The Rest Is Classified - 13. How China Spies: Trump, TikTok, and Taiwan

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Is the Chinese state using TikTok to spy on you? Why did President Biden move to shut TikTok down in the US the day before Trump's inauguration? And where does TikTok fit into China's cognitive warfare strategy? On Sunday 19 January, TikTok users in the United States opened their apps to receive an error message from the company, explaining that "a law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.". Op eds were written, influencers took to other social media apps to express their dismay, and politicians scrambled to explain why they were taking drastic action against the Chinese tech company. But, what did the 24-hour ban really mean for national security and data privacy in the US? Listen as David and Gordon take a deep dive into how China spies in the 21st century. ------------------- Pre-order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. Get tickets to see David and Gordon in conversation at Waterstones Trafalgar Square on Tuesday 28 January at 19:00 GMT via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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But keeping your cat off your keyboard, that's up to you. Reach out to TD Direct Investing today and make your investing steps count. Plus enjoy 1% cash back. Conditions apply, offer ends January 31st, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. Hello everyone and welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. I'm David McCloskey. The second part of our story on Anna Chapman, the deep cover Russian spy was released yesterday,

but today we are doing a timely special on TikTok and we're recording this on Monday evening and it's going to be released Wednesday morning. And some more good news for those of you who are enjoying the podcast, we hope you're all enjoying the podcast, but from now on we'll be releasing two episodes a week, not just one, two a week on a Monday and a Wednesday and that's starting next week. But David, we thought we'd jump on and do a special for TikTok, didn't we? That's right. It's one of our favorite subjects, TikTok, Gordon and I.

And we're also here, I think, you know, and for those of you with your sort of rest is bingo cards, we're here because of the mooch. Isn't that right, Gordon? Yeah, Anthony Scaramucci. That's right. That's right. Anthony Scaramucci said these guys should talk about what's going on with TikTok. And we thought also that plus with TikTok being down over the weekend in the States, we had to do something to resurrect the rest is classified TikTok feed. Isn't that right, Gordon?

That is right. It's still going. It's still there. It's not, you know, might, might live on. No, it's true. Cause over the weekend I logged into TikTok to watch wiggle wiggle dance videos and I could not. Wow. Right. Cause it was shut down. Is that how you spend your weekends, David? Sorry, sorry. Is that how you spend your weekends watching wiggle wiggle dance videos? Yes. I logged in for my normal ration of moodang pygmy hippopotamus videos, wiggle wiggle dance videos and cucumber recipes.

And you couldn't get them. You'd been denied. I was told by the TikTok overlords that I could not access the application. And then today, of course, now it's back and there's a very wonderful, you know, little kind of intro thing when you log back in that says thanks to President Trump working with us. We're back online and you know, we're going to figure this all out. So I could watch my pygmy hippo videos this morning and in complete peace.

And I'm very pleased for you about that. We should say that this is all to do with, you know, the reasons given our national security and spies. Well, that's right, Gordon. And we'll set the table a little bit here, of course, with describing what's going on with the TikTok ban in the States and a little bit just to kind of bring listeners up to speed. But we are not going to, I think importantly, not going to have a kind of debate about whether

the band's a good thing or a bad thing or kind of prognosticate on where it might be headed. I think what we want to do in this emergency pod is to actually flip the script a little bit and think about this from the lens of Chinese intelligence officers, the Chinese security services. And this is actually an exercise that we did occasionally at CIA, called like a red team or red cell exercise, which was basically to write a piece or to give a briefing, frankly, from the standpoint of a foreign adversary. And I remember actually, I'd only been at the agency for a little while and I collaborated

on this, but we wrote a piece for then President Bush about a terrorist leader in the Middle East whose group was recovering from a war. And it was was kind of like what's keeping this guy up at night whole piece was written as his kind of journal entry cuz he was an avid journal. And it is a way it's a it's a sort of a method i think of getting in the mindset. Of the other side and so i think in this case we want to do is actually lay out a bit of how we might view TikTok and other such kind of apps from the standpoint of Beijing and the MSS, the Ministry of State Security, which is essentially China's CIA or its SIS MI6. Great, I think that's a really interesting way

of looking at it to kind of get to the national security issue through that lens. The power of it is the algorithm in which it recommends people more of what they clearly like. And that's the kind of, if you like, the secret sauce, which has made it hugely successful. And I think 170 million users in the United States. I mean, that's the figure you see how many are regular users I don't know. But you know, a third of American adults using TikTok and also, I mean, people using it for entertainment, but also for news and information. It's risen in the last, I guess, seven or so years to be hugely influential, hasn't it? It has. And a third of American adults using TikTok, that's up from about 20%, one in five, just two years ago. So pretty staggering growth.

And then for the under 30 category, there's more like 60%. And this was a crazy number, 15% of teens say they're basically on it constantly. And so, you know, we list all of these numbers just to give a sense of the scale and reach, I think, of this platform, because what we're going to talk about here in terms of the potential national security risks, that scale really matters immensely. It's just a massive, massive platform. And actually, I mean, I've seen some of this Gordon. So I have a TikTok account, as I mentioned, mostly for hippopotamus videos, but I actually did a video last year

that went viral and got about I think at last check, it was up to almost 4 million views. And it has an amazing capacity if you sort of, you know, and as a very kind of small user of it, you have no sense when you're producing this thing that it's going to go viral and get that reach. But it has this incredible ability for you to get out there and get seen and really to put content out there that is going to influence the way people think about a particular topic, politics,

entertainment, whatever, some ridiculous dance trend, whatever it might be, but that virality that reach the ability of the algorithm to sort of pump that content out as it sees fit is really, really insane. So let's have a look at it from a spy point of view and from a Chinese spy point of view. I guess one thing to say at the start is that TikTok, the company is technically an American company, but it is run by ByteDance and ByteDance has international investors, but is fundamentally a company founded

in China. So TikTok's ultimate ownership traces back to China, and that is the key question that's raised about it and why there are national security concerns. And the company itself always says it's not involved in spying, there's no evidence of it, but we're gonna look at it through this idea of, if you were in the Chinese intelligence services in their ministry of state security,

what might the value of something like this be and what might you want to use it for and where would it not be so useful compared to other things? Yeah, I think we should state upfront that the sort of, I guess, backend of the interaction between all of this data that TikTok owns, ByteDance, and then eventually sort of security organs of the Chinese state, particularly the Ministry of State Security or the army, the PLA. The way those things interact, right? And the piping that connects them are decidedly probably in the realm of the classified pieces of the rest is classified in that I'm

sure people in the know at NSA or GCHQ or CIA or SIS might have some sense of how they all interact. But from the outside, I mean, this is really opaque stuff, right? Of how they all connect and how they share information. Yeah. And which the company denies. Yeah. and how they share information. And which the company denies. I think it's probably reasonable to assume that if Chinese state security wanted data from a Chinese company, that it would be able to get it. Would you agree with that?

Well, there is a law in China, a national intelligence law, which says companies can be compelled to provide data. And I guess the question is, firstly, is the data that TikTok collects valuable? And secondly, is it somewhere where the Chinese state can get to it? And does it have a kind of mechanism to get to it? So on the first part, I mean, the value of the data, I mean, TikTok does gather a lot of data from people. I mean, when you sign in, it's going to look for things like contacts to see who else you might know, it's going to look for potentially for kind of location, perhaps what other things you're browsing what you're buying through the app. I mean, there's a lot of data. But it's also true that that is, while it's quite personal data, it's also data that lots of social media apps collect,

isn't it? I mean, you know, it's not that different from what Instagram or what a lot of American apps would collect. I guess the point is, it's China. That's the question about it. Yeah, it's kind of a question around who has it as opposed to how it's being gathered or even what's being gathered. But I think to step back into the, I guess, shoes of that kind of fictional Ministry of State Security officer, I think there's probably, I would say, three

potential avenues here, ways that TikTok creates value for you. And the first one we're talking about it is data collection, right? Can the Ministry of State Security get access to information that users willingly or maybe unwittingly provide in the app through registering for the app, through the location of your phone while you're using the app, through financial transactions you might make in the app? Can they collect that data, put it into a broader model that they have in Beijing, and use that for purposes of targeting for recruitment, influence operations, etc. I think there's a second piece here around

is TikTok a, and this is you mentioned earlier, this idea of, oh, is TikTok spying on me? Is it a vector for kind of malware, right? Is it something that I'm unwittingly giving it access to messages on my phone, my camera. That would be how you'd kind of think about an app, a spyware app, right? Is it a spyware app? And then the third piece, if I'm the MSS that I'm thinking about here is what I call algorithmic manipulation or a sort of algorithmic cognitive kind of warfare, which is, can I use this app to sway opinion

and really affect the way people think and thus the way that they act, the choices that they actually make in the real world? I think those are kind of the three ways as a as a Chinese intelligence officer, or military officer, I'd be thinking about ticked out. This is a much broader topic than tick tock to we're sort of, in some ways talking about a massive strategic competition, we're focusing in on like one

weapons system, I guess, in a way, but it's bigger than that. But tick tock across all three of those categories, I guess, in a way, but it's bigger than that. But TikTok across all three of those categories, I think, creates value for you as a Chinese intelligence officer or security official. Well, let's break them down and look at each of those. So the first one was data collection. So the data that we are voluntarily giving to the app and that it's collecting about us as we go about using it. TikTok itself has said that it's put some of that not out of reach, if you like, of the Chinese state and into the US and put servers in the US or in other

countries to prevent that happening. There are still questions about whether there could be some kind of backdoor access. That's the accusation that TikTok denies that somehow the Chinese state could still compel them to get that kind of data. But a lot of people would be thinking, well, why, well, why would you want that as a spy service? I mean, what's the value of that kind of data? Most people who are posting their hippopotamus videos, whatever it is, why do their contacts or whatever else it is? Why might that be useful to the Chinese MSS, the Ministry of State Security? The MSS hippo analysts have been just working over time over the past six to 12 months,

just raking hippo content off the internet. And let's maybe just start with the kind of, I guess, more traditional human intelligence operations, trying to spot, assess, develop and recruit somebody as an asset. You would want data on a population to understand, to be able to sort it, analyze it, and determine who has access to information that you want, or who is connected to people who might be able to get you that information. You'd want to assess people in terms of their sort of maybe political views or even things like are they angry at their employer, right?

Do they have an interesting employer like a big US telecom or, you know, do they actually work for the federal government? Right? And they're ticked about something that happens. You're sort of assessing people, I think, for recruitment as intelligence, you know, assets or agents. Right? I mean, that, that to me is one very clear potential source of value. Although I think with TikTok, it's probably not as valuable as, frankly, many of the other data breaches that the Chinese have been behind over the past 15 years. And there's other sources of that information, like places like LinkedIn. You sort of don't necessarily need to own the data in this example to be able to make

use of it. If you can go buy it, if you can steal it, it's just as effective. So I think in this case, the sort of threat from that data being accessible to Beijing and the MSS or the PLA to me feels, I mean, it's real, I suppose, but the Chinese can buy this stuff and have stolen a lot of it already. As you said, people put this stuff on LinkedIn, they put it in lots of other places. It's not necessarily the most sensitive data about people or that hard to find.

We also have abysmal data privacy laws here in the States too, which make it easy to just buy the stuff. Yeah, you could buy the stuff. There's data brokers who sell that kind of geo-located data about where someone was and they use it to sell it to advertisers. It's the kind of model of surveillance capitalism that lots of apps collect this. So, I guess it feels like that isn't the most sensitive, although, as you said, if you get enough of these datasets, then you can kind of put them together and start to kind of find people and track people a little bit more. As you said,

China has stolen some very sensitive datasets about people, but it's stolen them. I mean, famously, it stole the Office of Personnel Management, which was the vetting records of nearly 20 million people who work for the US government, not CIA, I think. I think it was everyone else had to fill in forms saying, have you done drugs? Have you got money problems? It's standard form 86, SF86. As someone who's filled that out. It's a terrible, terrible form. It's very long and it contains, I mean, essentially every bit of possible information you could imagine about where you have lived, who you've worked for, personal contacts. There's probably a whole bunch of information in there that a foreign

service could potentially use for blackmail if they found the right case. So it is, I mean, it was a massive, a massive trove of information. And it was stolen by China. I mean, we should be clear. You have the OPM leak or breach really, Office of Personnel Management, where all those forms got out. I mean, the Chinese got into Yahoo and Google, right, as well. That's on the list.

In 2016 or 17, there was a massive breach at Equifax, which is basically credit scores and credit data for tens of millions of Americans. There was the breach at Marriott hotels. So, you know, I think from the standpoint of the data scientists in some God forsaken basement at the Ministry of State Security, if you're building this massive model, of the data scientists in some God forsaken basement at the Ministry of State Security, if you're building this massive model,

all of those breaches, plus information you can buy, plus the information you could get from TikTok, all start to form a picture of individual Americans and also frankly, groups of Americans that might be amenable to recruitment or influence, I guess. All true, but it does feel to me as if the most sensitive information we talked about, the kind of blackmailable stuff from Office of Personnel Management, that stuff was stolen from the US government. They didn't need a Chinese company to do it. So it does feel like that this is one area where you can see some value if you were the

Chinese to it kind of data you might be able to get by compelling TikTok to hand it over if they were to do that. But it doesn't feel like the most sensitive thing or the only way you can get it either, because you can get it by just hacking into American companies, frankly, or buying it, as you said. I guess when you think about the information that you're getting from TikTok, the stuff you're putting in and willingly sort of providing the app, I think is very much on par with what you're providing to Meta, Instagram, Facebook.

TikTok isn't some, my understanding is that it's not some grievous sort of outlier in harvesting more of your data than any of these other services. It really is to bring it back to the point you made earlier, the idea that there is theoretical piping that goes from TikTok to ByteDance to Chinese security agencies. It's a matter of who could get it as opposed to this being some kind of egregious breach right off the bat from collecting your own personal data or anything like that. Okay. So having looked at that first kind of possibility of why the Chinese Ministry of State Security might want this stuff,

let's take a break and then we'll come back to look at some of those other possibilities. This episode is brought to you by our new friends at NordVPN. Now David, what do you find useful about NordVPN? Well, I really like NordVPN's Threat Protection Pro, which is an incredibly powerful and effective anti-virus tool. It is integrated directly into the NordVPN app and allows you to browse safely and smoothly while also protecting you from phishing and other cyber threats. It can often be hard to distinguish fake websites

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When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan and there's absolutely no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box. Okay, welcome back. We're looking from the vantage point of a red cell, the people who get inside the minds of adversaries, how the Ministry of State Security in China might view the advantages and maybe the disadvantages of using TikTok to spy to answer that question. Is TikTok a national security threat? David, what's the next area to look at when it comes to this?

Well, I think the second one on our list, Gordon was the idea that TikTok is kind of a spyware program. Is it being used to harvest data from your phone, like your messages, your emails, turning the camera on, off, things like that, that you might associate with a spyware app, right? And I think here, I have not seen anything to suggest that TikTok has been kind of weaponized in that way

by ByteDance or the Chinese government. Now, it's certainly possible that it has been kind of weaponized in that way by dance or the Chinese government. Now it's certainly possible that it has been and that it's locked away in the vault at NSA or Langley or wherever. But if I'm a Chinese sort of intelligence officer, I think I've actually got other applications that are better suited to this, right? I think this is where we have this laser like focus on TikTok.

And in some respects, it's normal and natural because of that reach we mentioned earlier. But if I'm the MSS, you know, there are companies like, for example, Tmoo, which is a large e-commerce site. Essentially it's kind of a broker that connects Western consumers, essentially with factories in China and offers these really cut rate prices on a whole bunch of consumer goods. The parent company of Tmoo is directly connected, of course, to the Chinese state communist party. And its sister app was actually pulled from Google Play, I think a couple years back,

because it had malware embedded in it that was letting the application do things like reading emails, manipulating the camera, geolocating movements and the like. And so there is kind of a broader conversation that we're missing when we talk about TikTok, which is this app environment or ecosystem that the Chinese have built that is on our phones and that is probably in some cases being used as spyware, although probably selectively, right, by the Ministry of State Security or the PLA. But it doesn't seem like in the TikTok case, this is really the way it's being used.

No, and there hasn't been any kind of hard evidence for that. And it reminds me a little bit about the debate, particularly in the UK, we had about Huawei, the telecoms provider, there was this big issue, do we want a Chinese telecoms company in our infrastructure? And one of the reasons one of the reasons they gave was, well, it could be used to spy on you could be used, you know, there could be backdoors in the Huawei kit, which could be used to siphon off everyone's data.

In that case, it was a theoretical risk. And it seems the same with TikTok, a theoretical risk, you know, about what could be done rather than anything where there's evidence of it having been done. And I mean, with Huawei, it was fascinating. I spent a lot of time looking into it. I actually went to China, went to Shenzhen, the headquarters of Huawei, around their facilities. I went to a fascinating place in Bambury in Britain in a business park where they had this place called the Evaluation Cell, which was jointly run by GCHQ and Huawei, and where they actually literally took apart Huawei kit to look for secret backdoors being used

to spy on the British infrastructure of the kit going in. I mean, they both checked the code to see whether there is any hidden malicious software, but they also physically took apart the routers and the systems to see if there was anything there. They spent years doing this, looking for these backdoors, and they found some little problems with the code, but no evidence of those deliberate malicious attempts to use it to spy. In a sense, it would be crazy for a company to allow itself to be used in that way, because you get found out and you're finished. If you're found to have deliberately allowed yourself to plant back doors and be used to

