TikTok Whistleblower Zen Goziker’s Revelations on ByteDance’s Ties with US Government

TFD – Uncover the intricate web of allegations and controversies as Zen Goziker, a whistleblower, sheds light on ByteDance’s connections with the US government during his time at TikTok. Join us at TheFoxDaily as we delve into the details of this significant revelation and its potential implications for TikTok’s future.

The United States government is currently poised to outlaw TikTok. Little of the evidence that convinced Congress the app may be a national security threat has been shared publicly, in some cases because it remains classified. But one former TikTok employee turned whistleblower, who claims to have driven key news reporting and congressional concerns about the app, has now come forward.

As a risk manager at TikTok, Zen Goziker was responsible for safeguarding the company against external security and reputational concerns. He claims he was fired in February 2022 for refusing “to sign off” on Project Texas, a $1.5 billion initiative that TikTok designed to allay US government security concerns by storing US data on servers run by Oracle. The wrongful termination lawsuit was filed in January against TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.

Goziker spent just six months as an employee of TikTok. He was not a senior employee of the company. His complaint makes a lot of unlikely claims, as does another one he filed in March against multiple US government entities. He claims that while working remotely in Mexico, TikTok and the FBI placed him under constant observation. He claims that US attorney general Merrick Garland, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, and other top officials “wickedly instigated” his firing. And he states that the FBI helped the CIA share his private information with foreign governments. The suits do not appear to include evidence for any of these claims.

A spokesman for TikTok, Michael Hughes, said in a statement, “This lawsuit is full of outrageous claims that lack merit and comes from an individual who significantly exaggerates his role with a company he worked at for merely six months.”

However, it appears from court documents and emails obtained by WIRED that Goziker had no trouble finding support when he voiced concerns about his former employer’s ties to China. Goziker claims that after he was fired, he started engaging with media, law enforcement, and elected officials. According to court records, he claimed to have found evidence that TikTok’s software might transfer US data to Toutiao, a ByteDance app in China. Executives from TikTok had claimed that the two businesses ran independently, so that claim ran directly counter to their claims.

Goziker claims in court documents that Project Texas needed to be reevaluated in light of what he saw. Additionally, he claims that his tale about the inside connection to China served as the foundation for a significant Washington Post article that was published in March of last year and claimed that the worries originated from “a former risk manager at TikTok.”

According to TikTok authorities cited in that report, the employee had uncovered “nothing more than a naming convention and technical relic,” and the accusations were “unfounded.” According to The Washington Post, it doesn’t discuss sourcing.

“I am free, I am honest, and I am doing this only because I am an American and because USA desperately need help and I cannot keep this truth away from PUBLIC,” Goziker said in an email to WIRED.

His March lawsuit alleging US officials conspired with TikTok to have him fired was filed against Garland, Haines, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and the agencies they work for.

Sean Jiang, Goziker’s attorney in the US government lawsuit, sent an email to WIRED stating, “Goziker’s main point is that the executives in the American company TikTok Inc. and certain executives from the American federal government have colluded to organize a fraud scheme.” There doesn’t seem to be any proof of such a plot in the lawsuits. Requests for comments were not answered by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department chose not to respond.

Since the bill “blames ByteDance instead of TikTok Inc. for the wrongdoings of the American executives,” Jiang refers to the House’s recent passage of a bill that could require ByteDance to sell off TikTok as “problematic.” Goziker, according to him, would rather see TikTok undergo corporate reorganization and audits.

Goziker arranged meetings with representatives from the DHS, FBI, and Tennessee Attorney General’s office in an effort to voice his worries about TikTok, according to documents he shared with WIRED. Additionally, he claimed to have met with staff members of many US senators, including liberal Mark Warner of Virginia, Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Mark Warner is the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The US government could have banned TikTok with separate legislation introduced by Hawley and Warner last year, and all three senators have expressed support for the more recent TikTok bill that has already cleared the House. (Hawley has stated that he doubts it will pass the Senate.) Requests for information regarding whether or whether their staff had met with Goziker were not answered by senatorial representatives. A spokesman for the Tennessee Attorney General did not reply to a request for comment, and the FBI declined to comment.

Scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center Jeremy Daum says he wasn’t shocked that Goziker would have been willing to interact with US officials. Although there isn’t enough proof to conclude that TikTok presents a special security risk over other online platforms, lawmakers are becoming more and more concerned about threats coming from China. He claims that it is very simple to persuade people to pay attention to China these days. “There’s never been a clear cut evidence about TikTok.”

Goziker began working as a risk manager at TikTok in August 2021, answering to the senior director of operations. Goziker has occasionally gone by Gene rather than Zen. In court documents, Goziker states that he left the National Bank of Pakistan, where he held a senior vice president position overseeing enterprise risk management for the bank’s activities in the Americas, to join TikTok. He claims in court documents that he was born in 1978 in Ukraine and began working at Citibank in 2006 after graduating from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Goziker asserts that, while not holding a senior role, his primary responsibility at TikTok was “overseeing” Project Texas to guarantee the success of the social media app’s plan to secure US user data. In order to appease the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency committee tasked with assessing the dangers to national security connected with foreign companies purchasing or taking significant holdings in US businesses, a set of precautions had to be put in place. CFIUS has the power to force companies to unwind deals it considers risky, and since 2019 has been investigating ByteDance’s 2017 purchase of a lip-syncing app called Musical.ly, which was later merged into TikTok.

According to court documents, Goziker states that he conducted interviews with over thirty persons at TikTok and ByteDance regarding Project Texas. He claims that despite purported pressure from his manager and other corporate executives, he refused to “sign off” on the plan because he saw weaknesses in it. According to court documents, Goziker attempted to bring up his concerns with the CEO and board of directors at TikTok.

In court documents, Goziker claims he discovered proof that TikTok’s software might transmit data to China in January 2022, just a few weeks before he was let go. He states in the documents that he was able to extract “a verified artifact” in TikTok’s software that linked the platform to Toutiao, a well-known Chinese news aggregation app that is also owned by ByteDance, via “collaborative and willful joint effort with ByteDance engineers from mainland China.” Goziker claimed that in spite of TikTok’s denials to the contrary, his research showed US data from the platform could still reach the People’s Republic. His claims are not supported by comprehensive documentary evidence in the filings.

Two weeks after Goziker’s accusations were published in The Washington Post, in March of last year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress and faced intense questioning on the app’s ties to China. Following that, Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Democratic congresswoman Jan Schakowsky sent inquiries to TikTok over the allegations made in the Post article.

In response, TikTok stated that a large number of the accusations made in the article were false. It stated that the reference to Toutiao in TikTok’s code “does not in any way indicate a correlation between, integration of, or network connectivity between Toutiao and TikTok,” adding that the “Toutiao news application cannot interfere with TikTok data flows once Project Texas is complete.”

Goziker disclosed that he had also been in contact with a Forbes writer who has authored several significant pieces about TikTok’s data security procedures and connections to ByteDance in the lawsuits and an email correspondence examined by WIRED. When the writer was employed by BuzzFeed News in June 2022, they released a piece based on eighty TikTok internal sessions in which nine distinct workers allegedly made claims “indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022.”

Goziker claimed to be the source of the recordings in an interview with WIRED. Forbes said to WIRED that it doesn’t address sourcing.

Senator Warner and Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican and the vice chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, later cited that BuzzFeed story in a letter urging the Federal Trade Commission to start an investigation into TikTok. Politico reported this month that the agency heeded that call and opened a probe into whether the app “deceived its users by denying that individuals in China had access to their data.”

As Goziker was filing his lawsuits, US lawmakers were getting closer to banning the app than ever before. The House of Representatives approved a bill last month that would force ByteDance to sell off TikTok within six months before the app would become illegal to download from US app stores. The legislation is now being considered by the Senate, and President Joe Biden has already said he would sign it into law.

4/4/2024, 6:15 p.m. EDT was updated: The House passed the bill that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok with a clear majority, but not unanimously.