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After US President Joe Biden and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) spent years trying to work out a deal with TikTok that could address national security concerns, Biden seems to have given up. Yesterday, TikTok confirmed that the Biden administration issued an ultimatum to the app’s China-based owners to either divest their stakes or risk a TikTok ban in the US, Reuters reported .

Biden’s demand comes just one week before TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Chew is already in the US and is working with “experienced Washington advisers” to help him defend TikTok against its harshest critics in Congress next Thursday.

Chew told The Journal that forcing a sale does not address national security concerns any better than the deal that TikTok had already worked out with the CFIUS. Under the deal that Biden seems to be shrugging off now, TikTok has already invested billions in moving its US users’ data to US servers and hiring independent monitors to ensure that Americans’ TikTok feeds can’t be manipulated and that their data can’t be accessed by China authorities.

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United States lawmakers seem to be exploring every possible path to potentially ban TikTok nationwide. The latest push comes today from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who this afternoon will lead a dozen senators in introducing a bipartisan bill that would grant US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo the power to ban TikTok on personal devices to protect national security, Reuters reported .

The bill is called the "Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act." Unlike the “Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries (DATA) Act”—which Republicans who view President Joe Biden’s stance on China as weak have been jamming through Congress to quickly empower Biden to ban TikTok—Warner’s bill doesn’t single out TikTok to be banned. Critics have said singling out TikTok risks damaging US global alliances and driving more countries into China’s influence sphere, CNBC reported . Instead, Warner avoids making his bill all about TikTok. His office told Reuters that the RESTRICT Act will "comprehensively address the ongoing threat posed by technology from foreign adversaries,” citing TikTok as an example of tech that could be assessed as a threat.

According to Warner, who is introducing the bill with Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the RESTRICT Act is superior to the DATA Act because it provides a legal framework for the US to review all “foreign technology coming into America,” not just from China, but also from Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. It’s designed to give the US “a systemic approach to make sure we can ban or prohibit” emerging technology threats “when necessary.”

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Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday in an attempt to bolster US cybersecurity defenses, after a number of devastating hacks including the Colonial pipeline attack revealed vulnerabilities across business and government.

“Recent cybersecurity incidents... are a sobering reminder that US public and private sector entities increasingly face sophisticated malicious cyber activity from both nation-state actors and cyber criminals,” the White House said.

Under the order, federal agencies will be required to introduce multi-factor authentication to their systems and encrypt all data within six months in a bid to make it harder for hackers to penetrate their IT infrastructure.

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