spy deliberately, then you're finished. So it doesn't feel like that is the strongest use case for TikTok. So maybe we should go on to our third one, which I think is, I think we both think is perhaps the most interesting one, isn't it? third one, which I think we both think is perhaps the most interesting one, isn't it? Yeah, this one I think is the most interesting. It also is, I think, the reason why it's been very hard for the US government to articulate practical specific information around the ban and why TikTok is actually a national

security concern. That third one is, you know, we could call it a lot of different things. I would call it a kind of algorithmic cognitive warfare, which is how do you actually capture the mind or minds of a group of people to shape cognition, which I guess would be how information comes in, how it's processed, and then the decisions that you make with that information on the back end, right? This is the more potentially tinfoil hat part of this conversation, but it's very real, right?

And I think we should talk about this because we're not talking about something that actually it's a future risk, I think, that it poses to us in the States, Britain, the West, but this is something that the Chinese military security services, the government apparatus talking right about all the time. They talk about cognitive warfare. And it is a formalized doctrine that essentially puts the space of the mind, the brain

on par with other military domains. So you think about land, sea, air, space, you have cyber kind of connecting all of them. The mind is written about and spoken about in official Chinese military publications, Chinese military and security adjacent think tanks. It is a very studied and thought about part of a conflict and the social media space in which TikTok is a major player is probably the most important component of that battlefield right now. And it does sound a little bit abstract in terms of that kind of cognitive warfare, but I guess it goes back to that thing which makes TikTok successful, which is

the secret algorithm, the recommendation algorithm, which learns what people are interested in and feeds them more of that to keep them on the app, to keep them on the platform. And I guess the key point is if you have control of that algorithm, what can you do with it in terms of shaping the information that people get and therefore how they see the world? Precisely because people get not just entertainment, but information and news from TikTok, you have the potential, at least it's argued, to suppress certain topics, maybe topics that are critical of China, to boost, perhaps if you want to boost

division in a country by boosting certain things. Of course, this is all done through that secret source of the algorithm, which is held by the company, which is very interesting in the current discussions about whether or not TikTok should be sold or banned. The one thing that parent companies don't want to do is give up control of that secret algorithm. But that's where, if you like, the power lies. There was a really interesting story I read in the Financial Times, the FT, just a few days ago, which was about Taiwan, which obviously China views as a renegade province and wants to take back control of. The argument was, and it raised a question, the piece really, and it seemed a really well-reported piece, whether a younger generation were having their views of China made more sympathetic through TikTok specifically.

Now, I'm not sure if it could definitively prove that, but that was the kind of question it raised. I think we are all understanding much more how social media can shape the way we see the world. It's obviously not just a Chinese question. It's a question you get about X or Twitter. You get it about Meta and Facebook and Instagram. How far can they dial down or dial up certain things? We're hearing it at the moment with Meta. It's taking off fact checking. You're seeing it with X under Elon Musk or Twitter. It's changing what the kinds

of things people are being fed. And that is really the interesting question, isn't it? If you're in the Ministry of State Security, could you find some way to secretly, and it would be hard to spot, use TikTok to somehow exert influence over a population? In the Chinese cognitive warfare literature on this, they have this great phrase, they talk about building cognitive cocoons as a way to shape sort of thought and then eventually action. And there's kind of a process to this and some real thinking that's been done on how you might use a platform like TikTok to accomplish this is you think about, okay, I'm a Chinese security guy who's sort of the wizard over TikTok, right? What am I trying to do? Well, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying

to identify a kind of target audience at scale and segment it out, right, into kind of different components. And I'm going to see this in a very interesting way if I have a network of 170 million users, right, all over the United States, different political backgrounds, different class backgrounds, educational backgrounds, race, ethnic, gender, all this kind of stuff, age. I'm going to find a way to get content in front of them, gain attention on particular content, or frankly, in some cases, make sure certain content doesn't get attention. I'm then going to inject it in a way that makes it all feel really natural.

