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.”
Photo: Reuters
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.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts