A former TikTok employee who worked for six months as part of the company’s Trust and Safety division has been meeting with member of congress and warning them that the company can’t be trusted.

His allegations threaten to undermine this $1.5 billion restructuring plan, known as Project Texas, which TikTok has promoted widely in Washington as a way to neutralize the risk of data theft or misuse by the Chinese government…

The former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation, has told congressional investigators that Project Texas does not go far enough and that a truly leakproof arrangement for Americans’ data would require a “complete re-engineering” of how TikTok is run.

TikTok has been doing its best to convince lawmakers that no US data could possibly be taken, viewed or manipulated by the company’s Chinese owners. Last month the company opened a “Transparency and Accountability Center” in Los Angeles and invited a bunch of tech journalists to view it.

This Tuesday, following its recent charm offensive in Washington, DC, TikTok hosted journalists at its Los Angeles headquarters to unveil a new center it has created to woo American policymakers, regulators, and civil society leaders…

TikTok’s new Los Angeles Transparency and Accountability Center offers a behind-the-scenes view into TikTok’s algorithms and content moderation practices, which have attracted controversy because of concerns that the wildly popular app could be weaponized to promote pro-Chinese government messaging or misinformation.

The information TikTok offered about its algorithms and content moderation wasn’t particularly illuminating, but what stood out were the details it shared about its plan to split parts of its US operations from China, while still being owned by a Chinese company. The event also presented a rare opportunity for reporters to ask questions of a broad cross section of TikTok’s staff about its content policies and algorithms.

TikTok is supposedly going to open a similar Transparency Center in Washington, DC. All of this is highlighting the company’s high profile effort to wall off US data known as Project Texas. But the former employee who spoke to the Post says the whole thing is not enough to keep data safe.

The former employee worked as head of a unit within TikTok’s Safety Operations team, which oversaw technical risk management and compliance issues, including which employees had access to company tools and user data, according to documents he shared with The Post.

He argues that a nationwide ban would be unnecessary to resolve the technical concerns, which he said could be fixed with “doable and feasible” solutions that would go beyond Project Texas’s protocols. He said he worked to address the data-privacy issues internally but was fired after raising his concerns.

This former employee is not the only insider who has been warning about TikTok. Last year Buzzfeed published a story claiming that US data was completely available to Chinese engineers at ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. At the time, ByteDance denied that such a thing was even possible, but did launch an investigation.

In October, there was a report from Forbes that some employees had planned to monitor the location of specific Americans without their knowledge.  In December, Forbes published a follow up. It turned out that employees at Byte Dance had been gathering data to monitor the whereabouts of several US journalists who’d been covering TikTok in an attempt to determine who was leaking information about the company. So the things they claimed could not happen were happening even as they denied it.

According to materials reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance tracked multiple Forbes journalists as part of this covert surveillance campaign, which was designed to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company’s ongoing links to China. As a result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned.

“I was deeply disappointed when I was notified of the situation… and I’m sure you feel the same,” Liang wrote in an internal email shared with Forbes. “The public trust that we have spent huge efforts building is going to be significantly undermined by the misconduct of a few individuals. … I believe this situation will serve as a lesson to us all.”…

Forbes first reported the surveillance tactics, which were overseen by a China-based team at ByteDance, in October. Asked for comment on that story, ByteDance and TikTok did not deny the surveillance, but took to Twitter after the story was published to say that “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,” and that “TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested.” In the internal email, Liang acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way, as Forbes had reported.

So it’s a bit hard to believe the whole Transparency Center charm offensive when this is going on in the background. As for the claims that this was just a few employees, what’s to stop a few employees from doing something similar if they’re ordered to do so by the Chinese government? As I’ve pointed out before, it’s a matter of law in China that the communist government can request data from any Chinese company. And they do it all the time. ByteDance employees are in no position to say no to any request.

This week the White House endorsed a bipartisan Senate bill that would give it the ability to ban TikTok.

Under the new proposal, if the Commerce secretary determines that a transaction poses “undue or unacceptable risk” to U.S. national security, it can be referred to the president for action, up to and including forced divestment.

In other words, Biden could demand ByteDance sell TikTok if it wants to keep operating within the US, something that the Trump administration suggested several years ago. The bottom line is that we’d be crazy to trust China at this point. They have a long history of stealing data and using it for their own advantage.