The Trump war on Chinese cell phone applications

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Yeah. Trump is really pushing this. But we all know what is going on. If it is Chinese, it is bad. It’s a all-hands-on-deck assault on China, short of nuclear war. And the ONLY reason why America is not invading China, and blasting the living fuck out of it’s cities is because Trump knows that America will become completely destroyed and radioactive in the process. China does not play.

So he’s going all-out against everything Chinese. And part of that is the software applications that are Chinese, and being used all over the world. We have read about Huawei, and wechat, which most Americans know nothing about. So they just go with the flow and say Yah! China Bad!

China Bad!

Well, there’s a lot of articles on this. Most are propaganda justifying banning software and technology.

Little thought is whether the President of the United States actually has the power to ban anything. After all, it took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol back in 1913. Since when did the President become a King?

But I digress.

The excuse is “National Security”. It’s a catch-all phrase which means “I can do what I want and not give any reasons or justification for it”.

Anyways, this article is a pretty decent overview on this subject and is well worth a look. It is titled “Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat” written by Larry Romanoff on August 8, 2020 it has 201 Comments . It was found on the UNZ website and all credit to the author. It was edited to fit this venue.

Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat

First, let’s dispel the combined notion that China spies on everyone and the US spies on no one. There is so much public evidence to destroy both these assertions that I won’t bother repeating them here. I will however remind readers that a few years ago China more or less banned Windows 8 from the country because it was discovered that the O/S had a built-in NSA back door.[1]

It seems that Germany reported on this first, but the devastating proof was at an IT conference where a Microsoft executive was interrupted during a speech with precisely this accusation.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

He did not deny it because the person making the accusation was the person who discovered it and had with him the proof, but refused to discuss it and changed the subject.

But this is hardly news. Forty years ago it was proven that all Xerox copy machines delivered to foreign embassies and consulates in the US were “espionage-ready”.[10][11]

Also, for at least 20 years, and perhaps much more, it was common knowledge that when any foreign embassies, consulates, banks and other corporations ordered computers and similar hardware from US suppliers, those shipments were intercepted by UPS, delivered to the CIA and/or NSA for installation of “extra” hardware and software before delivery to their destinations. This was one of the confirmations by Edward Snowden.[12][13][14][15]

Any search on this will give you millions of hits unless Google chooses that moment to lose its memory.

Huawei

Trump’s problems with Huawei are twofold.

The most obvious is that China is eating America’s lunch when it comes to innovation and invention and Trump would like to slow this down by destroying Huawei and is clearly making every possible effort in this regard, including bullying and threatening half the known world against using Huawei’s products. But this is the small part of the problem; the real issue is espionage.

There is no practical value in disputing the assertion that Cisco and other American hardware and software firms install back doors to all their equipment for the convenience of CIA and NSA access. But suddenly Huawei is replacing Cisco and those other American firms with its better and less expensive equipment.

That part is okay, but how can the CIA and NSA approach Huawei and ask the company to build back doors into its equipment so the US can spy on China – among all other countries?

There is no solution to this problem other than to trash Huawei’s reputation by accusing it of being an espionage threat and having the company’s equipment banned. And this applies not only to the US, but to the entire Five Eyes Espionage Network, involving the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.[16]

Briefly, this was set up to break laws while pretending no laws were being broken.

It is generally against the law for a government to spy on its own citizens, but that law doesn’t apply to a foreign government. So Canada spies on Australian citizens and sends the information to the Australian spooks who can claim they did nothing wrong.

Rinse and repeat.

The sad part is that the “intelligence” received is usually of little interest to the four minor participants but all of it is shared with the US who are frothing to spy on the entire world and to take possession of “every communication” of every kind in the entire world. Thus, it isn’t sufficient to ban Huawei only from the US because this company’s equipment would castrate the NSA’s effort in the other four nations. Thus, US bullying to ensure each of its five eyes is Huawei-free.

And that’s the entire story, like it or not.

Tik-Tok

Tik-Tok is nothing of consequence, except that it is in direct competition with similar American platforms and has proven too popular and too competitive to be permitted to survive.

This is just a cheap, below-the-belt and illegal-as-hell shot at China.

No threat, no nothing.

However, as with all similar IT products and platforms it contains much personal information especially useful for marketing, which has so far been the private property of people like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Thus, Trump kills two birds with one stone: either simply kill Tik-Tok on some trumped-up accusation (if you’ll excuse the expression) of espionage, or force a sale to an American company.

Either way, China loses massively while the political oppression and marketing value of that personal information remains safely in trusted American hands.

