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- [00:00]
David McClarsky
Foreign this episode is brought to you by our new friends at NordVPN. Now, Gordon, you have been a NordVPN user for over a year now. And why in the world do you like them so much?
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Gordon Carrera
So many reasons, David. But one feature in particular that I love is that with just one subscription you can keep multiple devices safe up to 10 at once with the NordVPN app. So I've got a lot of phones and laptops around the house which I've used over the years in various places. And to keep the all safe and secure, I do use that NordVPN.
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David McClarsky
You can also protect unlimited devices on your router by using NordVPN, which means that it is perfect for keeping your family safe online when they're using social media, email, banking online, or really anything for that matter.
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Gordon Carrera
If you want to ensure that you're safe online, you should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. All you need to do is go to nordvpn.com restisclassified and when you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your subscription plan. And there's no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box.
- [01:11]
Ryan Reynolds
Exclusively on AMC and AMC Plus.
- [01:13]
Gordon Carrera
There's a black cloud that hangs over our family.
- [01:17]
David McClarsky
Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches Return.
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Ryan Reynolds
Slasher's out there hunting Mayfair women.
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Gordon Carrera
You're gonna have a battle on your hands.
- [01:24]
David McClarsky
Starring Alexandra Daddario.
- [01:26]
Gordon Carrera
I'm gonna take care of it.
- [01:27]
David McClarsky
Of him.
- [01:28]
Ryan Reynolds
Surrender to the darkness. It's not Not a sin to kill the devil. Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches Sundays exclusively on AMC and amc.
- [01:41]
David McClarsky
Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet resolutions.
- [01:47]
Gordon Carrera
A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is.
- [01:53]
David McClarsky
To not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get.
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Gordon Carrera
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Ryan Reynolds
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- [02:18]
Gordon Carrera
Hello everyone and welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm Gordon CARRERA.
- [02:22]
David McClarsky
I'm David McClarsky.
- [02:23]
Gordon Carrera
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?
- [02:54]
David McClarsky
That's right. It's one of our favorite subjects, TikTok or deny. 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?
- [03:07]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. Anthony Scaramucci.
- [03:08]
David McClarsky
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?
- [03:25]
Gordon Carrera
That is right. It's still going. It's still there. It's not, you know, might. Might live on.
- [03:29]
David McClarsky
No, it's true because over the weekend I logged into TikTok to watch Wiggle Wiggle dance videos and I could not.
- [03:37]
Gordon Carrera
Wow.
- [03:37]
David McClarsky
All right. Because it was shut down.
- [03:39]
Gordon Carrera
Is that how you spend your weekends, David? Sorry, sorry. Is that you spent your weekends or Chick Wiggle Wiggle?
- [03:44]
David McClarsky
Yes, I logged in for my normal ration of mu dang pygmy hippopotamus videos, Wiggle Wiggle dance videos and cucumber recipes.
- [03:52]
Gordon Carrera
And you couldn't get them. You'd been denied.
- [03:55]
David McClarsky
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.
- [04:16]
Gordon Carrera
And I'm very pleased for you about that. We should say that this is all to do with, you know, the reasons given are national security and spies.
- [04:23]
David McClarsky
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 and 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 ban'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 kind of like, what's keeping this guy up at night? Whole piece was written as his kind of journal entry because he was an avid journaler. And it is a way. 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.
- [06:04]
Gordon Carrera
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?
- [06:41]
David McClarsky
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.
- [08:07]
Gordon Carrera
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 going to 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 others things?
- [08:53]
David McClarsky
Yeah. And I think we should state up front that, you know, the sort of, I guess, back end 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, how they all connect and how they share information yeah.
- [09:44]
Gordon Carrera
And which the company denies. Yeah.
- [09:46]
David McClarsky
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?
- [10:01]
Gordon Carrera
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.
- [10:58]
David McClarsky
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 kind of 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 am 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'd call algorithmic manipulation, or a sort of algorithmic cognitive kind of warfare. Right. 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 Chinese intelligence officer or military officer, I'd be thinking about TikTok. Now, this is a much broader topic than TikTok, too. We're sort of, in some ways, talking about a massive strategic competition. We're focusing in on, like, one weapon system, 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.
- [13:14]
Gordon Carrera
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 is that? 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 or whatever it is, why. Why do their contacts or, you know, whatever it else it is, why might that be useful to the Chinese mss, the Ministry of State Security?
- [14:05]
David McClarsky
The mss Hippo analysts have been just working overtime 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, you know, 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. So 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.
- [15:46]
Gordon Carrera
As you said, people put this stuff on LinkedIn, they put it in lots of other places. So it's not necessarily the most sensitive data about people or that hard to find.
- [15:54]
David McClarsky
We also have abysmal data privacy laws here in the States, too, which make it easy to just buy the stuff.
- [15:59]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, you could buy the stuff. There's data brokers who sell that kind of, you know, geolocated 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 data sets, 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. I mean, China's stolen some very sensitive data sets 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, you know, forms saying, have you done drugs? You know, have you got money problems?
- [16:42]
David McClarsky
It's standard form 86 SF 86. 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.
- [17:15]
Gordon Carrera
Was stolen by China. And I mean, we should be clear.
- [17:17]
David McClarsky
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 I think from the standpoint of the data scientists in some godforsaken 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.
- [18:11]
Gordon Carrera
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 Officer 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.
- [18:44]
David McClarsky
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. So it's a matter of who could get it, as opposed to this being some kind of egregious breach right off the bat from, you know, collecting your own personal data or anything like that.
- [19:31]
Gordon Carrera
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 Nord?
- [19:53]
David McClarsky
Well, I really like NordVPN's Threat Protection Pro, which is an incredibly powerful and effective antivirus 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.
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Gordon Carrera
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- [20:28]
David McClarsky
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- [20:49]
Ryan Reynolds
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David McClarsky
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- [21:17]
Gordon Carrera
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?
- [21:40]
David McClarsky
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, your phone, like your messages, your emails, you know, 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 and that it's locked away in the vault at NSA or Langley or wherever. But if I'm a, if I'm a Chinese Sort of intelligence officer. I think I've actually got other, you know, 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, temu, 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 Temu 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.
- [23:50]
Gordon Carrera
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 Banbury 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. And I mean, they both checked the code to see whether any kind of hidden malicious software. But they also physically took apart the kind of routers and the systems to see if there was anything there. And they spent years doing this, looking for these backdoors. And they found some kind of, you know, little problems with the code, but no evidence of those kind of deliberate malicious attempts to use it to spy. And 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 backdoors 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?
- [25:32]
David McClarsky
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, 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, government apparatus talk and write 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.
- [27:24]
Gordon Carrera
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? And 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, you know, critical of China, to boost, perhaps if you want to boost division in a country by boosting certain things. And of course this is all done through that secret source of the algorithm which is held by the company, which is, it's very interesting in the current discussions about, you know, whether or not TikTok should be sold or banned. The one thing that parent company don't want to do is give up control of that secret algorithm. But that's where, if you like, the power lies. And I mean 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. And the argument was, and it raised a question, the piece really, and it seemed a really well reported piece, whether it 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. And I think we are all understanding much more how social media can shape the way we see the world. And you know, 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, and Instagram. How far can they dial down or dial up certain things? You know, 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, you know that, that it's, it's changing what the kinds of things people are being fed. And that is really the interesting question, isn't it? Is 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.
- [29:44]
David McClarsky
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 am 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 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 casus belli 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, you know, 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. And 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.
- [34:04]
Gordon Carrera
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 done with that. And I think absolutely this is the interesting area with TikTok because, you know, some of the other things we talked about, you know, delivering malware or spying on people, you can do that in other ways. I mean, you know, going back to telecoms, you know, the Chinese, we've just learned, you know, a kind of hacking group have 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, can do the kind of spying or data collection in different ways. But when it comes to that kind of algorithmic manipulation, that is something where you need a platform which reaches a.
- [35:01]
David McClarsky
Lot of people and where it's helpful to own the data, not, not necessarily to steal it. Or buy it, and to own the.
- [35:08]
Gordon Carrera
Algorithm and to have that under your control now, Absolutely. This is a theoretical risk rather than 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 be going to want to use it in the future? It would be very useful to have that capability in case I ever needed it. And I guess it goes back to that point, which is, you know, 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, you know, more than just competitive relationship between the US 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.
- [36:02]
David McClarsky
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.
- [36:20]
Gordon Carrera
Written, a Presidential Daily Brief, a Presidential.
- [36:23]
David McClarsky
Daily Brief article written, you know, for Biden or the first Trump administration that sort of walked through a case study of how TikTok was manipulated to affect some outcome. Right. But I mean, 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, you know, 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 kind of a lot of the reaction to the TikTok ban 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 intent around information and cognitive warfare in Beijing that I think has set off red lights in D.C. 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.
- [38:12]
Gordon Carrera
Show the threat, I think to conclude it is us. China. Competition is, you know, is the big story. The centre 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?
- [38:42]
David McClarsky
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, 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?
- [39:08]
Gordon Carrera
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 TikTok videos. Say goodbye to your Chinese spy, do your wiggle dance, whatever, whatever it is you're about to do next. Good luck.
- [39:39]
David McClarsky
That's right. I'm back to. I'm back to just doom scrolling mudang pygmy hippo videos here for the rest of the night. So you know, you know where to find me. I think this, the cognitive warfare on me is just. It mostly just shut my brain down, I think.
- [39:52]
Gordon Carrera
And what was your viral video, I forgot to ask earlier. What, what was your, what was your video that went viral? Were you dancing?
- [39:58]
David McClarsky
No, it was. There was no dancing. There was no dancing. It was tips on booking a hotel room from a former CIA guy and it included such bombshells as you should always book. It depends on the country, but you want to book like above the third or fourth floor, but below the tenth 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 want to be in this kind of sweet spot where if the 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.
- [40:51]
Gordon Carrera
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.
- [40:59]
David McClarsky
We'll link to it in the show notes to the video.
- [41:01]
Gordon Carrera
Well, thanks for listening and see you for the next episode on Monday.
- [41:04]
David McClarsky
All right, see you next time.
- [41:14]
Gordon Carrera
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 Goal Hanger that focuses solely on. 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 Mully, a friend of mine and an amazing historian. Now, amongst the stories they're going to discuss is the tale of Christina Skaek, 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 a. This amazing woman.
- [42:05]
David McClarsky
Absolutely incredible.
- [42:07]
Gordon Carrera
Without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Just a minute. On Christina Scarbeck. Well, we were talking about being the originals, you know, the originals of the SAS the other day. She is the original.
- [42:18]
Ryan Reynolds
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. 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.
- [42:40]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [42:41]
Ryan Reynolds
And of course, the young men in there, and they were all young men just laughed at her.
- [42:44]
Gordon Carrera
Okay, but what's her motivation for that?
- [42:45]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, she's Polish born Christina Scarbak, or Christian.
- [42:48]
Gordon Carrera
She's living in England.
- [42:49]
David McClarsky
Did she buy this one?
- [42:50]
Ryan Reynolds
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 in 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, 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.
- [43:28]
Gordon Carrera
How does she know which doorbell to ring to go and see sis?
- [43:31]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, I mean she, she'd done a bit of journalism before the war and she definitely was moving in those circles, in parent and internationally. Yeah, she'd been in Paris, her husband was a well known diplomat. So yeah, she had contacts we don't entirely know, but we know some people.
- [43:45]
Gordon Carrera
Who could have put adjacent enough.
- [43:47]
Ryan Reynolds
Exactly.
- [43:47]
Gordon Carrera
And after all journalism, diplomacy, there is some interface. Lots of people double hatting in those worlds.
- [43:54]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, 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 memoir in there is really fantastic. It's these young men who describe her as expert skier, a great adventuress 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 guitar. They couldn't look in the mouth. She had the right contact, 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 smell smoke. She just did it for kicks, just for the thrill of it. But it meant she knew the smuggling routes right in and out of the mountain.
- [44:50]
Gordon Carrera
So in February 1941, for instance, she's taking microfilm.
- [44:53]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, she served in three different theaters of the war. So this is the first one she is serving as sort of working in intelligence and as a courier.
- [45:00]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [45:00]
Ryan Reynolds
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. Contact.
- [45:38]
Gordon Carrera
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. They eventually say, yes, okay, fine, yep. Then what? I mean, she's got training.
- [45:49]
Ryan Reynolds
No, well, she's trained later on.
- [45:51]
Gordon Carrera
She was trained in 41, she's volunteered to MI6.
- [45:54]
David McClarsky
SIS.
- [45:54]
Ryan Reynolds
That's right.
- [45:55]
Gordon Carrera
So she's been taken on by SIS.
- [45:57]
Ryan Reynolds
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. French. And that's not unusual. Hungary hasn't fallen yet. There's lots of international journalists based there, seeing what's going on in Eastern Europe. So she's sent out there and from there she independently goes across the mountains and she does make contact with the fledgling Polish resistance. The first time she skied in is actually with the pre war Olympic Polish skiing champion, which is quite handy. And then when she comes back, she makes contact with the man, Andrew Kowirski, who becomes one of her main partners in the war, who'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, hide stuff in his leg. This is why I don't write novels, you know.
- [46:44]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, we just touched on it a moment ago that soe, the creation of soe, and she predates this. But this is really the sort of significant thing that happens in British efforts to famously set Europe a place. 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 use 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.
- [47:15]
Ryan Reynolds
Wing of sis, even though there was, you know, huge problems between them.
- [47:18]
Gordon Carrera
Well, yes. I mean, it's sort of Venn diagram. They sort of phase in and out of one another as the war runs. And is SOE under SIS's purview or warning?
- [47:27]
Ryan Reynolds
It wasn't, but it was partly from sis, partly from Section D for destruction, which is Big Bang sabotage, which is partly why sis, of course, which is Silent Intelligence, didn't get on with them.
- [47:36]
Gordon Carrera
And if you want to hear those episodes, search, we have ways of making you talk wherever you get your podcasts.