And this is where that algorithm comes into play, right? Because this thing gets recommended to me in a very tailored way based on everything they know about me and what I've watched and how long I watch things in a way where I don't even have to think. I just know this thing is pushing stuff to me that I really like, right? And it's very effective. So I'm gonna inject things in a way where I don't even have to think. This thing is pushing stuff to me that I really like, right? And it's very effective. So I'm going to inject things in a way

where it feels like I'm kind of coming to this on my own in a natural way. I'm going to then induce a reaction among people to that content that creates what they would call, as I said, a cognitive cocoon, which is here's a group of people that are, you know, they might be particularly angry. They might be particularly polarized one way or the other. They might be particularly fearful of something. And then I'm going to push information into that

cocoon that sort of builds that fear and insecurity around a particular topic to kind of shape thinking on it, and then hopefully create action. And I think, you know, it's very interesting if you thought about an example of, and this is a more extreme one, but it kind of makes the point, is that if you just walked this through a little bit and you thought about an actual outbreak

of a shooting war over Taiwan, in which we might have real like US casualties being taken daily. We could be talking about losing hundreds or thousands of people in naval engagements over this. You think about a situation where the information environment, and we haven't even talked about what the Chinese have done

with respect to utility systems and water transmission systems and building vulnerabilities into those that they could exploit during a conflict. But if you think about the information space, all of a sudden, what happens if there's a certain cast his belly for the Chinese doing an amphibious landing on Taiwan or on one of the sort of rocks off of it. And they're able to create a narrative around that that suggests that they're justified in this action and pump that narrative into these cognitive cocoons

that are particularly open to receiving it. So you can kind of think about, and again, I think it's this idea that TikTok is a potential or something like it in the future is kind of a weapons delivery system for this cognitive kind of battle space. But the actual payload you're going to get is going to be content, some of which could be synthetically created by generative AI, that's going to be videos, pictures, and news that fits this narrative, but it's being very precisely tailored to you in the specific group around you to induce some kind of action.

In this case, it could be sapping the will of really our country to fight or to resist Chinese territorial takeovers in the Pacific. So you kind of walk one of these cases through and you see how TikTok is from the standpoint of the Ministry of State Security, a particularly interesting weapon system to have at your disposal. That's right. I think we've learned recently to think much more about the kind of manipulation of the information environment and what can

be done with that. I think absolutely this is the interesting area with TikTok because some of the other things we talked about, delivering malware or spying on people, you can do that in other ways. Going back to telecoms, the Chinese, we've just learned a hacking group have got inside the US telecom network. The US spent all this effort saying, well, don't have Huawei, got inside the US telecom network. So, you know, the US spent all this effort saying, well, don't have Huawei, don't have Chinese telecoms. And

instead, the Chinese just hacked US telecom providers to get all the information and spy on people. And they used it to spy on some pretty high level people. And they probably did it in the UK. I mean, we haven't heard that officially yet. But I wouldn't be surprised as well, this campaign called salt typhoon. And that just shows that in other areas, China can do the spying or data collection in different ways. But when it comes to that algorithmic manipulation, that is something where you need a platform which reaches a lot of people. And where it's helpful to own the data, not necessarily to steal it or buy it.

And to own the algorithm and to have that under your control. Now, absolutely, this is a theoretical risk rather than, you know, one you can point to happening now, but I think it's that which is the key to the real worry about TikTok. And that's why I think if you were in the ministry of state security, if you were, you know, back to our red cell scenario, I think what you'd be doing is thinking, I want to keep that capability. I may not be using it now. Who knows if I'm going

to want to use it in the future. It would be very useful to have that capability in case I ever needed it. I guess it goes back to that point, which is there are other social media companies which collect data. There are others which could do that kind of algorithmic manipulation, but it's the issue of China, isn't it? It's the fact that we are now entering a period of a very adversarial, But it's the issue of China, isn't it? It's the fact that we are now entering a period of a very adversarial, you know, more than just competitive relationship between the U S and more broadly other countries in China and where these things suddenly, you know, feel more acute and more important than they did in the past.

My guess, Gordon, is that there's a lot of Intel on intent, strategic intent in how the Chinese are thinking about using TikTok or systems like it, but that there probably hasn't been a PDB written. A presidential daily brief. A presidential daily brief article written for Biden or the first Trump administration that walked through a case study of how TikTok was manipulated to affect some outcome, right? But even from the intent side of things, again, there's a great quote cited by Peter W. Singer and Josh Bachman who look at this issue very closely.

They're citing two professors at the very wonderfully named Military Propaganda Teaching and Research Department of the school of political science at China's National Defense University. And they say, the goal of cognitive warfare is to achieve an invisible manipulation and invisible embedding of information production to shape the target audience's macro framework for recognizing, defining and understanding events.

