Over the holiday weekend, The New York Times reported that a tranche of highly sensitive U.S. intelligence documents had been leaked. Photographs of the folded-up pages—many of them from classified briefings for the Joint Chiefs—began popping up on Telegram and Twitter. Upon further investigation, it turned out that some of these images had appeared even earlier, as far back as January, on gaming sites dedicated to Fortnite and fringe message boards like 4chan.
The documents themselves are proving to be a nightmare not just for the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community, but for America’s friends and allies. They’ve revealed some of our most tightly-held secrets about how American spy agencies gather intelligence—from secret satellite systems like LAPIS, to now potentially compromised human sources—as well as the uncomfortable (but extremely obvious) fact that Washington spies even on those in its corner. Ironically, the documents also paint the U.S. intelligence community in a very flattering light. After the embarrassing disasters of 2003 and the withdrawal from Afghanistan, it is wild to see how deeply American espionage has penetrated the military and security services of Russia, which is one of the hardest places in the world for our spies to operate in.
There is still a lot we don’t know about the leak. Initially, it seemed it was the result of a Russian hack. But now, because of how some of the documents are marked, it seems that they may have been leaked by an American with a very high security clearance. (Though, honestly, it’s hard to tell which would be worse.)
On Monday, I sat down with Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and seasoned veteran on issues of national security. (This isn’t surprising for a man who has the denizens of Langley as his constituents and who is now trying to move the F.B.I.’s headquarters to his state as well.) Warner had been out of town for the holiday until a couple hours before I walked into his light-filled corner office in the Hart building and, like pretty much everyone in Washington, he knew remarkably little about the intelligence leak.
We also spoke about the war in Ukraine, the threat from China, the scourge of lobbyists, and the RESTRICT Act, co-sponsored by Warner and South Dakota Republican John Thune, which would ban TikTok in the United States. Before we got into it, though, Warner wanted to contest my characterization of him as standing on a chair at a cocktail party at the Munich Security Conference. “I’m tall enough,” he said, laughing. “I don’t need no stinking chair!”
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
The Leak & TikTok
Julia Ioffe: Let’s start with the obvious, which is the intelligence leak.
Mark Warner: I talked to people yesterday, I’m getting another call at 5:30, 5:45, and so far, I’ve got nothing. I don’t know. Was it an American? Was it someone else? Was it Russian disinformation? Maybe because it was a holiday weekend, but I don’t have any answers yet. And I am also trying to understand: When was the system put on alert? Because it appears in the public reporting that some of the documents may have inadvertently started showing up online even in February. But generally speaking, obviously, whenever classified documents are leaked, it’s a huge concern, particularly in light of the planned Ukrainian counteroffensive. But I feel like until I get more facts, I just don’t have anything to add.
I also wanted to talk to you about TikTok, which has faded from the headlines a bit. Is your concern with TikTok more about the privacy aspect or its ability to influence Americans?
Let me first of all state that I have concerns about a lot of social media. I have concerns about the fact that we don’t have a privacy bill in this country. I’m concerned that we’ve not had a meaningful debate about Section 230 reform. And I’m amazed that we still haven’t even been able to pass data portability and interoperability reforms. I had our friends from the U.K. in here ten days ago as they’re starting to implement their children’s online safety legislation; the fact that we’ve done none of that is of huge concern to me. Whatever we do on the RESTRICT Act doesn’t mitigate the need we have across platforms, domestic and otherwise.
Number two: the genesis of this legislation comes from the very ad hoc approach that this country has taken over the last number of years—you know, Kaspersky, Huawei, ZTE, and now TikTok. Ironically, the approach we have taken actually builds upon a Trump executive order that the Biden administration then continued. But it starts with the premise that we need a rules-based approach that looks at the national security implications of foreign technology from six designated countries. It’s not a group of countries that we pick. These are countries that are already defined by law as potentially adversarial. That would give the Secretary of Commerce a set of mitigation tools that could involve lesser options. If our bill becomes law, TikTok will still have its day court. Matter of fact, there’ll be an even greater burden on the intelligence community to disclose rationales about why this falls into the national security category.
