State of the Union: Interview With Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)

Interview

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What the hearing made clear to me was that TikTok should be banned in the United States of America to address the immediate threat.

And we also need a national data privacy law, because, to your point, repeatedly, Mr. Chew said that the data that they are amassing on Americans is accessible by the CCP. He was asked about the -- about ByteDance spying on Americans. And he responded: Oh, well, I wouldn't describe it as spying.

What we are seeing is that TikTok and Mr. Chew have repeatedly been caught in this lie that there's not a connection to ByteDance and ultimately the CCP.

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Well, what we do have evidence of, Jake, is that TikTok cannot be trusted, that they have repeatedly lied.

So they cannot be trusted to protect our data. They cannot be trusted to ensure that our children's mental health is a priority. Mr. Chew was unable to convince us that the data that they're -- he keeps wanting to say, well, there's no -- we aren't -- we're a separate company. We're a private, independent company.

But yet they are connected to ByteDance. That was clear and that the data right now is accessible by the Chinese Communist Party.

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Well, we need to do both.

We need to address the immediate threat that TikTok poses, because it is ultimately the Chinese threat, the Chinese Communist Party accessing data. We need a national data privacy standard also. And that's what Ranking Member Pallone and I have worked on and we're going to introduce this Congress, because we need to take action, whether it's TikTok, big tech, or other data brokers, to restrict the amount of data that they're collecting to begin with.

We need to ensure that individuals have the right to know what their profile might be or it -- or to be alerted if their information, their personal data is being accessed or transferred to another country like China.

We need to protect kids, and we have the strongest protections for kids in the privacy proposal that we have been working on to protect anyone under the age of 17.

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And we need to stop this listening on devices of people.

We -- our bill would say you cannot listen to conversations on an app or on your device without people actually having -- giving you the permission.

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I would say there's an immediate threat via TikTok from the Chinese Communist Party that is the reason that I believe we need to ban TikTok immediately.

It is a national security threat, their access not just to our data, but the way that they have infiltrated. It Republicans and Democrats on the committee as to the urgent need for us to take action.

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Good to be with.

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