And so I think it's probably a large compilation of that kind of stuff, both out in the open and being collected by clandestine methods that is feeding this apparent disconnect where you see a lot of hyperventilating about TikTok inside the government. And I think really a kind of a lot of the reaction to the TikTok ban, you know, here in the states outside of government has been, well, you're just kind of kneecapping creators who are making money doing this, this is a fun platform, everybody's manipulating everybody meta does this, why are you bothering us, but it is this this intent around information and cognitive warfare in Beijing that I think has set off red lights or in DC in particular around this because again, it's like we should probably think about this as a weapons delivery system, but we don't have a good analogy for it because it isn't a bomb. It's very hard to come up with a kind of really clean analogy to show the threat.

I think to conclude it is us China competition is, you know, is the big story. The center of that competition is arguably over technology and TikTok is, I guess, at the sharp end of it. So we will see where it plays out next. But one more imminent, but no less important issue, David, is that next time an episode comes out, which is very soon, your latest book will also be out. And I'm going to plug it for you. It's coming out soon, isn't it?

It's coming out soon in the UK. It is my humble attempt at cognitive warfare unleashed upon your unwitting and hopefully very witting population. Yes. So my next book, my third book, The Seventh Floor, is coming out in the UK on the 30th of January and it is going to be available where all good books are sold anywhere and everywhere. And Gordon, we're also going to have a little chat, aren't we? We are. We're doing an in-person event, no less. So we won't be talking remotely. We will be in-person 28th of January at Waterstones in Trafalgar Square in London, talking about the book.

You can find details of the tickets and where to get them in the episode description. Please do come along if you can. Please buy the book, even if you can't. And David, I guess with that, I'll let you go back to your Tik Tok videos say goodbye to your Chinese spy do your wiggle dance whatever whatever it is. You're about to do next. Good luck That's right. I'm back to I'm back to just doom-scrolling Moodang pygmy hippo videos here for the rest of the night So, you know, you know where to find me that I think this the the cognitive warfare on me is just, it mostly just shut my brain down. I think.

And what was your viral video? I forgot to ask earlier. What was your, what was your video that went viral? Were you dancing? No, it was, there was no dancing. There was no dancing. It was tips on booking a hotel room, uh, from a former CIA guy. And, uh, it included such bombshells as you should always book,

it depends on the country, but you wanna book like above the third or fourth floor, but below the 10th in a hotel. And the reason for that is because above the 10th or so, most of the fire truck ladders can't get to you, but below the third or fourth, you're at risk from car bombs. And so you wanna be in this kind of sweet spot where if a car bomb goes off

at the bottom, you might not be blown to pieces and then, you know, you're not so high that, that the fireman can get to you. And there, there were a few others in there about basically assuming you're always being watched and if someone leaves an unwanted present on your bed, you shouldn't disturb it because it'll be a professional slight. Well, with those fantastic tips, which I'm sure our audience will take on board for their holiday booking over the summer. I will say thank you very much.

We'll link to it in the show notes to the video. Well thanks for listening and see you for the next episode on Monday. All right. See you next time. Hello, it's Gordon here and if you've been enjoying The Rest is Classified and are after more espionage content, I've got very good news for you. We have ways of making you talk. Another podcast from Goalhanger that focuses solely on World War II has just released a special series on female spies during the Second World War and it's featuring the brilliant Claire Mulley, a friend of mine and an amazing historian.

Now amongst the stories they're going to discuss is the tale of Krystyna Skarbek, the Polish beauty queen who became an SOE agent and undertook extraordinarily dangerous missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France. Such was her success that she was once described as Churchill's favourite spy. To give you a taster, here's a clip from the series. Just give us this amazing woman. Absolutely, an incredible woman. Without hesitation, deviation or repetition, just a minute on Christina Skarbek. Well, we were talking about being the originals, you know, the originals of the SAS the other day. She is the original.

She is first woman to serve Britain as a special agent even before SOE was established and actually the longest serving special agent, male or female, for Britain during the Second World War. Sure. Yeah, indeed. Six years, six years. Extraordinary. female for Britain during the Second World War. Yeah indeed six years six years. So yeah she was banging on the door of SIS MI6 in 1939. Not so much volunteering as demanding to be taken on. Yeah and of course the young men in there and they were all young men just laughed at her. What's her motivation for that? Well she's Polish-born, Kristina Skarbek or Christine Granville. She's living in England, is she by this point? No, she was actually then married to her second husband, who was a diplomat in Southern Africa

when they heard the news of the outbreak. So they turned around to come back to serve their nation, Poland, but they had to come back with wartime conditions very slowly and convoy around sort of possible submarine areas. So by the time they got back, Poland, of course, never capitulated, but had fallen and been occupied and divided. And so she felt that the fastest way she could join the Allied effort was to volunteer for the British Special Forces. So there she is demanding to be taken on and they just laugh at her because she's not British. And above all, she's a woman and there are no women doing this work. But she's just too good to be turned down.