And I guess number three, this is not just an American concern. As I talk to TikTok advocates and people who make a living off TikTok, people are a little surprised when they find out, well, the Canadians [have banned it], at least on government phones, the E.U. [has done the same and is considering a full ban], the Australians last week, the Brits. And then you’ve got organizations like the B.B.C. literally telling all of its journalists, Hey, you should get off of this because you could end up being monitored.
The predicate for this happening is much broader than America, really. It is rules based. It does provide a process that will be much broader than a single app alone. It falls into two areas of concern: the ability to collect data, including real time presence, which may be one of the reasons that it raises a red flag for journalists; and, potentially, the possibility that that data could be used, frankly, for blackmail or other purposes. I’m not making the case that that is happening in real time, but with Chinese law dictating the fact that ByteDance, which owns TikTok, has an obligation to turn that kind of data over to the C.C.P. at their request, should we really wait for the actualization of the harm before we take action?
As for its potential use as a propaganda tool, I mean, it’s 90 minutes a day on average, 150 million Americans. That’s a powerful tool, particularly when part of the secret sauce of the technology is the ability to generate content in an addictive fashion. And the notion that the CCP would not use this to either weave a tale about, say, Putin’s right to have invaded Ukraine or Xi’s right to take over Taiwan—I think this is a huge concern.
Have you seen any evidence to that effect, like altered algorithms?
I have not seen that evidence. I’m not sure we have any documentation that can say how many different messages have been conveyed by this platform. I’m not sure how we would even be able to sort that out at this moment. And let me quickly add that there’s a lot of creativity on TikTok. I don’t deny that at all. I’ve been meeting with a number of folks who are social influencers who make a living on this platform. I met with a young woman from the disability community who told me how TikTok positively changed her life, both in terms of giving her a community and also a source of income. My belief is—and this won’t happen overnight—but I think if TikTok were to be banned, I think the market will create an alternative. India banned this outright three years ago and there are very active platforms in India that provide compensation for social influencers. I haven’t talked to anybody who is a computer scientist or expert in this field that doesn’t believe that this would be replicated in the marketplace.
I want to go back to the first point you made about Section 230, about the ad hoc approach to Facebook, etc. You’re arguably very well positioned to do all the things that you said have not been done. So why haven’t they been done? Regulating social media companies is one of the few bipartisan issues in Washington.
There are two things I’ve realized. One is that Congress doesn’t deal very well with technology. And two, do not underestimate the power of these companies, who play a little bit of rope-a-dope. When pressure was on that we might make some progress on Section 230, suddenly there was a lot more willingness to talk about data portability and interoperability. They bob and weave.
The evolution of the RESTRICT Act has been fascinating. We spent a lot of time trying to think this through in a way that would make sense and would stand up to scrutiny in court. We were proceeding along and picking up broad bipartisan support to get this before the administration, and it’s almost a light switch went off. I think TikTok may have hired half the lobbyists in town. You can’t find one of the political rag sheets that come out in the morning that hasn’t been sponsored by TikTok. I don’t watch a lot of broadcast TV, but a friend of mine told me they saw three TikTok ads the other night.
You’ve got this massive disinformation campaign misrepresenting what the bill would do in terms of the potential vulnerability of individuals that use TikTok. There’s no ability to go after an individual in the language of the bill, nor is this a massive expansion of government surveillance power. I guess I shouldn’t be totally surprised when you’ve got a company whose most recent valuation is something like $66 billion, half of whose users are in this country, that they’re going to do lobbying on steroids and not be connected to the truth. But it doesn’t diminish my feeling that we need to get this done. If anything, it reinforces the case in my mind.
All that lobbying did not seem to help their C.E.O. He was crucified and drawn and quartered when he testified before Congress last month.
Yes, most of it has actually taken place afterwards. Not that they hadn’t already hired many lobbyists. Lots of people I know in town are on TikTok’s payroll at this point. And that’s their right. But their efforts at throwing chum in the water went up exponentially after Mr. [Shou Zi] Chew’s testimony.
If you voted this afternoon, would you have the votes?
If it was on the floor and was an up or down vote, yes. It would pass with a healthy margin.
My last question about TikTok: If you were successful, how enforceable would a ban be? Because I see, for example, Russian friends still using Instagram and Facebook, which have been banned in Russia.
I think that, since we’re not going after individual users, in a technology-based world, you can always find a workaround. Right now, it is disproportionately young people, 150 million users, 90 minutes a day. Those numbers will dramatically, dramatically drop.
The Putin-Xi Axis
The last time I saw you in Munich, the Biden administration was beginning to float the intelligence that China was thinking about supplying weapons to Russia. Have you seen any evidence that they’ve backed off from that?
Let’s put it like this: Obviously China is providing some assistance by purchasing Russian oil, but I think the administration has done a good job of warning about actual munitions. It would be a bridge too far.
You think that warning was heard in Beijing?
I just saw two Americans who were in Beijing recently. China has its own equivalent of Davos, which happened two weeks ago, and the message from both of these senior business leaders was that China was very anxious to try to get the Americans to come back. I think that a poke in the eye against America at this point would only make things worse for the Chinese economy.
How in bed do you think they really are with the Russians?
My sense is that Xi and Putin are two authoritarian leaders who both feel their destiny is to take Ukraine and Taiwan. I’m not sure that kind of personal-destiny politics by any means extends to all of the Chinese leadership that is more focused on China’s economic growth, so I think there’s that potential conflict. But in both cases, it’s not like these leaders haven’t actually strengthened their position vis-a-vis their governments. I mean, you saw what happened at Party Congress.
During a three day visit to China, Macron recently warned Europeans that they should resist any entanglements in disagreements between Beijing and Washington. Why do you think it has been so difficult to convince European allies that there is a threat from China?
That’s the thing that I’ve found has been a sea change in the last year. I spoke with a group of senior German business leaders a couple weeks back. Now, I hadn’t spoken to them since before Covid. Before Covid, I kind of got pooh-poohed on some of this stuff. It was a very different feel. I think about some of the countries that I’ve been in recently, the meetings I had in Munich with some of the intelligence services who were reluctant before. But you see China’s lack of transparency about Covid origins, you see how they did the lockdown, you see the Xi-Putin alignment over the war, and I feel there’s a recognition that this threat is much greater. Of course, the fact of the matter is that, pre-Covid, I had a hard time getting American private equity to listen because they were making so much money off of Chinese tech companies. They didn’t want to hear the story.
So then what do you make of Macron’s visit to Beijing?
[Very long pause.] I’ll let others make comments on that.
To what extent do you think the war in Ukraine is informing Xi’s decision-making on Taiwan?
I think he’s watching very closely. It’s one of the reasons why [I don’t understand] the naïveté or ignorance of certain American political leaders who say this is just some territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia—and then talk tough about China. If people can’t understand that linkage, that Xi is watching very closely how Putin does and how the world reacts—again I don’t know if it’s naive or ignorant.
I wanted to ask you about the upcoming 2024 election. Do you think we’re going to see more foreign interference? And if so, by whom and in which direction?
You know, in 2016, through the use of bots, the Russians had to create a whole infrastructure of fake news that then got amplified. Now, you don’t need to create that infrastructure because there’s enough Americans saying crazy things that can just be amplified. On the other hand, I’ve been amazed that we’ve not seen a greater utilization of deepfakes.
It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to manipulate with misinformation and disinformation than it is to buy tanks and subs and planes. So I think we will see more of that. I think there has been no evidence of any decline in Russia’s interest. I’m one of the ones who still feel like we’ve not seen the full firepower of Russian cyber—or, for that matter, Chinese cyber. There has been public reporting that other countries are getting into the game, too. Again, it’s cheap. It is one of the reasons why I scratch my head when I see some of these counties that are deciding to take down the D.H.S. protections around their election systems. It seems, to me, pretty wacky.
Is Twitter in your sights at all? They just stopped flagging Chinese and Russian state-owned media, while flagging NPR as such.
Who knows what’s happening at Twitter! I worry that the CCP can have an influence over Elon Musk because of—if you just look at the comments about how we talked about the Chinese…
Or Putin and the Russians.
Either one. That worries me more than whether he puts Donald Trump back on Twitter.
Are you thinking of getting Elon Musk down here to testify about all the changes he’s making to Twitter and the national security implications of that?
I’m not going to weigh in on future plans of the Intelligence Committee. [Laughs] I’m glad you’re trying to get a good headline out of me, but you know what? I’m not going to take it. It’s not my first rodeo!
