The report is emboldening high-profile enemies of TikTok like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, whose bill to ban TikTok on U.S. government devices passed in the Senate a little over a week ago.That bill still needs to pass in the House of Representatives to become law, but statewide bans of TikTok on government devices are already the law in Texas, North Dakota, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Utah, West Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, Nebraska, and Montana.It seems instead, a handful of ByteDance employees who were on the lookout for internal leakers managed to find the user data and IP addresses of U.S. reporters in an ultimately thwarted — but demonically clever — effort to see if ByteDance employees suspected of leaking were ever physically near the journalists.But Hawley and his ilk have made it clear that they imagine TikTok is being used as something much scarier: a spying apparatus for the Chinese Communist Party, as spelled out in (to cite one random example) a tweet from Hawley’s fellow Republican Senator Ted Cruz, in which he notes that TikTok tends to "dodge" questions about the communists and says "it's clear they're spying on users."At least one of these reports — and for the record, ByteDance denies it — is by Emily Baker-White, one of the two journalists ByteDance now admits to having spied on."