How does she know which doorbell to ring to go and see SIS? Well I mean she she'd done a bit of journalism before the war and she definitely was moving in those circles in Poland and internationally. Yeah she'd been in Paris, her husband was a well-known diplomat so yes she had contacts we don't entirely know but we know some people who could have put her in touch. Adjacent enough. Exactly. And after all, journalism, diplomacy. There is some interface. Lots of people double-hatting in those worlds. Exactly. So, yeah, so because she served directly for Britain during the Second World War, most of her papers are in the National Archives at Kew. And the first member in there is really

fantastic. It's these young men who describe her as expert skier, a great adventurous and absolutely fearless. But what I loved is one of them had penciled in the margin, but she terrifies me. That gives you an idea of her character. And despite everything, you know, she had, she was a good horse. They couldn't look in the mouth. She had the right contacts.

She spoke the right languages and she knew the secret routes in and out of occupied Poland because as a rather bored countess at the when she was married to her first husband actually she used to smuggle cigarettes by skiing over the high Tatra Mountains in and out and actually she didn't even smoke she was one of the few women in 1930s Europe who didn't smoke she just did it for kicks just for the thrill of it but it meant she knew the smuggling routes in and out of the mountains. So in February 1941 for instance she's it, but it meant she knew the smuggling routes in and out of the mountain. So in February 1941, for instance, she's taking microfilm.

Yeah, she served in three different theatres of the war. So this is the first one. She is serving as sort of working in intelligence and as a courier. Yeah. She made the first contact between Britain and the fledgling resistance in Poland, which of course is the first occupied nation. So Britain's desperate to find out what's going on in the country. So she skis in, gets rid of her skis, and then she goes around the country, she makes contact with the resistance, she collects information from them, but she also undertakes her own intelligence going around the country, seeing where troop

movements are and so on, and then takes microfilm and other material, first coding information so we could establish radio contact with the Polish resistance skis back over the mountains to Budapest where she's based and hands it over to both Polish and British resistance contest Can we just go back a bit because she's arrived in London in 1939 Back end of 1939 says you need to take me on there. They eventually say yes. Okay fine. Yep, then what I mean We're just training. I know well, she was she's trained later trained later on she's trained in 41 she's volunteered to MI6 SAS that's right so she's been taken on by SAS so they do give her a false identity she's sent to Budapest and she's meant to be a French journalist I mean among her

language skills she's completely fluent in French and that's not unusual Hungary hasn't fallen yet there's lots of international journalists there, seeing what's going on in Eastern Europe. So she's sent out there and from there she independently goes across the mountains. So she does make contact with the fledgling Polish resistance. The first time she skied in is actually with a pre-war Olympic Polish skiing champion, which is quite handy. And then when she comes back, she makes contact with the man, Andrew Kowerski, who becomes one of her main partners in the war. He's a one legged veteran. He's got a prosthetic one wooden leg, which is quite useful, actually,

because he whittled a hole in it and would hide information in his leg. These people don't write novels. We just touched on that moment ago, the S.O.E, the creation of S.O.E. And she predates this. But this is really the sort of significant thing that happens in British efforts to famously set Europe ablaze. I mean, we're doing a podcast about secret agents, about SOE. We have to say set Europe ablaze or we'll be run out of town, won't we?

We have to get through that bit. Yeah. And this is really, really important, isn't it? Because when we've talked about SIS here, but here's an actually separate organization being set up quite deliberately. Partly under the wing of SIS, even though there was huge problems between them. Well, yes, I mean, it's sort of Venn diagram, they're sort of phasing and out of one another as the war runs. And is SOE under SIS' purview? It wasn't, but it was partly from SIS, partly from Section D, D for Destruction, which is, you know, Big Bang Sabotage, which is partly why SIS's purview? It wasn't, but it was partly from SIS, partly from Section D, D for destruction,

which is, you know, big bang sabotage, which is partly why SIS, of course, which is silent intelligence didn't get on with them. And if you want to hear those episodes search, we have ways of making you talk wherever you get your podcasts.