Biden Cyber Official: ‘All Kinds of Capabilities’ in ‘Critical Infrastructure’ Can Harvest Risky Amounts of Data for Other Nations

During an interview on CNN’s “Axe Files” podcast released on Thursday, Jen Easterly, the Director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said there is an “enormous” amount of data that TikTok can harvest, and there are “all kinds of capabilities that we have resident in our critical infrastructure that come from foreign companies that can allow them to do things with our data that we would not want to be done from a national security or economic prosperity perspective.”

Easterly stated, [relevant remarks begin around 56:00] “Certainly, the amount of data that can be — and I won’t sort of go into deep debate about where that data is stored and whether it’s really possible to segment it — but the potential for that data to be harvested and used, I think is enormous and is something we need to be really thoughtful about, not just with respect to TikTok. But there are all kinds of capabilities that we have resident in our critical infrastructure that come from foreign companies that can allow them to do things with our data that we would not want to be done from a national security or economic prosperity perspective. So, that, I think, should give everybody pause. And I think the direction that we’re going in as a government is the correct one.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett