Political Quotes

“I want to commend the Senator from Washington for her leadership going through the disparate effects of TikTok versus other social media platforms. And let's acknowledge, TikTok, I think, realized they had a problem over a year ago. So they tried to develop a response--it was something called Project Texas--to allegedly address concerns related to TikTok's handling of America's data. However, Project Texas would still allow TikTok's algorithm, source code, and development activities to remain in China. They would remain so under ByteDance control and subject to Chinese Government exploitation. Project Texas allows TikTok to continue to rely on engineers and back-end support from China to update its algorithm and source code needed to run TikTok in the United States. How can they say there is not the possibility of interference? This reliance on resources based in China, again, makes it vulnerable to Chinese Government exploitation. That is why Project Texas does not resolve the United States' national security concern about ByteDance's ownership of TikTok. Now, let me acknowledge--and I think Senator Cantwell and I worked on a more, frankly, comprehensive approach that, in a perfect world, we might have been debating today, but we work in the world of getting things right. So I stand firmly in support, as Senator Cantwell has, of taking action now to prevent the kind of intelligence failure we first saw back in 2016.…”