Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

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Numerous Western officials have spent the past two days warning that the People’s Republic of China is using numerous means to spy on the United States and its allies.

Speaking in London Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray called China the “biggest long-term threat” to both the United States and United Kingdom.

“The Chinese government is set on stealing your technology — whatever it is that makes your industry tick — and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market,” Wray said while speaking to a gathering of international business leaders. “And they’re set on using every tool at their disposal to do it.”

Wray was joined for the talk by MI5 Director General Ken McCallum.

“The widespread Western assumption that growing prosperity within China and increasing connectivity with the West would automatically lead to greater political freedom has been shown to be plain wrong,” McCallum said. “But the Chinese Communist Party is interested in our democratic, media and legal systems. Not to emulate them, sadly, but to use them for its gain.”

McCallum later revealed that his agency was conducting seven times more investigations into Chinese activity in the U.K. compared to just four years ago.

Among the primary goals of Chinese spying efforts is the collection of data. While some of this information might require a hacker to access protected information, a booming number of Americans are volunteering their information through the use of TikTok, a social media platform long feared to be granting the Chinese government access to user metadata.

In mid-June Buzzfeed News, which was given access to leaked audio of 80 internal meetings at TikTok, released a startling report that revealed that not only does China have the ability to access American users’ data, engineers in China enjoyed easy access to data. Buzzfeed’s report revealed that administrators in China have “access to everything.”

TikTok and the Chinese government have denied these allegations, but now U.S. elected officials are beginning to grow anxious about what American social media users are exposing to a country with whom America’s relationship is, at a minimum, strained.

Wednesday, Senators Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the respective chair and vice-chair of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, penned a joint letter to Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan requesting that the FTC investigate TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance.

“[We] ask that your agency immediately initiate a Section 5 investigation on the basis of apparent deception by TikTok, and coordinate this work with any national security or counterintelligence investigation that may be initiated by the U.S. Department of Justice,” the letter reads.

The senators later added, “TikTok’s Trust and Safety department was aware of these improper access practices and governance irregularities, which – according to internal recordings of TikTok deliberations – offered PRC-based employees unfettered access to user information, including birthdates, phone numbers, and device identification information. Recent updates to TikTok’s privacy policy, which indicate that TikTok may be collecting biometric data … heighten the concern that data of U.S. users may be vulnerable to extrajudicial access by security services controlled by the CCP.”

As of this writing, neither Khan nor the FTC has responded to the senators’ request.