Are you a "foreign adversary"?

Because the language in the TikTok bill expands the definition to include individual American citizens

Apr 08, 2024

The key words to remember are foreign adversary. Because the language in the TikTok bill expands the definition to include individual American citizens.

On February 21, 2018, I — along with thousands of other users on twitter — woke up to find that my account had been disabled because I (we) had “interacted” with an account that was affiliated with a foreign adversary. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know that, it didn’t matter that we had zero intention to cavort electronically or otherwise with any foreign adversary, it didn’t matter what else we might have to say in our defense — persons in a position of authority had already decided that we would be ex-communicated. Punished for a thought/speech crime — that never occurred — without due process.

But I, being what they sometimes refer to as “resourceful,” logged into my connected periscope account and went live from the Target parking lot near my job in Apple Valley, MN because I knew that thousands of my twitter followers who had also opted in to receive alerts whenever I went live on periscope would tweet for me and share my broadcast. (This periscope went viral and led to my account getting between 1.1 and 1.4 million tweet views per month for the next year. The night of the 2020 election, my periscope was disabled on the back end, and no one ever received an alert that I’d gone live again.)

So, on that freezing Midwest morning, standing outside in the parking lot amidst feet of freshly plowed-into-piles winter snow, with my best “bedd uh-Russian accent,” I declared on the livestream, “Twitter!! You have busted me! It is I, Svetlana Louise Reynolds — I know it looks like I’m in a Target parking lot in United States but really, I am in Moscow!!”

Finally, three days after verifying my phone number, my account was restored. The correlation between Trump supporting accounts and those which were suspended (like mine) cuddled up awfully close to causation, let’s put it that way.

Fast forward six years. The deep state is shitting their darpa diaper pants. Trump is the Republican nominee, Trump is polling through the roof in swing states where it counts, Biden’s numbers are doing their best impression of the Dow in ’08, and now that Republicans are hip to the mail-in ballot game too, the “masters of the universe” (they actually call themselves that at McLean McMansion parties) are panicking. What if Trump actually does win — again??? laments the Deep State.

And, six years later, Twitter, originally funded by In-Q-Tel, the technology investment arm of the CIA, is dead. The origin story is old news and is such an open secret that even CBS was telling it back in 2011. Basically, monitoring a thousand different message boards was tedious and time-consuming for our federal government so someone had the bright idea of making one giant board and introducing the concept of hashtags so people could flag and categorize their posts themselves. But would they? They would and did. Uncle Sam’s minions couldn’t call it Chatter because that would have been too obvious. So “twitter” — referring to what noise everyone is making, who repeated/retweeted it, who has the most power of influence and gets the most repeats/retweets — was born. The only problem was that it didn’t draw enough normal healthy suggestible easily influenced users. It drew the opposite type of personality. Twitter became an echo chamber and fell on its own divide and conquer sword. Rest in peace, DARPA failure app, RIP. TikTok, in stark contrast, is alive, pulsating with energy and influence, and though it uses hashtags, this particular tool of mass emotion control isn’t operated under the backdoor auspices of the American intelligence apparatus. As a reminder, all mind-control starts with emotion-control: induce love or hate or apathy first; second, trigger the associated thought in the mind, i.e. Trump supporters are racist or voting doesn’t matter; third, inspire or compel the action or inaction (voting or not voting, calling your Senator or not calling) of the viewer. The CIA called this type of psychological operation “hearts, minds, feet” during the Vietnam War. The hearts and mind campaign comes first (specifically, emotion control first, mind control second), then “vote with your feet” was the slogan (i.e. command statement) used to inspire (induce) the migration of North Vietnamese people to South Vietnam. Bottom line? TikTok does everything twitter was supposed to but to a younger more impressionable audience (the demographic with whom twitter was least popular). And 170 million Americans use TikTok — that’s more than half of us. Only 23% of Americans answered yes to the 2021 Pew Research survey question, “have you ever used twitter?” Ever! To say even less of the active user base which is marginal when compared to TikTok.

TikTok came of age during the pandemic, providing Gibraltar level certainty and consistency (reliability of presence) to young people during a time of terrifying — for them — uncertainty. For many Gen Z-ers, an attack on TikTok is perceived as a personal attack on themselves and their sense of safety and security. They have and will continue to fight any attempt to ban TikTok, tooth and nail. So what happened when thousands of them called their Representative in the House to demand that they oppose the bill? The legislative aid on the other end of the line explained, oh, no, you don’t understand, there’s a security risk. The Chinese government could access your user data. [This problem is solved in seconds with the use of a VPN.] And, the app could be used to try to influence you during an election season!!

