Politics

Meet the TikTok employee taking on Trump’s executive order

Patrick Ryan is raising money to file a lawsuit against a recent executive order that he says could prohibit all TikTok employees in the U.S. from getting paid.

TikTok's offices

Patrick Ryan is raising money for a legal suit against the Trump administration.

Photo: Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

In March, Patrick Ryan left his position of nine years at Google to take a job as a technical program manager at TikTok. Five months later, Ryan is preparing to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration, fighting for his right to keep that job.

On Tuesday night, Ryan launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for a legal battle over the Trump administration's recent executive order, which prohibits "any transaction by any person" with TikTok owner ByteDance beginning Sept. 20. Ryan, who describes himself as a "recovering lawyer," argues that such an order would prohibit his employer from paying him and more than 1,400 other TikTok U.S. employees, thereby violating his constitutional right to due process.

"I have to take care of my family obligations, and I work with people, and I'm hiring people that I feel a sense of responsibility for," Ryan told Protocol. He said the idea that the entire company, not just the app, would get shut down was "not a scenario I anticipated."

When President Trump first announced his public plans to shut down TikTok, Ryan said, he and other staffers assumed that a ban — if indeed there was a ban — would only affect the app itself. It would be an undesirable outcome, but Ryan figured it would still enable employees to remain on the payroll while TikTok's leadership plotted their next move, which could include a sale to Microsoft. The company has announced its interest in buying TikTok pending a security review. In India, where the app is currently banned along with other Chinese apps, TikTok's 2,000 employees are still getting paid.

But as soon as he read the executive order, Ryan said he understood it could have more far-reaching implications for TikTok's U.S. employees, many of whom just started at the company thanks to a recent hiring spree, during which the company nearly tripled its U.S. footprint in a matter of months. Ryan said he began talking with his colleagues, including those on high skilled H-1B visas, whose ability to stay in the country is contingent on their employment. "I'm very concerned about what my colleagues are facing," Ryan said. "It's a real existential problem for them."

So, after informing TikTok and against the advice of his own friends and family, Ryan said he decided to pursue a case and began working with his friend Mike Godwin, a prominent attorney who's worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, and is best known for coining the eponymous internet adage Godwin's law.

Godwin told Protocol that he and Ryan's other lawyers at the firm Blackstone Law are still working out their case, but that their primary claim addresses the fact that the executive order would effectively take TikTok employees' property — in this case, their paychecks — without due process. "Due process requires that everyone with standing to make a claim gets a chance to be heard before their interest gets taken away," Godwin said.

TikTok's head of communications Josh Gartner said the company has "no involvement with and [is] not coordinating on" Ryan's case, which he's undertaken outside of work. "We respect the rights of employees to engage in concerted activity to seek due process of law," Ryan said.

In the company's public statement on the executive order, it made a similar claim about the lack of due process and said it would also "pursue all remedies" including through the U.S. courts. "We are shocked by the recent executive order, which was issued without any due process," the statement reads. "For nearly a year, we have sought to engage with the U.S. government in good faith to provide a constructive solution to the concerns that have been expressed. What we encountered instead was that the administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses."

It's unclear how Ryan's argument — or TikTok's — would be balanced against the right of the president of the United States to act in what he claims are the national security interests of the country. In the order, the president invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and, in doing so, assumed expansive powers to prohibit transactions with TikTok and ByteDance.

According to James Andrew Lewis, director of the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, challenges to the IEEPA rarely work. He called Ryan's approach "delusional."

"The courts usually defer to the executive branch on matters of national security," Lewis said. "In any case, any ban doesn't go into effect for another five weeks, so they haven't actually been prevented from being paid. Even if you found a judge who didn't like Trump, the [Department of Justice] would appeal and win at the next level up."

Lewis said that if TikTok does, in fact, sue, it will likely be on First Amendment grounds, "not this."

Godwin acknowledged that the case is "not a sure thing" but argued that it's not a "crazy idea," either. "There's never been a case quite like this before," Godwin said.

The GoFundMe page is seeking to raise $30,000, and in less than two days, it's already raised more than $9,000. Some of that, Ryan said, comes from TikTok employees.

The secretary of commerce still has time to specify what, exactly, the order means by "transactions," and could very well exempt payroll from that list. But in the meantime, Godwin said, TikTok employees are wracked by uncertainty. "It's been a bit of a rollercoaster, and it's been astonishingly stressful for him and other employees," he said.

Ryan, for one, said he would be satisfied if the administration made a clarification to accommodate TikTok's U.S. staff. "That's the only thing we're asking for," he said, noting that he doesn't plan on seeking damages. But if it is really the government's intention to put TikTok out of business if it doesn't find a buyer by Sept. 20, Ryan said, "We're going to have to go to court and fight this thing."

This story has been updated to include comment from TikTok.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins