to peers eyeing the four fifths, so going global is a must. I'm not sure what he means the four fifths. I guess the rest of the world Internet users. Yeah, and this guy is. This guy's in charge of a company that's native to mainland China, and as we know, mainland China has a bit of a firewall well, a bit of a firewall. The Great Wall of China now exists online and when TikTok hits the market in September of twenty seventeen, it is built for that four fifths. For the rest of the world that is not mainland China, it immediately takes off. You know, it's short form videos. I think it goes now. I think you can go up to ten minutes something like that, but the vast majority of videos are a little bit shorter. And part of this explosive growth comes due to a merger with another app called musical dot l Y. Do you remember that one? I honestly don't. I remember reading about it, but I also did not engage with it. Musical dot l Y is a Shanghai startup with an office in Santa Monica, California. It was a short form video platform that came about in twenty fourteen, and its big thing was will have people making short lip syncing videos, right or micro comedy sketches, similar to another great honorable mention of social media Vine. Now Vine was awesome. I think it's just a bunch of you know, short form comedy is what I remember it for. And by November of twenty seventeen, or in November twenty seventeen, this company Byte Dance spent more than one billion dollars US to entirely buy this app musical dot l y and they call them musically. Yeah, okay, maybe it's coming back. We're having our momento moment right in twenty eighteen, by Dance merges TikTok and Musically, and they do something pretty interesting. They don't make people get new accounts. If you have an account in the one, you have an account in the other. All of a sudden, you're just together, one big family. And they keep the name TikTok. If you were in China, of course, this doesn't really matter to you because you still have doing it and it's plugging along and everything's fine. You hear about TikTok, and you know, TikTok doesn't make it past the great Wall. No, it doesn't. I want to talk really quickly about snackable content, Ben. That is a phrase that you and I first encountered when our bosses started using it way back in the day when we were owned by Discovery Communications, and that's when things like quizzes online, quizzes that were in print started to become the big thing, the big piece of an article, content that need to be created. There are several other types like that. Quizzes and trivia was huge. Well, there are other things that there are other small little things that were just meant to capture an Internet user's attention as quickly as possible and then serve up as many of them as possible to keep that person's attention and keep them on a website. And it just makes me think about how effective this musically slash TikTok and you know, all of this, the duion, that idea of having quick videos that don't stop, that is such a scary, smart idea and it like, I don't know, it's a feel like a weapon to me for people's it is. Yeah, yeah, it's the weaponization of engagement, right, because all social media has two to three larger aims. Right. The first aim is to elicit a response, right, alike, an angry comment, a share, they all count, right, they all they all teach the platform more about the person responding. The second aim would be participatory in that you become the creator. Right. We have democratized the idea of communication there, and that's that can be a beautiful thing. The third aim, or the third big motive, is to spread information. But the spread of information does not necessarily mean all information spread is good or positive or true. So so, of course, like you said at the top, most people don't care about all this. Why would you? People like TikTok because it gives an editing capability. There are tons of filters, there are tons of trends. And again, in full disclosure, Mattnell and I and our stuff, they don't want you to know. Team have done things explicitly because there's a trend, right, And we had some fun I would say, very human moments. We did little dance parties and so on. That was really cool. I think our choreography, our choreography is entirely due to our pal Christie literally had to walk us through steps. But we enjoyed that. We felt it was innocuous. We were not purposely spreading propaganda or misinformation. We're very aware of the social media thing as a dopamine casino right, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, friends, stir how far back do you want to go? These platforms all create some level of celebrity right when they are successful, and they're also at their best capable of spreading impactful, true information and sometimes when everything works out, they give people honest, meaningful connections. We have friends, like actual friends that we have not met in person and may never meet in person, and we know each other entirely through these platforms. Yeah. Absolutely, it goes for any social media platform. Yeah, social media can be good. Yeah, all right, we're doing maybe a little bit of a setup because we wanted to get the good stuff out of the way. But of course it's not all you know, trumpets and angel fartssichords. A lot of people are