And there it is. That pesky freedom of speech. The ability to state — freely and loudly enough to be heard — that something is wrong. Just as with 2016 twitter and the sharing of 100% authentic DNC emails about spirit cooking and sacrifices to Moloch, and as with 2021 twitter and the sharing of math and science-derived facts about the ineffectiveness of non-N95 masks, the harm being perpetrated against children because of lockdowns, and the antibody dependence enhancement caused by experimental vaccines, and their obvious decreasing efficacy. Hilariously, our government was so overwhelmed by the onslaught of nonstop Covid truth-jaculations from Alex Berenson and others, valiant tweet-swimmer after tweet-swimmer fighting for the egg of the American mind, eruption after eruption coalescing into an incessant geyser of reality, so sticky and immovable that even an army comprised of every snowplow in the states of MN, ND, SD, and WI combined could not clean up that coast-to-coast explosion of information, that the feds had to come up with a new label for truth so ironclad! Malinformation. Literally, information that is true but that the government doesn’t like.

But the truth will out. And it feels. So good.

But Deep State (ok, State of Wisconsin) Representative Mike Gallagher might feel differently. He says this about TikTok and why he and his colleagues urgently need to pass this bill (as of this writing, it has passed the House, and a date for voting on the passage has not yet been set for the Senate):

“The fundamental danger is that TikTok is owned by ByteDance, and ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. So, from this flow two concerns, one being the security of Americans' data on the platform, but the other, and I think broader concern, is the potential for this platform to be used for the propaganda purposes of the Chinese Communist Party […]. Imagine what could happen the closer we get to an election. The unclassified director of national intelligence assessment released yesterday said, TikTok is already being used to target members of Congress in both parties politically.”

Oh, is that what the DNI said? Now is this a person from the same team as (in chronological order) “the Gulf of Tonkin incident” and “weapons of mass destruction” and “Russian Wikileaks” and “Hunter Biden’s laptop is Chinese disinfo” and “the Covid vaccine is safe and effective”? We’re Americans. There was a time when the vast majority of us were loathe to believe anything someone claimed unless they provided evidence, and if it was someone from the government talking, we knew to be extra skeptical and extra wary of the veracity of their claims.

But if the bill does pass in the Senate and President Biden signs it into law, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance would have to sell TikTok within 180 days or the app would be banned in the United States, per AP.

Now history show us that all bans do is drive behavior into secrecy (to wit, Prohibition). If TikTok were to be banned, I think it would follow that the use of VPN’s could become as ubiquitous as TikTok itself. Lots of actually terrible sites on the internet are “illegal.” People use their free will and a VPN (and sometimes Tor) to view them anyway. (As an aside, “VPN stands for virtual private network; it establishes a digital connection between your computer and a remote server owned by a VPN provider, creating a point-to-point tunnel that encrypts your personal data, masks your IP address, and lets you sidestep website blocks and firewalls on the internet.” Per google.)

But (AND) the real danger of this bill is that its text contains a whole new definition of the phrase “foreign adversary.”

Find the full text of the bill here but first, let’s take a look at the crux of the bill:

This Act may be cited as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”.

Ok, so we know TikTok is just the first app they want to target. Not the only. (And the text further delineates later in the bill that app [short for application] could mean a website that has no corresponding app, because all apps have a website, but not all websites have an app.)

The gist of the bill:

To protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications, such as TikTok and any successor application or service and any other application or service developed or provided by ByteDance Ltd. or an entity under the control of ByteDance Ltd.

But we are assured that, “following the issuance [by the President of the United States] of—

(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and

(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture”

… that there would be a process, which would generously, and not dictatorially or autocratically at all, allow for judicial review, such as:

“(a) Right Of Action.—A petition for review challenging this Act or any action, finding, or determination under this Act may be filed only in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

(b) Exclusive Jurisdiction.—The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any challenge to this Act or any action, finding, or determination under this Act.”

So, Cocoon of Love . gov, tell us, what’s a foreign adversary?

Ohhhh. Snuck C in there with such grace and candor! It’s “a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person….” A person subject to the direction of a person. And which elected official gets to determine — without due process — that person A was in truth directed by person B? Why, the President of course (as mentioned above). Not a judge. Not a jury.

But don’t worry. We will have the opportunity to prove our innocence — after the fact — by challenging this determination in the D.C. Court of Appeals “not later than 165 days after the date of the enactment of this Act.” Even though there was no first verdict because there was no first trial. No, the President already decreed your guilt in round one so we can fast-forward straight to the appeals court. You get to petition them (i.e. beg) for a review of the determination. In this way, the government can perpetually delay this review while your ability to exist in an online space is “suspended” … indefinitely.

