If you think the Chinese Balloon is bad, wait until you find out about TikTok
Some insight into Chinese surveillance balloons, TikTok and how it all ties into a 1992 fiction book from Christopher Fowler.
There has been a lot of talk about a Chinese surveillance balloon that is now floating over Montana. It’s not a good look, but it’s not the greatest threat facing the US from China.
WHY BALLOONS?
To start, there is the question of why China would send a balloon and not a satellite.
The truth is cost and persistence. It costs about $10,000 to get one pound of anything into low earth orbit. Satellites also lack persistence.
Most spy satellites have a geosynchronous orbit with varying levels of inclination. This means they make passes over the target, rather than stay at a fixed point in the sky like communications satellites.
Surveillance balloons, however, can stay up in the air for weeks or even months and cost about $100,000 to fill up with helium.
These systems were used by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan for general surveillance, especially for the counter-IED mission.
The advantage of this system is its simplicity, persistence and cost-effectiveness - at least compared to satellite rocketry. If you don’t mind losing your sensors, you can pack sensors into a balloon, let it go, and gather data until the balloon comes down.
WHY HASN’T THE US SHOT IT DOWN?
Because the amount of intelligence that can be gathered from capturing the balloon outweighs the amount of intelligence that China can gather from the balloon. This is a treasure-trove of data that will show sensor technology and manufacture’s serial numbers. I wish I could get my hands on it myself.
THE TIKTOK CONNECTION
I put out a video this morning on how the real threat was not a Chinese balloon, it was TikTok. This video was immediately demonetized and placed into a “ad check” state by YouTube.
The Ad Check state is sort of like being “benched” by your coach. YouTube will suppress your video if they don’t think they can show ads on it. That being said, I don’t make much money on a video even if it is monetized. For example, this is the amount of money I’ve made from the “Ukrainian Death Ray “ video - $11.19.
This is why I ask people to buy T-shirts and subscribe to my Substack. Just my Adobe Cloud Subscription is $600 a year, and that doesn’t count buying stock footage or satellite data. I have lot of expenses associated with video production and memberships to professional organizations like CAT-UXO, Global Security and LiveUAmap.
THE DANGER OF TIKTOK
The real danger of TikTok is not tracking - everybody does that. The danger is the “stickyness” of TikTok and how it can be used to “nudge.”
The average TikTok user spends 1.5 hours a day on the platform.
How you entertain yourself in your own time is your business, but the scary part is that TikTok is a Chinese company and can theoretically be controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
So the real threat is “nudging.”
Years ago, Christopher Fowler wrote a book called “Rune” about a series of murders that were committed by people reading strips of paper.
The technology had originally been invented by a corporation who intended to put these runes on product packaging as a sort of subliminal message to people to buy their product. If 1.5% more people bought the product, the rune would be considered a success.
Now imagine you have a service that people watch for 1.5 hours a day that also knows what you like to watch. What if you can tweak an algorithm to show more videos to someone deemed mentally susceptible to change their opinion on an issue?
You might not have to alter public opinion much - just a few percentage points and now you can control the outcome of an election or an opinion on public policy.
Or even worse, imagine that a view on public policy was suppressed from people who might be interested in changing their minds - like YouTube just did with me.
And that is the real danger of TikTok.
Wow I never thought of that but it’s kinda terrifying.
Sure, this is all completely true. TikToc can be a threat
Now consider that all the american social media companies have been doing this exact thing for at least 5 years ... pushing ideas that most/many people find deeply troubling