David Remnick: You could probably count on just one hand the subjects where there's bipartisan support for anything in Washington. One of those few subjects is the TikTok ban, which was just signed into law. The law will remove TikTok from the app stores unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it to a competitor.

Jacob Helberg worked behind the scenes to get the ban through Congress. He's a technology executive with Palantir, the giant data firm and military contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel. Helberg's also a member of a government agency called The United States China Economic and Security Review Commission. Helberg was all over Capitol Hill in the run-up to the TikTok ban, convincing one legislator after another that it was an urgent matter of national security.

Jacob Helberg: The basic pitch is that TikTok is wholly owned by ByteDance, and ByteDance does the bidding of the CCP. We know that--

David Remnick: The Chinese Communist Party.

Jacob Helberg: The Chinese Communist Party. In fact, the Chinese Embassy was directly involved in the lobbying against the TikTok legislation. Because ByteDance does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, and it's also a vehicle for Chinese surveillance, which is a major national security threat to this country.

David Remnick: Now, we should be clear on something for the record. ByteDance has repeatedly denied that it does the bidding of the Chinese government, and the Communist Party itself does not own ByteDance, which is something you may hear in this debate. Jacob, how do we know? How do we know that the Chinese Communist Party is using TikTok as an instrument of surveillance?

Jacob Helberg: China has a national intelligence law that it passed in 2017, which requires any organization or citizen to "support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work". Under that law, Chinese organizations and individuals also have to keep that compliance process completely confidential. You could easily imagine a scenario where ByteDance employees based in China are complying with Chinese intelligence requests without even informing the US-based offices of TikTok based in Los Angeles.

David Remnick: You said you can imagine a scenario.

Jacob Helberg: Yes.

David Remnick: Should we be in the business of imagining scenarios and then doing this?

Jacob Helberg: We have laws in this country that prohibit the foreign ownership of traditional media in this country. I mean, you could make the same argument that that threat is hypothetical, and yet we still have them because we don't want to be in a place where we have to imagine it.

Here's the basic dynamic. We have a system in the US that is based on Fourth Amendment constitutional protections against unwarranted searches and seizures. We have the First Amendment that gives us a right to free speech. Chinese laws requires total compliance with the Chinese Communist Party. It directly contradicts our legal protections to the First Amendment and to the Fourth Amendment. If you are TikTok, you can comply with American law or you can comply with Chinese law, but you can't comply with both because those two legal systems contradict each other.

David Remnick: Tell me about your lead meetings with lawmakers before they, in the main, accepted the idea that TikTok was a real national security danger. We hear over and over again from various members of Congress, "I've been briefed in private, I've been briefed under a national security code of secrecy." That's a source of frustration for somebody trying to figure out if you are wrong or you're right.

Jacob Helberg: There are two bodies of evidence related to TikTok. There is evidence that's in the classified domain of which it's obviously there because, as you know, the Department of Justice did hold classified briefings with elected members on Capitol Hill laying out their evidence of why TikTok is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

I will say, and the conversations that I've been involved with, I've actually highlighted publicly available information of which there is a lot. I serve on a bipartisan commission in Congress, and so I get prepped for hearing congressional hearings regularly. In February of this year, we had a congressional hearing, which actually covered the issue of TikTok. In that briefing, you could look at a pattern of former TikTok employees who've left the company who've said that the Chinese-based offices have access to everything on the app. That includes microphone data, that includes geolocation, that includes data from your text messages, iPhotos folder.

If you look at what the TikTok CEO has said under oath in his testimony last year, he said, TikTok user data is on US-based servers managed by US employees on American soil. We know that last year, there was evidence after the hearing that showed that the data of TikTok celebrities based in the US was stored in China. When confronted on it, TikTok said, "Oh, we consider that to be a different category of data." Then, of course, there were all the revelations of former TikTok employees that directly contradicted the statements made by the CEO. I think at this point--

David Remnick: Why don't you take one example by name and explain what that person said?

Jacob Helberg: There are multiple examples, but I'll just give you the latest one because this happened right before the legislation passed. In April of this year, an employee whose last name is Turner, I believe from memory, his first name--

David Remnick: Right. This is Evan Turner. Evan Turner, I think, you're talking about.

Jacob Helberg: Evan Turner. That's right. He said that TikTok required him that he had a dotted-line manager in China, which, by the way, totally contradicts the whole idea of Project Texas. That dotted line manager basically told him to send him large spreadsheets filled with data of hundreds of thousands of US-based users to ByteDance workers based in Beijing. That data included names, email addresses, IP addresses, geographic, and demographic information. Does that sound to you like US servers on US soil protected by US individuals? That sounds like that the TikTok CEO committed perjury.

David Remnick: I've listened to Scott Galloway, for example, who teaches at NYU and talks about TikTok. He's very anti-TikTok as you are. He said that, basically, TikTok is an instrument to reach into the gray matter, particularly of young people particularly in the United States, and influence them and propagandize them. You agree?

Jacob Helberg: Sure.

David Remnick: Do you not think the same of Facebook and many other social media apps?

Jacob Helberg: We should have that debate. That's a great debate to have. That is a separate debate than the national security issue.

David Remnick: Jacob, again, I want to be clear on one thing. You work for a huge technology firm, Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, who's a major figure in Silicon Valley and on the right. It's important for us to establish how your company would gain from a forced sale of TikTok. A lot of people might be suspicious about Palantir going to such lengths to drive this lobbying effort against a potential competitor. Is Palantir doing this out of the goodness of its heart? Out of a sense of-- [crosstalk]

Jacob Helberg: David, Palantir's not involved. I have been doing this since 2020. If you say it's important to establish how Palantir would benefit, you are making a claim that I'm not making. If you want to make that claim, to your point, I would love for you to present evidence and articulate how Palantir would benefit because they wouldn't benefit is the truth. It is completely orthogonal to their business.

David Remnick: Who would benefit? Let's say this had to be sold. Who would buy it? Who would benefit?

Jacob Helberg: I think the way that the benefits and costs would fall really depends on the terms of the sale. It depends on how much it sells for and to who. Obviously, there's a lot of-- Steve Mnuchin formed a group to try to buy it.

David Remnick: This is the former treasury secretary under Donald Trump.

Jacob Helberg: Exactly. Look, four years ago, when the last time we had this go-around of discussions around a forced divestiture, Oracle was interested. There were even rumors that Walmart would be interested. The reality is TikTok is an extremely profitable business, and a lot of people in the United States would be interested in buying it.

David Remnick: Doesn't its diminishment stand to benefit imitators and rivals?

Jacob Helberg: Potentially, they say that, but I think that is operating on the assumption that those rivals or imitators would directly gain everything that TikTok has built. I just don't know that that's necessarily true because the reality is TikTok has gained so much momentum because their algorithm is really good. I think in order to get that kind of user traction, you need to have an algorithm that's as good.

David Remnick: Jacob, do you see big political consequences among young voters, especially about this? They're going to go blame Joe Biden for this, right?

Jacob Helberg: Not necessarily. The reality is this was one of the most bipartisan issues of our time.

David Remnick: 80% of the house voted for the bill.

Jacob Helberg: I mean, I can't think of another bill that's gotten this large of a majority.

David Remnick: Now you've called TikTok "the most potent espionage operation that China has ever carried out against the United States". So far as I know when it was launched, TikTok was a karaoke app. Is there evidence that this was truly an act of intentional espionage, or did it just turn out to be fantastic for the Chinese Communist Party and its intelligence apparatus?

Jacob Helberg: Well, yes, I still believe that. I think TikTok's reach into the cell phones of 170 million Americans is unprecedented when you think about the influence that gives a foreign adversary government. Ultimately, that was the biggest reason why I have been so passionate about trying to get some sort of legislative policy resolution to this national security issue.

David Remnick: Meta and X, formerly Twitter, also have every ability to steal user data and manipulate their algorithms for all kinds of purposes. Should the government be protecting us from American social media companies more rigorously than they already do?

Jacob Helberg: We already have in the US the California Privacy Law, which was modeled after the European GDPR. It doesn't make sense to have a patch-- [crosstalk]

David Remnick: GDPR stands for?

Jacob Helberg: The General Data Protection Rule in Europe. It doesn't make sense to have a patchwork of 50 different laws at the state level in the US. The way that tech companies work is they basically create a system that complies with the lowest common denominator. California being a very large state where a lot of these companies are based, they apply the California Data Privacy Law federally at the federal level. It's the defacto law of the land. Why not have a federal privacy law that basically has a federal preemption that has a single privacy rule for all 50 states? I'm in favor of having that discussion. I just think that's different than the national security issues.

David Remnick: What about the First Amendment ramifications here? During the Pentagon Papers situation many years ago, it was decided that you can't cry national security in order to overwhelm the First Amendment prerogative. How does that figure here?

Jacob Helberg: It's true that that was an issue that a lot of opponents of the TikTok legislation raised as a concern. TikTok is not a free-speech platform. It is an algorithmically controlled platform. It's not a public square. It is a newspaper. If you look at platforms like Instagram or Facebook that are friends-based. The content you get on Instagram and Facebook is derivative of the people you follow and are friends with on those platforms. On TikTok, it's algorithmic based. TikTok decides what content you might be interested or want to see, and then pushes that content to you. That means that they effectively have complete editorial control over what they amplify and suppress on the platform.

The NCRI, the Network Contagion Research Institute, which is a think tank, has actually published research, statistical research that shows that TikTok does editorialize in a way that matches China's censorship and propaganda laws. That's number one. Number two, we have a long legal precedent and history in this country of taking, of restricting foreign commerce and restricting foreign entities when national security is at stake. We put sanctions on Russian oil companies. We put sanctions on Chinese telecom companies like Huawei. It's not actually that uncommon for the United States to restrict the foreign ownership of a given company when national security is at stake.

David Remnick: How do you think China might retaliate?

Jacob Helberg: They could potentially retaliate against a number of our hardware companies. They've already banned a lot of our software companies in China, especially our content platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, and the like, but for economic development and national security reasons, they allow hardware manufacturers, American hardware manufacturers to operate in China, like Tesla, Apple, and so forth. They could try to retaliate against them. It will ultimately be very interesting to see how this plays out and if they do resort to some sort of retaliatory measure against Apple or Tesla.

David Remnick: Well, that's my last question. This bill is passed by ByteDance still owns TikTok. What happens now?

Jacob Helberg: I think the bill is ultimately unassailable. I think it's very well thought through. Ultimately, if and when that case gets dismissed by the courts, which I think it will. The clock has already started ticking for them to start the divestiture. Everyone hopes that they will proceed with a divestiture, but if it runs out without a divestiture, it will be banned.

David Remnick: Jacob Helberg, thanks so much.

Jacob Helberg: Thank you so much for having me. David really enjoyed it.

David Remnick: Jacob Helberg is a policy advisor for the technology company Palantir, and he serves on the United States, China Economic and Security Review Commission.

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