Arabs and Israelis to forge defence alliance; U.S. suspicion of TikTok resurfaces

And fresh sanctions on Iranian oil trade network

Happy Thursday, China watchers. This week’s China news revolves around how the west is waking up to China’s potential interference in its democracy and how everybody’s life could be affected by it. First, let’s take a close look at the user privacy concerns over the soon-to-be world’s third-largest social network, TikTok. 

The U.S. is raising the app’s national security concern, again. 

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Tuesday to investigate whether China could have access to U.S. user data. 

What is the claim? Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat of Virginia who heads the Intelligence Committee, and the panel’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio co-wrote a letter to the FTC, expressing their concern about TikTok’s user data being accessible to employees of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The letter challenged the social media giant’s previous claims that the company has “no affiliation” with its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, of which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) owns a partial stake.

The leaked recordings: In June, Buzzfeed News obtained more than 80 internal TikTok meetings that showed China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users. The internal recordings tracked a variety of internal meetings which are complemented by screenshots and other documents. According to the report, user data was accessed much more often and recently than previously revealed.

What is TikTok’s relationship with Beijing? You are not the only person who has that question. In fact, many countries in the west have repeatedly questioned its ties with the authoritarian regime where the ruling party’s power is paramount. In the U.S., the company was first put under intense scrutiny in 2020 when President Trump said he would ban the app from the U.S.. Unlike Trump’s other rather unfounded claims, the national security concern over the foreign-owned company was backed by both Democrats and Republicans as well as bipartisan experts. The U.S. government was not the only one with suspicion over the app. Amazon had asked its employees to delete the app then backtracked the demand. India also permanently banned the platform along with 58 other Chinese apps last January. 

TikTok backpedals on its previous claims: Trump’s executive order banning TikTok was revoked by Joe Biden and the company’s chief security officer Roland Cloutier did claim in court documents that TikTok’s servers are “entirely separate” from its Chinese parent company ByteDance to fight against the sanction in 2020. In an interview with CyberScoop, the CSO went a step further. 

“The data doesn’t even exist in China … but the biggest fundamental truths are that the Chinese government doesn’t ask for it, because it doesn’t exist in China,” he said.

However, in a letter last week to nine U.S. Republican senators, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew acknowledged that China-based employees, in fact, can have access to user data.  

“Employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to

TikTok U.S. user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls….” 

Moreover, Chew said that the company expects "to delete U.S. users' protected data from our own systems and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S."

So can we trust TikTok or not? While the jump from TikTok being owed by a Chinese company to it posing a privacy threat might seem like a stretch to some, given the amount of power the authoritarian regime has over its private sector, experts and lawmakers have confirmed the validity of the assumption. In an interview with CBC, John Zabiuk, chair of the cybersecurity program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, said that if the company has access to the user data, it's safe to assume the Chinese government does, too. This Washington Post article also gives a good breakdown of why lawmakers, despite the company’s reassurances, remain skeptical about its independence from the Chinese government. 

A quick look: The British government has delayed its final decision on whether the country’s largest producer of semiconductors can be bought by a Chinese-owned manufacturer, according to the Financial Times. The business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said he needed two more months to analyze the purchase of Newport Wafer Fab by Nexperia, a Dutch firm wholly owned by China’s Wingtech. The decision comes amid a wider cooling of relations between London and Beijing. The request was made under the new National Security and Investment Act, which came into force on Jan. 4 this year, allowing greater scrutiny of foreign takeovers of companies in critical industries.

Unprecedented joint warning on Chinese spying: The U.S. and U.K. intelligence chiefs issued a warning on China’s industrial spying, calling Beijing the “biggest long-term threat to economic security.” Christopher Wray and Ken McCallum sounded the alarm about the longstanding concerns related to economic espionage and hacking operations by China, as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to muffle dissents abroad. Wray told business owners that Beijing is determined to steal their technology for competitive gain.

“We consistently see that it’s the Chinese government that poses the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security, and by ‘our’, I mean both of our nations, along with our allies in Europe and elsewhere,” Wray said.

Hello, Beyond the West readers! As Muslims in the Middle East and across the world are busy preparing for Eid al-Adha this weekend (here’s an infographic on what the holiday is), the battle between Iran and the U.S. continues. In this week’s edition, we’re looking at the most recent U.S. efforts to further alienate Iran through sanctions and a ground-breaking air defence network.

Once antagonists, Arab countries and Israel are forging a defence alliance.

The U.S. is brokering a deal that would connect Arab and Israeli air defence systems to combat the threat of Iranian missile and drone attacks in the Middle East, according to Breaking Defence.

The details: Israel announced the coalition, known as the Middle East Air Defense Alliance (MEAD), in June without much detail. Israeli sources later revealed that participating countries would be required to place early-warning sensors connected through a unified communications network overseen by the U.S. Central Command. 

The agreement would also allow countries to purchase the sensors from Israel, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago given the strained and in some cases non-existent diplomatic relations between the Arabs and Israel.

The cooperation won’t be entirely built from scratch. Israel’s defence minister said MEAD is based on an existing program and has already allowed Israel to intercept an Iranian drone attack in 2021 using real-time intelligence collected outside the state. The drones were intercepted before they entered Israel’s airspace “in coordination with neighbouring countries.” 

Who’s in favour? Countries potentially participating in the alliance include Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. Delegations from the five countries, as well as Qatar, met U.S. and Israel Defence Forces (IDF) representatives last month in the Egyptian town of Sharm el-Sheikh. 

Positioning the sensors could be particularly useful for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Iran is believed to be responsible for several drone and ballistic missile attacks on oil facilities and infrastructure in the two countries, the biggest of which happened in 2019. The majority of the attacks were executed by the Iran-backed Houthis in relation to the seven-year Yemen war.

Israel will possibly be the biggest winner if the agreement is finalized since the positioning of radars on the Gulf coast will give the state additional early warning of any attacks, an expert told Reuters.

The alliance is reportedly facing resistance from Iraq, Qatar, and Kuwait. The three countries have been strongly opposed to strengthening ties with Israel on multiple occasions.

A project long in the making: The idea for an integrated missile defence has been around for years and successive U.S. administrations have tried to overcome Gulf states’ mistrust in sharing intelligence with Israel. 

MEAD discussions are making headlines about one year after the U.S. Department of Defense transferred Israel from the U.S. European Command to the Central Command, a U.S. military organization responsible for protecting American security interests in an area stretching from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. The move was touted as a chance to deepen operational collaboration between the IDF and the Central Command’s many partners in the region, including the Gulf countries.

What to look out for: Discussing the alliance is a “set goal” for U.S. President Joe Biden’s July visit to the Middle East, an Israeli D.C. official told Reuters. Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said last June that Biden’s visit will help "integrate Israel into the Middle East.” 

The U.S. imposes fresh sanctions on Iran and other entities 

The Biden administration blacklisted several individuals and firms on Wednesday for assisting the “delivery and sale of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical products from Iranian companies to East Asia”.

The details: The U.S. accused the network of entities based in Iran, the UAE and Hong Kong of using Gulf-based front companies to skirt Iran-related sanctions. The Department of State has also penalized two firms based in Singapore and Vietnam for transporting Iranian oil products. The U.S. government will freeze all assets the companies have in the country and ban Americans from doing business with them.

The big picture: The sanctions come amid efforts — mediated by the E.U. and hosted in Doha, Qatar — to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. Indirect talks between Washington and Tehran ended last week without progress on how to restore the deal, which previous U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018. With current talks going nowhere, a former U.S. official said he expects the U.S. to target more companies that facilitate oil exports to China, which is one of the biggest markets for Iranian oil. In January 2022, China purchased record-breaking amounts of oil from the Islamic Republic, exceeding imports before sanctions were imposed in 2018.