Tencent in talks for 'longterm solution' to WeChat mess as injunction keeps the app alive Tencent-owned messaging-and-more app WeChat has evaded the USA’s ban on its presence in app stores and on the internet - for now - after the United States District Court granted a preliminary injunction against the Executive Order that branded the service a national security risk. That Executive Order was made on August 6th …
"If the Americans show a bit of intelligence" and "vote Trump out of office" should never be used in the same sentence.
It would be like saying "If you do not want to see how bad COVID-19 is then slow down the testing for COVID-19. Problem solved." -- oh, wait.
Why should we care? There is basically no WeChat usage by non Chinese speakers. In the US it is used by Chinese nationals to communicate with people back home. If China wants to spy on their messages they can do it as the traffic passes through the Great Firewall (any traffic end to end encrypted, like iMessage, is blocked by the Great Firewall so I assume WeChat is not end to end encrypted)
I assume Chinese nationals living in the US who care about whether China could spy on them and worry that WeChat might be bugged by China's government choose to use something else to communicate amongst themselves, and only use WeChat to communicate to people back home.
If WeChat is banned, someone will create a new app designed for the same purpose, which would have to not be end to end encrypted, so banning WeChat would accomplish nothing other than inconveniencing Chinese nationals living in the US and people back home who want to communicate with them. It is just election season showboating by Trump.
The fundamental weakness in our system of government is that it requires an independent judiciary that's prepared to do the right thing. We have a set up where the judiciary has been systematically corrupted by applying an ideological test for new, lifetime, appointments. (Forget the recent SCOTUS vacancy -- there's been a bit of a production line filling a large backlog of lower and appeal court vacancies that have been allowed to build up for years.) Couple this with a Department of Juistice that's not prepared to enforce the law, at least any law that inconveniences the Administration, and is prepared to purge anyone from the ranks who doesn't toe the line, and you've got a situation where an Administration can either do what it wants or can be stymied at every turn depending on whether its complexion pleases the power base. Trump's just a useful tool.....
I know many of you will hate this new music, but how many songs quote the First Amendment? I, for one, am down with the 1990 kids.
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