concerned that TikTok is a piece of a larger conspiracy, you know, and some of that is due to its origin, and some of that is due to its popularity. TikTok in specific is huge. Just looking at the stats is crazy. Yeah, one out of every eight people on the planet uses TikTok because there's over a billion users. That's nuts. It's pretty nuts, right, And maybe you can we can parse that a couple of different ways. We can say some of those people might have extra phones or additional accounts, right, But the best way to think about it is, like you said, Matt, one out of every eight people that's bananas, and TikTok is still a privately held come as we record today, bike Dance still owns it, and it has changed the landscape of social media. That's why if you look on the number two search engine in all of the world, YouTube, you see that YouTube has rolled out, YouTube shorts, Facebook has stories, Instagram has short form reels. Right, they're all they're they're all entering that space of TikTok because they realize that bike Dance was onto something. And during the previous presidential administration, folks in the US, in the world of tech and security began asking some questions, what's happening with this thing? You know? Yeah, well, yeah, of course. I mean with that much popularity, with that form of content, if it's not just TikTok, that form of contents, when we're talking about the infinite scroll of videos, which I have found myself in a deep dark hole sitting on my bed over there scrolling for an hour and I didn't realize I had scrolled through I don't even know how many reels on Instagram. That's terrifying to me, at least as an individual. But then when you think about the ability to if you have a platform where you have the ability to control content in any way, the algorithm, at least of what content gets served to individuals in certain regions. It could be a It could really be a weapon where you could psychologically change the way somebody thinks about stuff, either whether that's political or something based on a country. You know, you could target a country's laws or leaders with propaganda. There is some scary stuff there. So makers in this country started really taking notice of TikTok in particular, and there's some some legislation we're gonna be talking about today. Yeah, like what happens when people in their seventies realize, oh, technology is getting different. I love that you point that out, because we we alluded to this earlier, and I think we've talked about it for a number of years. The people who make laws in the United States in general are very different demographic than the people who obey those laws. And that's that's not necessarily saying these folks were all evil Monty Burns types, you know, like just steepling their fingers and planning to hurt the children. But they are far older than the average person, to the point where that becomes a bit of a problem. You know, and they're asking still valid questions, what's happening to all this data generated by TikTok users, to all this data taken by the platform. And one of their big questions was by Dances a Chinese based company, could by dance be feeding this information to the Chinese government. There was a lot of cenophobia, right si n o phobia meaning prejudice, racist, or otherwise against the Chinese government. And you know, the one point three billion people in China who are innocent, They're not doing anything, they're not wheedling and making plans to overthrow anything. They just want to do their dance videos too. But anyway, as a result, in twenty twenty, the previous administration in the US, the Trump administration, tried to force bike Dance to sell off its US assets to cut ties and caught a rise, right, and they wanted to ban TikTok from any kind of app store. They wanted it gone, and courts in the US blocked this effort. And then when the next administration came in, the Biden administration, they stepped back those orders, those marching orders, and they said we're going to hear it out though you know what, We're not going to pull the trigger on this yet, but we are going to study this in depth. Let's answer some of these questions. And the biggest questions remained. It wasn't just a question of this company bike Dance or the Chinese government taking data. It was the question you set us up for, Matt, which is a very real concern. Could the Chinese government you a super popular social media platform to push its own agenda, to push propaganda, to launch psychological operations. That's the heart of the debate. Absolutely. The heart here is is that intelligence agencies within the United States and the FCC, well it's specifically the FBI, right and the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, they have basically put their hands up and said everyone, we would like to make it known Byte Dance could share user data with China. And we're talking about a lot of stuff. We're talking about browsing history, location, biometric identifiers. They could share all of this stuff directly with China's government. I think the question here is, Okay, well, why does that really matter that much if an end users information gets shared with China. I think there's other stuff at play, and we're going to talk about this, but I think there's other stuff at play that the FBI is really con learned about just the info. No, I don't think so. I don't think they're worried necessarily until it becomes politically convenient or advantageous. I don't think Uncle Sam is necessarily worried about maybe an individual US national with a TikTok account posting some hot takes on the wagers and then and you know, getting jammed up at customs in Beijing. I don't think they're watching every falling sparrow in that case. There there's something else at play, right, And to give you China's perspective, folks, the government of China says this is misinformation. And the way they say it, I guess if we want to translate it for the streets of the good folks in the US, China says bulls. And they also have a law in that country that is a pretty recent law and came into play in twenty seventeen. It requires companies to give the government any personal data that may be deemed relevant to national security. Pretty broad. Wow, it sounds like we need something like that here in the US. A super broad, vague law that says the United States government can take all the data and also you have to give it to them. What could go wrong? Right? Are good friends that Illumination Global Unlimited of course have their eyes and tentacles on this. Right now, we can say there's no evidence that TikTok has turned over data to the Chinese government, but fears abound, not just amid seventy year old lawmakers in the halls of Congress, that this could be happening, and that fear is somewhat hypocritical because as we know, US based social media companies do that at all the Livelong day? Right? Am I being musical? You're definitely being musical when you say all the Livelong day in my end at least? But no, for sure, we Facebook has been not on trial necessarily, but has had to go to congressional hearings over and over and over again about that very thing of course now known as meta. But like they take in a ton of information and people use that platform all over the world too. Yeah, yeah, shout out Cambridge Analytica. So Matt, you you're talking about vague laws, right, We mentioned one vague law in China, you know, with the boogeyman of national security, are you implying that the United States might have something similar not not yet. Oh wait, that's what this episode's about. It's called the restrict Act, and you've likely been hearing a lot about it. People are talking about this thing, Yeah, Restricting the emergence of security Threats that risk Information and Communications Technology Act agrohyms. It turns out this little rascal might be a conspiracy all its own and coming to you, America. We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsor, and we'll tell you exactly what we mean. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay. Supporters of this act love it. They call it a systematic framework for addressing technology based threats to the security and safety of Americans. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, right, Well, I'll tell you what I what I felt when I first encountered it. Ben, you and I were both looking at the Congress star gov website that has the full restrict Act written out there, and it's so weird. You hover over it with your mouse and it's just got a place where you can share each individual line within the Act. But what I'm looking at the level the level of lack of detail in this thing, and just how vagan in general it is. It feels like the thing you always talk about how legislation can never keep up with technology, like it just can't. And when I think about the aging people that are putting this together, of course, working with other organizations that probably wrote this bill. I don't have the exact information of you know what moneyed interests actually wrote this bill, but it feels like an attempt to be vague enough to where they can cover things that are going to come in the next five to ten years, right that they don't know about yet because they know they won't be able to get legislation through. Again, that's similar to this in any kind of timely manner, so they're just like, let's throw a net at this problem that will hopefully save us some trouble in the future. Yeah, it feels a little like the situation where you're talking to you know, a big time producer and they say, Okay, what we're really doing, We're telling a story. Here are some exciting verbs we learned recently, and let's put that in the mix somehow. And there's also I love that you raised this point because there's also tremendous validity in attempting to make something lasting right to set a precedent to acknowledge that humanity collectively does not know what the next social media thing will be. Right, Remember when you and I are old enough in these iterations that we were around before Twitter. And when Twitter came out, I thought, what a dumb idea. Don't people want to Don't people want to practice deep learning? Don't they want to read in depth and understand the nuances of a thing one hundred and eighty characters? Who's going to be into that? And then they got me, They turned me just like that movie The Pod People or whatever. And I have a Twitter account. Now I was wrong. Yeah, who knew microblogging would be the thing? That's what they called it? Yeah, And so so it can be frankly embarrassing to watch national leaders of all imaginable political parties demographics across the planet. It can be embarrassing to watch them seem kind of clueless when they are in hearings about this stuff. There was something you, Noel and I alluded to in a strange news segment where there's this curmudgeonedly congress person who seriously doesn't seem to understand the concept of Wi fi. Yeah, you know, I watched that again, Ben, I think that person in question just didn't know the right vocabulary to use in that situation. When you look at his face, it seems like he's asking a question about something he really does think is nefarious, like the way, the way, just the I don't know how to describe Ben, the way his face looks and the way he asks it. So I think he was trying to say, does TikTok access your router and other devices connected to your router? Right? I think, and your your local area network? Does it access other devices? Because at the end he finally gets to so does it access other devices on your network? And and then he gets an answer which is, you know, I'm not actually sure. I'll get back to you. Uh. Yeah. So that's a really good point. But the bite that we get, the bite dance that occurs, is just the so does it connect to your network? He's like, yeah, I got to connect to the network to it's kind to be on your Wi Fi to send any information. No, but does it connect into your network? Yeah? Man, that's how it works. That's what we get. Yeah, And that's that's a great point because we're only seeing the clip that serves the purpose of whatever conversation is meant to be had. This is a this is a hyper fast version of an Overton window. Hey, there you go, and and so expertise aside, it does make sense for any nation to protect itself from possible skull duggery. The United States already does not allow TikTok on government issued mobile devices or devices of any sort. And they're not alone, you know. The US, of course, has a little bit of autonomy for all fifty of its states, and at least twenty twenty seven or thirty state governments already did the same. Several universities here have done the same. Multiple other world governments have banned TikTok from their devices. I think, let's see Canada for sure, Denmark, the Uniting Kingdom, maybe the EU. Overall, this restrict Act is a macro cosmic approach. It's a federal level approach. It would quote comprehensively address the ongoing threat posed by technology from foreign adversaries China, Russia, Iran, all the hits, all the good ones, North Korea as well, Venezuela of course, and and there. If it passes, it allows the Department of Commerce to quote, review, prevent, and mitigate information, communications and technology transactions that don't pass a vibe check. Well, yeah, but they do say threaten national security as like the one thing, or cause harm to any citizens, right, national security. You know, if you want, if you want taxpayers to open up the wallet, all you have to do is talk about national security. This bill right now has bipartisan support, even in a very divided United States. There are two senators leading the charge. One is Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and one is John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota. Interesting thing, there's a lot of there's a lot of scuttle butt about the restrict Act, and it's important to note in the text of the thing, if you actually read it, which we have, you'll see that TikTok is never explicitly named, and that I think that speaks to your earlier point about trying to create a precedent, a lasting thing, right, because in ten years from now people might read that and go, what the heck is TikTok? Yeah? Was that like a bomb or something that was just waiting to go off? Is this about wristwatches? Yeah? Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. No, you're right, I mean that's and I do think that's the point. I think that's the whole point, because not only can you target TikTok, you can target anything that is currently a potential threat to whatever politically motivated goals you've got, you know, and it can get it can hit anything in the future, as long as it's made by a company controlled by a country that you see you have ideological differs with. There we go. Yeah, nice, you should be in charge of more things because uh, the you would you would be one of the youngest senators. Also. Uh. What I like about that point is that it's also hitting on the broad definition of national security, right, which essentially functions as an umbrella term all the world round. If you can find a way to phrase a problem that you have or your organization has in terms of national security, then conversations get a lot easier. Right, People are more likely to listen to you. This is not dunking on the concept entirely. It's just to say, you got some wiggle room, kry gus wiggle room. There was and there multiple bill This is another thing that's not getting reported as often as it should. There are multiple other bills that have been proposed and probably will be proposed aiming to do the same thing, just like Patriot Act had a bunch of earlier also rans right, and there had to be the right climate in the American public for people to sign a way you know, yeah stuff, well, I mean national security. It's like tagging base. Yeah they harbor. Oh my gosh, yes, that's what they said. That's what they said. It's true, it's true, and people forget that that is exactly what happened. There's another earlier bill that would have required the president to use something called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act LOVE and acronym I uh, I don't know if they have that in todation, but I like it. Uh. This would have this would have restricted access to the app on the part of any US citizen right now. Of course, TikTok is still legal in the United States, and honestly, man, it sounds kind of un American to tell the public what to do with their phones, right, Yeah, you can't tell me what I can and can do. Oh wait, well, it feels like a string. I don't know, if we're on this string of ultra like ultimate awesome freedom. We're like moving in that direction while we're also simultaneously moving in the direction of the government telling us what we can't do with our bodies and our minds. I don't know. We're in a weird spot, guys, We're in a really weird spot. Yeah you're uh yeah, Oh gosh. Just wait until some of the less economic, more cultural issues get phrased as national security. That's going to be a dangerous tag base, Isn't it go into the Caribbean. I'm gonna hang out on an island or peninsula somewhere. It makes me think of some post Soviet collapse countries who had ten pot dictators and past laws. I believe it was Romania, right, what's his name says how there was a law that required families to have children as many as possible and taxed them if they did not, and it was phrased as national security. So these things are closer, these disastrous dystopian things are closer than it may appear for a lot of people. And right now, TikTok and Bite Dance, I guess the Chinese government are very well aware of this controversy. TikTok has tried to sort of calm the waters in Congress, and they've done things like routing US data through Oracle Cloud servers that are based in the United States. They also said they're instituting audits of algorithms, and they're making a they've made a new department in the company entirely focused on managing US user data. So they're saying, hey, we're firewalling this a bit. If the problems, if the suspicions that you have are that we are in the pocket of what you consider a foreign adversary, then we'll relocate. We'll move it all to the US and then you five eyes can go and have your own party, right. Yeah, and five Eyes is like, we want to see everything and we want to be the only ones you see it. Right. We'll see how this all works out. But again, it's kind of crazy, right. The US does have its own very shady, quite unethical track record with US based social media. But the problem for the critics of the restrict Act is not all the stuff about China. No, that's only a small piece. It goes way. It's to paraphrase our pal stick, it's bigger than TikTok. Right, Oh wow, I love that. It's been nice work, sir. Reached out to him again, just so you know on DMS, trying to get him to come on here and talk. You know, we're supposed to do that fifty celebrating fifty years of hip hop. That's right. Yeah, you need to get him on to talk about coming up with dead pres and like what that was like to exist in the world of hip hop within that you know, partnership anyway, Well, I hope you reach us back out to us. That would be awesome. Okay, So, yes, Ben, you are correct, and you I love when you put the spin on that, because it is not just TikTok. TikTok is probably the current target, or at least it was, you know, it was. The restrict Act was built around TikTok. But there's other stuff in there too, other things that a ton of Americans use, a ton of people globally use, like VPNs, and there are a lot of there's a lot of other collateral damage that might get hit by this bill. So let's uh take a quick break here from a sponsor and dive deeper into that stuff. So riddle us, this, fellow conspiracy theorist, if the restrict Act is less about protecting Americans and more about controlling them. This is where you'll see, yeah, multiple viral tweets, you know, the Court of Public Opinion is in session. You'll also see surprise, surprise, several viral TikTok videos love it claiming the restrict Act is overly broad by design. The language of the proposed law spends a lot of time being vague. To be quite honest with you, it calls it dwells on what it calls transactions. It gives the Secretary of Commerce these sweeping or welly empowers to take action on any transaction by information technology or communications companies that are owned or could be influenced by foreign adversaries. That is nuts, Okay, it's twenty twenty three, as we were, a chord. What company on the planet is not somehow an information technology or communications associated enterprise? Yeah, that could arguably be influenced by another country. How do you how do you prove any of that? Oh? Y'all, y'all a gain influenced, aren't you? Oh? I tell oh the CEO is LinkedIn friends with someone in Turkey, right, or the CFO went to school in a different country like this, It just strings out so easily, you know. And also a transaction, literally, any exchange of information. It's a little cartoonish. You can see how the author of the bill could argue, well, no, we're saying transaction as in exchange of money. But that's not Come on. We know the this bill like every other bill on the planet, like the Constitution, like all these things, like the Bible even it's all about translation. How do you how do you translate that? Right? How do you interpret any exchange of information? And if this bill does become law, it does not guarantee that apps owned by foreign based companies like TikTok would be banned for all users in the United States, But make no mistake, it is a possibility. It is a bill that gives the agency to do so. Right, it bestows this legislative superpower, and I like this is something you and I talked about at length earlier. The big concern that a lot of people have, myself included to be transparent about the restrict Act is that it might be used to ban other things. As a matter of fact, I would argue that's the precedent the idea of it banning VPNs right virtual private networks, which we've talked about before, encryptic connections over the Internet from a device to a network that prevents people from snooping on you to a degree ast aastric fine print. Yeah, or it can even make it look like you're operating in a different location. I gotta say, Ben, I got this wrong during that Strange News episode. I really thought this restrict Act was just talking about banning those VPN services that were from other countries, right, But that is not. Upon looking into this further for this episode, I realized that, no, it is at least what people are talking about when interpreting this bill. They're just saying the use, the single use of a VPN to perform a transaction where you download one of these apps that will eventually be banned, right, That itself is the potentially criminal action that an individual like you could take in the future, at least according to this bill. Specifically you folks. Yeah, that's the thing. It could be used to impose criminal penalties on people who are online. Right. And the restrict Act, we shall also note, does not explicitly mention VPNs the same way it doesn't explicitly mention TikTok. But the two senators who proposed this bill, who are leading the charge, they both name drop TikTok when they were talking about how great and necessary restrict Act is. Critics are calling it Patriot Act two point zero because that is a good snackable headline, right, snackable headline. But the question is would it give Uncle Sam vast powers? Will it allow the government to further intrude into the private lives of people? Supporters say, no way, you guys are nuts. Gaslighting is a thing that you made up because you're crazy. Yeah, oh jeezus. And for more on this, we go to Rachel Cohen, who is who is the center of Warner. Oh, Warner is one of the main people putting forward the bill from Virginia. Yeah, yeah, so Rachel Cohen is his communications director. And this person said that the legislation is aimed to quote squarely at companies like Kaspersky. We know this one's of the internet security company. Is how do you say this? Been quo hua why h u a w ei and TikTok. That creates systemic risk to the United States national security, not all individual users. And then she continues the threshold for criminal penalty in the bill is incredibly high, too high to ever be concerned with the actions of someone who is an individual user of TikTok or a VPN, which I would have to just in minor support of Rachel's words there it I can see how the creator of this bill imagines it that way, but you have to but they must understand. Again, like I'm trying to give people benefit of the doubt here, but they must understand, including Rachel, when it's that vague, it cannot be considered just what she said there, just for people who hit a certain echelon of you know, power, number of users, all that other stuff. Yeah, that's the thing, because the way that a society like this works and should work means that people will come after There aren't supposed to be dictators right in this instance, So people will come after the original creators and co signers of laws like this, and those people may not have the same noble aspirations or ambitions or intentions. They may be able to read something like the restrict Act and say, oh, yeah, what is national security? I think it's all these people protesting, you know, my takeover of the press or something like that, which hasn't happened yet. But again, it's closer. It's closer than it seems. Right, In general, so opponents disagree with this. I want to go to a US policy analyst for a nonprofit called Access Now. Her name is will Marry A Scoto, and she says that just because VPNs aren't mentioned doesn't mean they're not on the table in the future. And then we gotta shout out our pals at the eff the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They said restrict is so vague that it can be read as criminalizing common practices like using a VPN to get a phibited app, or sideloaded installations, or using an app that was lawfully downloaded somewhere else. So what they're saying is this law is to like Kevin Bacon with it like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, you know. I mean it's weird though, right because again, first, I guess the fact and fiction of it is right now, the United States has never placed a total ban on a foreign app. Second, like we're pointing out, you know, once again for the people in the back, the language is way too broad. It has catch all