The U.S. Navy Bans TikTok from Government-Issued Mobile Devices (reuters.com) 26
An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:
Earlier this week the United States Navy banned the social media app TikTok from government-issued mobile devices, saying the popular short video app represented a "cybersecurity threat."
A bulletin issued by the Navy on Tuesday showed up on a Facebook page serving military members, saying users of government issued mobile devices who had TikTok and did not remove the app would be blocked from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet.
The Navy would not describe in detail what dangers the app presents, but Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Uriah Orland said in a statement the order was part of an effort to "address existing and emerging threats...." The U.S. government has opened a national security review of the app's owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co's $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly, Reuters first reported last month. Last month, U.S army cadets were instructed not to use TikTok, after Senator Chuck Schumer raised security concerns about the army using TikTok in their recruiting.
A bulletin issued by the Navy on Tuesday showed up on a Facebook page serving military members, saying users of government issued mobile devices who had TikTok and did not remove the app would be blocked from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet.
The Navy would not describe in detail what dangers the app presents, but Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Uriah Orland said in a statement the order was part of an effort to "address existing and emerging threats...." The U.S. government has opened a national security review of the app's owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co's $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly, Reuters first reported last month. Last month, U.S army cadets were instructed not to use TikTok, after Senator Chuck Schumer raised security concerns about the army using TikTok in their recruiting.
Keep the commies out of the heads of our children! (Score:2)
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Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really they should be using AOSP and having a short whitelist of allowable apps, all of which are FOSS which has been vetted by a competent technical team. Banning this app and that app is a bit pointless where there are so many of them.
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Re: Well, sure, but... (Score:2)
yeah, but that would be competant...
OPSEC - Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised it took this long. I'm also surprised they haven't made it a general order for all military personnel to not use apps built by the primary adversary.
Good OPSEC demands that you consider all the possible ways your opponents can gather information about your forces. Simple things like fitness tracking apps on your cell phone can, if you get enough of the data, give you a pretty good idea of troop levels, duty rotations, when shifts change and all sorts of useful intelligence. Heck, Google can figure stuff like that out, it's in their DNA.
Even forcing this kind of thing to be off duty only isn't enough. There are all sorts of inferences you can make if you just give me location data for a large group of people... Oh, look a that group that are only online in the evening hours near that Military base, hmmm, I wonder what they do... Then, poof a bunch of them up and vanish one day then show back up 9 months later. Seems pretty obvious to me.
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I thought this too -- why was it allowed in the first place?!
The only thing I can think is that there's a category of phones issued by the Navy that are just not managed in any way.
I'm sure there's a garden variety of explanations, some may be issued more as an economic benefit (like a company car) than a work-managed technical asset, some may be assigned to groups where central IT isn't an option, and so on.
My guess is these are't phones issued to anyone where there was some kind of operational risk.
The pr
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The thing is, sometimes communication to the homeland is great for morale, sometime communication to the homeland is so insecure it causes failures of safety. If parents want to kill their kid in the military, even if encryption works it still delivers the message to a red operative. AIM was hard to monitor sometimes...
Re:OPSEC - Good idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Good OPSEC demands that you consider all the possible ways your opponents can gather information about your forces.
During the first Gulf War, before the ground assault started, a Saudi small shop owner near a US military base knew the date exactly when the ground assault was about to begin.
All the soldiers came into his shop the day before, and stocked up on batteries for their personal electronic devices.
The Armed Forces TV Network used to have commercials warning members of the US military to be careful about what they do and say in public. Like buying hot weather clothes, and telling the shop owner that he will need them where he is going.
I guess nobody thought about batteries back then.
But hell, yeah . . . social media must be a nightmare for the OPSEC folks.
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Pretty much what you said, applied to everyday life. I mean I'd like to think we're not giving any information, but we probably do. All it takes is one breach of compartmentalization like my friends know who I am online and they know who I am "in real life" because we chat and play together even though I don't really want every online player to know who I am or the government to know every game I play online. I'm in the pessimist camp though, I don't think winning is an option.
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NSA and GCHQ would have issued report after report to the US gov and mil.
The US gov and mil would have looked at security and then considered the need for networked entertainment.
Guess the wisdom of the NSA and GCHQ did not get much of a say and the need for entertainment was more of an issue
Staff retention and happy contractors won over any US and UK OPSEC
Wonder what the CIA said
Remember when "off duty" was study time for
The Onion, or real? (Score:2)
Without reading TFS, I can't tell.
*proceeds to just 'ba-dum TISS' instead*
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Uh, this is real... it's a Reuters story, that's a credible news wire.
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Kesha should go back to vomiting in Paris Hilton's closet.
Service personnel using TikTok is a miltary threat (Score:1)
TikTok threatens the military by creating PR shit storms when soldiers, sailors, and airmen post embarrassing or illegal videos. A behavior that has nearly become a military tradition by now.
The real reason (Score:2)
The real reason they did it: It's affecting enlistment numbers. The boots keep recording the most cringey videos on earth and kids don't want to be associated with the military.