The DeepSeek dilemma
February 21, 2025
Geoffrey Cain UnHerd January 28, 2025 Geoffrey Cain, policy director of the Tech Integrity Project and author of The Perfect Police State, joins Emily to
Geoffrey Cain UnHerd January 28, 2025 Geoffrey Cain, policy director of the Tech Integrity Project and author of The Perfect Police State, joins Emily to
What if Xi Jinping owned a controlling stake in CNN? Or the New York Times? This week’s guest Geoffrey Cain argues that TikTok’s dominance over the flow of information and news to America’s population should be seen as a direct threat to our digital sovereignty and digital infrastructure, all on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. Cain and host Marshall Kosloff discuss what can be done about this and why Section 230 is the wrong frame for this debate.
What, if anything, should we do about TikTok? Is the forced sale of the fastest-growing social media platform in the world a commonsense step to protect America from the influence of the Chinese Communist Party? Or is legislation that would mandate the app’s sale or ban a threat to free speech?
Encryption is like a baby: It comes with problems, but you wouldn’t solve them with blunt force. There is no safe form of “end-to-half” encryption, no backdoor that serves government authorities without also serving criminals. Yet under the banner of foreign relations, lawmakers continue to advance policies that normalize surveillance by default. These measures turn personal devices into monitoring tools, weakening security for everyone while claiming to strengthen it. Once encryption is compromised, hackers and hostile states gain the same access as police. The result is a quiet dismantling of privacy, civil liberties, and the open internet itself.
The company’s China outpost has trained scientists who’ve gone on to work for top surveillance companies. By Geoffrey CainThe DispatchMay 11, 2023 Schoolchildren walk
When Tik Tok arrived in the United States in 2017, it was framed as a harmless cultural export: a platform for dances, jokes, and viral creativity. But for anyone who had seen China’s surveillance state up close, its arrival felt ominous. Tik Tok is owned by ByteDance, a company deeply entangled with the Chinese Communist Party’s system of mass surveillance—one that has enabled the detention of up to 1.8 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang. While the West debates whether concerns about Tik Tok amount to xenophobia, the app has already played a quieter role: suppressing information about a genocide, normalizing authoritarian power, and testing how easily human rights abuses can be made invisible in plain sight.
As part of NSI’s ongoing series, “A Spotlight on China’s Global Repression,” we are excited to host a discussion examining how China uses digital tools,
TikTok is a national security threat. By Geoffrey CainNovember 16, 2022 The midterm elections of 2022 were many things—a shocker for Republicans, the possible end of
TikTok dodges the hard questions about its China connections By Mike WackerThe Burner FilesOctober 11, 2022 The following is a guest post from Mike Wacker,
CBS NewsSeptember 30, 2022 Wade Herring didn’t know the teenage voter who approached him at a restaurant over the weekend. But she knew Herring, a
What to read next:
Geoffrey Cain on Investigative Journalism, Authoritarian Power, and The Perfect Police State | In a wide-ranging conversation with Jennifer Grossman, CEO of The Atlas Society, investigative journalist Geoffrey Cain reflects on years spent reporting inside some of the world’s most restrictive regimes — and on the research behind his book The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.
For years, Tim Cook insisted Apple could change China from the inside. Instead, China changed Apple.
The latest evidence? Apple spent billions developing cutting-edge electric vehicle battery technology with Chinese automaker BYD, only to watch its innovations become the cornerstone of BYD’s rise to global electric vehicle dominance. Apple walked away with nothing. China walked away with everything.
This isn’t just another story about corporate research and development gone wrong. It’s a cautionary tale about how even America’s most valuable company has become trapped in China’s web of technological control — and how that web is about to tighten even further.