Ok, now that last part (the 165 day timeframe to appeal the President’s “determination”) seems to only apply to what the bill defines as “a covered company,” such as TikTok or ByteDance. But either way, let’s put this type of law into historical context. Did you ever imagine in your worst Bill of Rights Cemetery nightmare that the 2001 AUMF would be used to justify the drone assassination of an American citizen living overseas in 2011? Without charge or trial? Did you? I didn’t! And I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 in the theater and had a “disappearing Bill of Rights” mug from the ACLU! (You filled it with hot liquid and the image of the Ten Amendments disappeared. Nowadays the ACLU loves body autonomy-violating forced vaccination, and Michael Moore is a lost person.) And per wikipedia: “Today, the full list of actors the U.S. military is fighting or believes itself authorized to fight under the 2001 AUMF is classified.” Twenty-three years later, it’s as active and legal as the day it was passed in the aftermath of 9/11. And just as secret.

Bringing us (and me in a very visceral way) full circle to the day thousands of us woke up in 2018, unable to express our 1st Amendment right to publicly dissent (or even tweet cat memes) on twitter because the government had pre-decreed our guilt. No due process. No charge. No trial. I wasn’t even told what I tweeted (or retweeted) that made them think I was suspect! (To say nothing of the fact that our government coerced a private company to act as a de facto arm of the state.) And that happened under President Trump. The Swamp drained back, ladies and gentlemen. Now, I read this bill several times. See if you too don’t smell the groundwork being laid for a future law giving the President “or his agents” the authority to restrain foreign adversaries from spreading malinformation online. An AUMF for the internet era, we might say. Instead of an Authorization for Use of Military Force, imagine an Authorization for the Protection from Foreign Adversaries Online. But first things first — you start by establishing a definition of a foreign adversary so vague that anyone could fall into that category.

Remember the idea of a “surgical” drone strike in our (ongoing) Global War on Terror? It’s the concept of remotely eliminating a threat with the technological ability to precisely kill only the one person who presents the danger. This is what (it appears) the government wants to be able to do to individual writers and content creators — people like you, people like me, whose moral compass drives us to protest injustice and object to abuse of power by authority. Instead of attacking the whole First Amendment, they’ve realized an easier strategy is to remotely silence the few influential speakers. And eliminate their reach. Oh, you retweeted “Russian” Wikileaks? Clearly, you were under the direction of a foreign adversary. Says who? None of your business. Which foreign adversary? Sorry, only members of congress invited to the “classified annex” can know that. It’s top secret. In the name of “freedom” and “anti-censorship,” leave the Wikileaks account alone and “free” to post videos or text. Then silence anyone who attempts to repost it. And compared to twitter (X), TikTok is actually widely used. If twitter is your gossipy chatty neighbor, TikTok is the 8th grade mean girl rumor mill. Everyone’s gonna know by third period. Once a message gets out, it’s unstoppable.

So, when this “TikTok” bill comes up for a vote by the Senate, I will be the first to let you know, and I’ll provide sample text for both calling and writing your two US Senators.

On a happier note, Elon Musk’s X now allows in-app livestreams! You can heart and comment, just as before with periscope, only it’s all in X without a separate periscope app. I figured this out last week and have gone live twice!

****** VERY IMPORTANT PERSONAL LIFE UPDATE for longtime readers******

I have some good news: I started going to AA meetings last summer and now have 7 months of sobriety under my belt and feel great about it. It should go without saying that this also means I am ***not*** suicidal!

Last April (of 2023), someone (the police have no idea who) did this to me in the hallway of my own secure apartment building.

(That’s a screenshot of the photo in my camera roll so I could capture the date - this photo was taken 2 days after the incident.) Other bizarre things have happened in the 12 months since. But I’m still not moving out of DC, and I literally have a spiritual belief that my life’s mission is to object to abuse of power by authority and protest injustice and inspire others to do so too. Thank you, God, for giving me the fortitude and perseverance to continue. So! Just letting you good people know. And, my face and eye (the left eye that was swollen shut for two weeks) fully healed, thank goodness. No scar either from the scrape from my eye to my nose— I applied 96% Aloe Vera (Aloderma brand in case you find yourself needing to prevent a scar) every day twice a day with amazing results over time.

If you’d like to support my work with a paid subscription, I would be honored. I would also love your feedback!

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