clear as mud —

Impending WeChat ban won’t actually ban users from WeChat, DOJ says

The ban is taking effect in three days, and nobody knows what it will do yet.

There both is and is not a ban in effect on WeChat.
Enlarge / There both is and is not a ban in effect on WeChat.

Three days before a ban on the use of China-owned app WeChat in the United States is supposed to take effect, the Trump administration still hasn't said what specifically is being banned—only that individuals will not be penalized for using the app, despite the alleged threat it presents to national security.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross does "not intend to take actions that would target persons or groups whose only connection with WeChat is their use or downloading of the app to convey personal or business information between users, or otherwise define the relevant transactions in such a way that would impose criminal or civil liability on such users," attorneys for the Department of Justice wrote in a court filing (PDF).

Users of WeChat may find services "directly or indirectly impaired" by whatever measures the administration does end up imposing, the filing continued, but "use and downloading of the app for this limited purpose will not be a defined transaction."

The filing comes in response to a petition a group of US-based WeChat users filed in federal court in August seeking an injunction on the ban.

The... ban?

President Donald Trump signed two very similar executive orders in August targeting WeChat and TikTok. The TikTok saga appears to have resulted in a deal with Oracle, giving the US firm a significant minority stake in TikTok.

The WeChat ban, however, remains much more nebulous. WeChat is owned by Tencent, an absolutely massive Chinese conglomerate with full or partial ownership stakes in a huge array of Chinese and US technology, media, gaming, and entertainment firms. It is China's everything app: where a US user might use Uber, GrubHub, Venmo, Facebook Messenger, and Google or Apple Pay in the course of a morning, a user in China would do everything within WeChat.

China's government, however, relies on this ubiquity for surveillance and censorship purposes inside China. The executive order alleges that WeChat captures "vast swaths of information" from its users (as nearly all mobile apps do), and that because of its ties to China's government, that data collection "threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information."

The order says that "any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" will be prohibited. The order does not actually describe what those "transactions" may entail but instead says the Secretary of Commerce has 45 days in which to determine them. Trump signed the executive order on Thursday, August 6, making Sunday, September 20—this weekend—the deadline by which Ross needs to identify what, exactly, the prohibited transactions are.

The promise that the executive order will not affect individuals is not enough, the users argued in a response to the court (PDF).

"The 'representations and assurances'" in the letter "provide no clarity about what the Secretary will or won't do on September 20," the group wrote in its response filing. "The Secretary has not taken off the table his ability to ban the use of WeChat by anyone... Having first failed to articulate any actual national security concern, the administration's latest 'assurances' that users can keep using WeChat, and exchange their personal and business information, only further illustrates the hollowness and pre-textual nature of [the administration's] 'national security' rationales."

Channel Ars Technica