Following the Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing with TikTok, Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) joined Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union to talk about TikTok and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) urgent threat to our national and personal security. She told Tapper that TikTok’s testimony placed “more urgency on us passing a national data privacy law to protect [America] from the next technological tool or weapon that China may put together.”

Excerpts and highlights of Chair Rodgers’ interview below:

TIKTOK MUST BE BANNED

“What the hearing made clear to me was that TikTok should be banned in the United States of America to address the immediate threat and we also need a national data privacy law.

“Mr. Chew said that the data that they are amassing on Americans is accessible by the CCP.

“He was asked about ByteDance spying on Americans and he responded, ‘oh, well, I wouldn't describe it as spying.’

“What we are seeing is that TikTok and Mr. Chew have repeatedly been caught in this lie, that there's not a connection to ByteDance and ultimately, the CCP.”

TIKTOK CANNOT BE TRUSTED

“What we do have evidence of is that TikTok cannot be trusted to... protect our data and they cannot be trusted to ensure that our children's mental health is a priority.”

E&C LEADING ON A NATIONAL DATA PRIVACY STANDARD

“We need to address the immediate threat that TikTok poses because it is it is ultimately the Chinese Communist Party accessing data.

“We need a national data privacy standard also and that's what Ranking Member Pallone and I have worked on and we're going to introduce this Congress because we need to take action.

“Whether it's TikTok, Big Tech, or other data brokers to restrict the amount of data that they're collecting to begin with, we need to ensure that individuals have the right to know what their profile might be or to be alerted if their information, their personal data is being accessed or transferred to another country like China.

“We need to protect kids and we have the strongest protections for kids in the privacy proposal that we have been working on to protect anyone under the age of 17.

“We need to stop this listening on devices of people. Our bill would say you cannot listen to conversations on an app or on your device without people actually having given you the permission.”