Northwestern experts on SCOTUS hearings on TikTok ban

• For Journalists
• News Releases
• Latest Releases
• News Release

Northwestern experts on SCOTUS hearings on TikTok ban

'Any data exfiltrated by TikTok to a server is an intelligence goldmine'

EVANSTON, Ill. --- The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Friday, Jan. 10 during TikTok's appeal to stop the enforcement of a federal law that requires the social media titan to shut down in the U.S. this month.

Signed into law in April 2024, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) identified China, which owns TikTok's parent company ByteDance, and other nations - Russia, Iran and North Korea - as "foreign adversaries" of the U.S. The law effectively bans the use of apps controlled by those countries and orders ByteDance to sell to a U.S. company by Sunday, Jan. 19.

TikTok argues that the law is unconstitutional and unless the Supreme Court steps in, the law will shut down one of the most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.

The following professors from Northwestern are available for comment.

Paul Gowderis a professor of law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. His research focuses on the rule of law, democratic theory, social and racial equality, institutional and organizational governance, law and technology, and classical Athenian law and political thought.

His latest book, "The Networked Leviathan," provides an alternative, democratic framework for how online platforms could leverage users, rather than employees, to do the very important work of regulating fellow users to prevent fraud, stop misinformation and avoid violence.

To set up an interview with Professor Gowder, contact Shanice Harris at [email protected].

An expert in AI and security, V.S. Subrahmanianis the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science at the McCormick School of Engineeringand a Buffett Faculty Fellow at the Buffett Institute of Global Affairs, where he heads the Northwestern Security and AI Lab. He is the lead author of the book "The Global Cyber-Vulnerability Report" (Springer 2015).

To set up an interview with Professor Subrahmanian, contact Amanda Morris at [email protected].

Quote from Professor Subrahmanian:

"Any app on a person's phone or tablet can potentially access a tremendous amount of data. These may include the person's location, contacts, past phone calls, emails, text messages, photos, audio recordings, video, information from other apps (including financial and health apps) and much more. Once an app has access to this information, it can, in principle, exfiltrate this information to one or more command-and-control servers at a site chosen by that app. Finally, the app can be updated on a user's phone in any way desired by the app's owner. Sometimes the user is prompted to consent. But, in the case of extremely popular apps, users usually consent to whatever they are asked to consent to without reading anything. If the app is updated, it can even potentially listen in to conversations, intercept sensitive text and email messages, which may relate to ongoing national security issues and more.

"Any data exfiltrated by TikTok to a command-and-control server is an intelligence goldmine. Using simple, off-the-shelf machine-learning methods, people can use the data to infer things like: Does this person work for the CIA, NSA or FBI? Is this person in financial trouble or have big health expenses? Is this person having an affair? These kinds of inferences can post a host of unacceptable national security risks, such as black mail, recruitment by Chinese intelligence and inference about ongoing U.S. national security operations.

"At the end of the day, our phones reveal a huge amount of information about each of us. An app that can track all that information potentially can allow China to build a massive intelligence database about each and every person in the country - and their personal network of friends and family.

"Article 7 of China's National Intelligence Law requires 'All organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.' Simply put, this suggests that ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, can be forced to hand over data to 'assist' national intelligence efforts, potentially making all of the data available to the Chinese government who can then use it for whatever national security purposes they deem fit."