wording that should make you very uncomfortable. Stuff that says they're going to be penalties where any technology quote otherwise poses an undoe or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons. So if any of these three hundred thirty plus million people have a problem in any way on the Internet and there there is a some kind of connection to another country, boom boom boom go time right, yeah, oh definitely, Well I would just let's keep going with the with what this thing says, just on the broad language tip quote, no person may engage in any transaction or take any other action with the intent to evade the provisions of this act. No person. So it's an individual person. Okay, So first proving intent can be a real bag of badgers. I'm sorry, officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that, but you see, Dave, I did though that kind of thing. Like, let's be honest, the average person, the average individual user of the Internet has no idea about all the back end stuff that goes on when they're playing the dopamine casino. And that means, in theory, you could accidentally commit what we could call a crime by click right, you suddenly find yourself on the wrong side of the law because you, um, what's a way, what's an entry point? Oh? Because you downloaded a thing that will tell you more about yourself. Right. Facebook has the you know, they have like the oh what type of snare drum are you? And they're like, oh, I wonder what type of snare trum I am? I've ad this right hashtag? Not sponsored yet, not sponsored yet and speaking of yet, we didn't get to the penalties this if, if this act passes with the language as is one thing that's very specific, the penalties involved for violating this law. It is not like getting caught at a red light checking your cell phone or not having your seatbelt on. It's not like um, getting yeah right, it's way past that. Oh it's more. It's more than one hundred fifty dollars US. Your your serious? What? Yes, yes, it is it is more. It is more. Uh, we looked into this the civil there. Okay, so think in terms of civil and criminal penalties. Right, So turns out your not some bond level supervillain on your on your phone, your civilian. Your civil penalty for violating this act can be a fine of up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars US or quote, an amount that is twice the value of the transaction. That is the basis of the violation, whichever is greater. Wait a minute, are we sure this isn't supposed to be applied to the entity that controls an app or something that. Yes, for sure. If this is like an individual penalty, well this would be again according to the spokespersons that we mentioned earlier, this would be applied to companies. Okay. Problem is the language is such that yeah, in practice it could. It could go down to a person. It just sounds insane. I'm thinking about the penalties you get back in the day for like torrenting, right, or for taking a CD and duplicating it and selling that wouldn't download a car, but it was like twenty five thousand dollars a pop or something. I think that's what it used to be back in the day. Or like how the FBI used to have those little warnings that would pop up on videos. Yeah, I forget those ads, but they were really great, something like you wouldn't do this other thing that is nowhere near the equivalent of copying a DVD. Wouldn't download a car, would you, Yeah? Exactly. You wouldn't steal the moon, which is an epic heist. I don't think anyone's done it. But okay, what about criminal penalties? But essentially a quarter million dollars or in what you say, been an amount that is twice the value of the transaction, that is the basis of the violation. Okay, right, So the idea is putting some sting onto the financial consequences. So you could get fined two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But if you had a transaction that was in violation of the restrict Act, and that transaction would say three hundred thousand dollars, I guess however you rate it, then you could be fined six hundred thousand dollars because that would be twice the value of the transaction. And it's whichever amount is greater. But if it's a criminal penalty, up, but up, do not pass, go, do not collect two hundred dollars. You can go to prison for up to twenty years, and you can be on the hook for up to one million dollars us twenty years. That's insane. Yeah, that's a prison sentence that is old enough to vote. I've getting valons can't vote. Sorry, well, no, keep it keep it in. It's state by state, it's state by state, and people who have people who have been convicted of felonies and have served their time should also be able to participate in democracy. Fis bump, fist bump. So this restrict Act has not become a law just yet, and it might not make it through Congress. And you know, the weird thing is about it, there's some validity to the concerns here, right, Like this is a catbird seat for propaganda. Come on, if you were a world power and you have an app that everybody loves and they give you everything, and you also control the faucet of what they see, that's amazing. You can you can cut past all the domestic media right of your adversaries, and you can you can show the world the way you want people to see it. That's tremendously powerful. Yes, And oh, I just watched a Tucker Carlson clip on this restrict Act ben oh boy, I found myself agree with him quite a bit because but it really was it's I think we talked about before the original uh, the original use of was it douyon dyan? Uh what TikTok was while it was still in mainland China, before it was you know, shipped over here, and the difference we talked about this before on the show, the difference in types of content that get shared on TikTok versus of that other original app, and then just what has become popular in American culture. There's so many types of content you can find on TikTok, so many you know, rabbit holes of information, so much deep information on there. But then also when you go to just the popular, like the generic popular stuff on Twitter, the way you could go to like the YouTube front page back in the day when you weren't signed in, right, so the algorithm isn't looking at you specifically, it's just going to serve you the popular stuff that's on the platform right now. The stuff on TikTok is really we seems like Americans really do enjoy some pretty base things, and that's fine, that's maybe what we're into. It really does feel like it's a culture, an American culture, that is being in the same way on it used to be on television. It's just getting kind of spun around in the same way and churned out through TikTok of what's popular, what's cool for young kids to like? M I see what you're saying, and then it becomes recursive. Right, uh uh yeah, Hey, here's a picture of here's a picture some twerking. Here's some animals that you wouldn't imagine hanging out together, but look at that they're friends. And then right, and then also, please share the specifications for the latest hypersonic missile, right, like, that's the that's yeah, if if you yes, that's I mean, it sounds it sounds so weird phrase that way. Uh. But again, the US is definitely in a glasshouse situation. It's a glass planet. Congress talks so often about foreign adversaries, and there are a lot of people in China who would say, well, why am I? Why am I the adversary? You know what I mean? I just guys, I just went to a McDonald's. Pump your brakes, and I'm on your side. But also the American public sometimes forgets the adversaries can be domestic as well as for it. Right, to paraphrase the old urban legend, the data mining is coming from inside the house, and most people don't care. Right, why should they? The average person is not some sort of disinfoagent. The one out of eight people on the planet using TikTok are not trying to launch revolutions. They're not trying to stage coups or do asymmetrical information warfare. They want to be seen, they want to be heard, they want to be validated, they want to be liked. Right, you're right, you're right. Yeah, Well you just kind of keep in mind the folks writing this bill, and it's kind of we already talked about it. It isn't even necessarily the lawmakers that are coming up with this stuff, right, the people who work for us that we voted for theoretically, um, it's it's it's often the people who run companies that are that have goals counter to other major companies. Right, it's often um intelligence agencies that want to have more power. Right, And and something like this is going to pass. Oh yeah, it is almost certain. Uh it might not be the restrict Act, but something like this will be on the way, and people across the world need to scrutinize this kind of stuff, dissect it, reassemble it. Even with the best of intentions, it will be imperfect because legislation, as much as it tries, legislation is reacting to technology. It is not proactive. And whatever this thing is, when it comes about like the terms of nervous that everyone clicks on, EG yours, there's gonna be some dangerous fine print that I I, I got an idea. We were talking about this soft air. What better way to end the episode than shout out to someone that we've started calling our privacy guy or just privacy guy. Oh yeah, our what are we calling this person? Privacy guy? Privacy guy? Okay with us using his name? Yeah, but sure, hmm, maybe we'll save it. We'll save it, how about it? Yeah, this is an extensive amount of information that was sent to us about specifically VPNs and our comments from the previous Strange News. So, Ben, what do you say we keep this talk about it later? Yeah, agreed. We just wanted to give you a shout out, Privacy Guy and commend your work with a new version of oil and great conversation about VPN. So do tune into our upcoming listener mail. We can't wait to share this story and we can't wait to hear from you folks. I know we got we got into the weeds on some legislation and we talked about a lot of stuff that has not happened yet but could. And that's the main takeaway from this. You know, when you are writing a law like this, you have to think in terms of what could happen as a butterfly effect and unintended consequence. Dare we say an unintended conspiracy? So I know, right, the best guid So let us know your thoughts. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, social media. Oh, hey, TikTok, why not while it's still legal. Just get it on the TikTok. And if you're by the way, yes, uh, and on and on YouTube. We do some cool stuff on YouTube, you know, that's the second place we started. 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