The Trump administration said on Wednesday it was stepping up efforts to purge untrusted Chinese apps from U.S. digital networks and called the Chinese-owned short-video app TikTok and messenger app WeChat “significant threats.” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said expanded U.S. efforts on a program it calls “Clean Network” would focus on five areas and include steps to prevent various Chinese apps, as well as Chinese telecoms companies, from accessing sensitive information on American citizens and businesses.
Pompeo’s announcement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok. The hugely popular video-sharing app has come under fire from U.S. lawmakers and the administration over national security concerns, amid intensified tensions between Washington and Beijing.
“With parent companies based in China, apps like TikTok, WeChat and others are significant threats to personal data of American citizens, not to mention tools for CCP (Chinese Communist Party) content censorship,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo said the United States was working to prevent Chinese telecoms firm Huawei Technologies Co Ltd from pre-installing or making available for download the most popular U.S. apps on its phones. “We don’t want companies to be complicit in Huawei’s human rights abuses, or the CCP’s surveillance apparatus,” Pompeo said… Pompeo said the State Department would work with other government agencies to protect the data of U.S. citizens and American intellectual property, including COVID-19 vaccine research, by preventing access from cloud-based systems run by companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, and Tencent.
Pompeo said he was joining Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf in urging the U.S. telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, to terminate authorizations for China Telecom and three other companies to provide services to and from the United States. He said the State Department was also working to ensure China could not compromise information carried by undersea cables that connect the United States to the global internet.
MacDailyNews Take: The reckoning has begun.
The CCP needs to go away and die, but banning apps is a slippery slope.
Leadership at the highest levels are the last to realize the war has been lost.
If you have Google, Facebook, Uber, a Chromebook (in schools) you have lost, if you supported non-union and the right to work states you have lost, doing business with the Chinese, Russians, Israelis, and Saudis the CEO’s at the top and the American government at the top already made the deals 60 years ago. Trumpet won’t help you his whole life is the opposite of the common American.
Trump can’t Constitutionally ban an app, right? And he can’t favor one corporation over another either. And why is he favoring MS over, say, Oracle?
Monarchial operations are slowly infiltrating the MO of the presidency who, as the title indicates, is supposed to only preside and govern, not to dictate. But this expansion began with slave owner and cheater George Washington when he issued the very first executive order for an office desk for his bare office. That EO was justified at a time when representatives had to ride a horse and buggy for hundreds of miles to Wash DC for a quorum to OK the purchase. Now, an EO is used to bypass Congress on large, costly items. This is too much power in the executive branch. Adding to the overreach is the National Security Letter provision of the Patriot Act that radically expanded the executive’s power to compel individuals and the corporation to disclose customer records held by banks, telephone companies, hospitals and ISPs, as well as the so-called “ presidential findings” that modify laws the people’s congress passed.
Trumpet is in Putin’s pocket. A moral bankrupt….
While Donald is morally bankrupt, I strongly disagree that he is in Putin’s pocket which is Hillary’s narrative to obscure the reasons for her embarrassing loss. in her book, “What Happened?” she blames all kinds of people and things but not herself. IOW, she fabricated that Russiagate narrative which now both parties are using to reignite what looks to be another highly profitable — the Fed makes free money for military contractors, legislators like the Pelosi and McConnell crime families, and of course the stock market — big time war which I deplore with Russia.