Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr told Newsmax on Monday about the importance of the House passing legislation that would ban from the U.S. apps, such as TikTok, that have ties to foreign adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would remove TikTok from app stores in the U.S. by Sept. 30 unless its parent company, ByteDance, which reportedly has ties to the CCP, sold its stake. It would also prohibit an entity to distribute, maintain, or update an application controlled by a foreign adversary within the U.S.
The bipartisan bill passed the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Thursday by a 50-0 vote, and a vote on the House floor is expected this week.
"Most people don't realize it, but TikTok hoovers up a tremendous amount of sensitive data," Carr, one of two Republican members of the FCC, told "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE."
"It's not just the dance videos that are out there. It's everything from your search and browsing history, keystroke patterns, location information, biometrics, including face prints and voice prints.
"[China is] surveilling the locations of specific Americans, [is] engaging in foreign influence operations to interfere with our elections. This would be a really big win this week for Speaker [Mike] Johnson (R-La.] and for conservatives to pass this bill out of the House."
Carr recently wrote an op-ed for Newsmax that TikTok's threat requires that it break ties with the CCP.
"We've been very concerned about foreign influence and espionage and data flows, and what's smart about this bill is it's very targeted," Carr said. "It doesn't give the government authority to go after any application it wants. It doesn't give them any authority to go after individual users. It's only about TikTok and any other applications that are beholden to the CCP, Iran, Russia, or North Korea, and only then, if it's a demonstrated national security risk.
"It's a rifle-shot approach to deal with a demonstrated threat that we've seen bipartisan [support]. … This bill would be good because it actually would allow TikTok to continue to operate here, but without the very serious risk that comes from it being beholden to the CCP."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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