The US Department of Justice yesterday asked a federal judge in San Francisco to allow the government to bar Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google from offering WeChat for download in US app stores pending an appeal.
The filing asked US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler to put on hold her preliminary injunction issued last Saturday. That injunction blocked the US Department of Commerce order which was set to take effect at the beginning of this week and that would also bar other US transactions with Tencent Holding Ltd’s (騰訊) WeChat, potentially making the app unusable in the US.
The justice department filing said that Beeler’s order was in error and “permits the continued, unfettered use of WeChat, a mobile application that the Executive Branch has determined constitutes a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
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Tencent had put forward a “mitigation proposal” that sought to create a new US version of the app; deploy specific security measures to protect the new app’s source code; partner with a US cloud provider for user data storage; and manage the new app through a US-based entity, the filing said.
However, its proposal still allowed Tencent to retain ownership of WeChat and did not address US concerns over the company, it added.
Tencent declined to comment.
The US WeChat Users Alliance, the group behind the legal challenge to the WeChat ban, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In support of its argument, the justice department made public portions of a Sept. 17 commerce department memo outlining the WeChat transactions to be banned.
“The WeChat mobile application collects and transmits sensitive personal information on US persons, which is accessible to Tencent and stored in data centers in China and Canada,” the memo said.
Beeler said that WeChat users who filed a lawsuit “have shown serious questions going to the merits of the First Amendment claim.”
The justice department filing said that “the First Amendment does not bar regulation of WeChat simply because it has achieved the popularity and dependency sought by [China], precisely so it can surveil users, promote its propaganda, and otherwise place US national security at risk.”
WeChat has an average of 19 million daily active users in the US, analytics firms Apptopia said early last month. It is popular among Chinese students, Americans living in China and Americans who have personal or business relationships in China.
Beeler wrote that “certainly the government’s over-arching national-security interest is significant. But on this record — while the government has established that China’s activities raise significant national security concerns — it has put in scant little evidence that its effective ban of WeChat for all US users addresses those concerns.”
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