WeChat

Since few Americans are familiar with WeChat, let me give you a description. Many of these functions are available in the West through various platforms, but not always to the same extent nor with the same convenience.

With WeChat we can transmit text and voice messages, photos and videos, and other files of any description even of many Mb in size.

FOR FREE.

We can send and receive both text and voice messages in any language because WeChat has an excellent translation function in combination with one of its partners which translates not only text and voice, but will extract and translate all text contained in photos, handy for restaurant menus if you can’t read Chinese.

FOR FREE

We can place not only voice calls but video calls to anyone anywhere that transmit over the internet.

FOR FREE

It is so convenient that WeChat is the default communication choice for a great many people for most purposes. WeChat also has a Moments platform where we can post text, photos, videos, that are visible to those on our contact lists while selecting those who can view and who cannot, reserving some posts for close friends and others more generally public.

In China we have two primary online payment systems, one operated by Alibaba (called Alipay) and the other by WeChat. Its use is nearly universal in China and both are free to the user. Unlike PayPal…

ITS FREE

During the past several years I cannot recall a single instance where I had cash in my pocket (even small change) when I went anywhere or was shopping for anything. Even to purchase a small bunch of green onions at a street market, the vendor has a QR code which my phone scans and the payment into their bank account is automatic.

With WeChat, we can send money to each other.

FOR FREE

If we want to share the cost of lunch, you can pay the entire bill and I transfer my share to you through WeChat. If I ever need cash, I could go to any shop or even approach a complete stranger and ask for 1,000 RMB and instantly repay him into his WeChat account.

It is frequently used to transfer money internationally this way, sending dollars to a friend in one country and receiving RMB into a WeChat account in China.

Instant, secure, and free of all fees.

FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE

It all happens within a second, with a concurrent text message confirmation from the bank of both sides of the transaction. WeChat is the main reason people can travel anywhere in China with only a mobile phone and passport (and a change of clothing). Through WeChat, people can purchase plane or train tickets, pay taxi fares and hotel bills, restaurant tabs, in the same way.

FOR FREE

Another useful WeChat function is real-time GPS location sharing. If a group is traveling to a destination in several cars, WeChat displays an active GPS map showing all locations in real space and time. If I am meeting a friend at a shopping mall or park or other large location, with this GPS function we can see each other’s location in real time and I know which way to walk to encounter my friend.

We have WeChat groups which we can create with any number of participants for any convenient purpose. During the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai we had a temporary WeChat group for the purchase of meat and vegetables that functioned better than any supermarket and with much less trouble. If I want to have a Christmas party I form a group of those I plan to invite, and all our discussions and planning take place within that platform. Most communities (small portions of residential districts) have a WeChat group for notification of community events and sharing important information.

The point with Trump’s “sanction” of WeChat is first that it will terminally disrupt international communications between China and the US for students, scientists, diplomats, media reporters, for all those in the US who have frequent communications with China, effects felt more seriously by those in China, which is a plus for Trump.

Second, Trump’s administration is uncomfortable with the extent to which WeChat is encroaching on the American turf of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and more, with already around 100 million downloads in the US, and his actions are partially to reclaim that turf by simply banning a competing medium that is threatening to take over and seriously downgrade the popularity of similar American platforms.

But most important is the espionage and censorship role of Trump’s initiative.

As the censorship noose tightens around Facebook and Twitter, Americans are naturally moving to WeChat. The real issue is not that WeChat poses any danger to the US in any sense but, as with Huawei, the CIA and NSA cannot very well approach WeChat and ask for automatic sharing of all that personal relationship data.

Therefore, under the guise of China being untrustworthy, the US government simply bans WeChat and thus no one in the US can send or receive any message without the NSA having a copy.

A huge plus is that any news not fitting the official narrative will then be strangled at birth, as Google, Facebook and Twitter are now doing.

If Microsoft or another American firm were to buy WeChat, then of course all is well since it is US firms, not Chinese, who automatically share all personal contact data with their government.

Movie Time

Notes

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/china-bans-windows-8-from-government-computers/

[2] https://www.rt.com/news/windows-8-nsa-germany-862/

[3] https://www.technobuffalo.com/nsa-windows-8-exploit

[4] https://wccftech.com/windows-nsa-backdoor-shadow-brokers/

[5] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2047332/is-windows-8-a-trojan-horse-for-the-nsa-the-german-government-thinks-so.html

[6] http://techrights.org/2013/06/15/nsa-and-microsoft/

[7] https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/11/12/windows-10-security-alert-hidden-backdoor-found-by-kaspersky-researchers/

[8] https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1160914-how-nsa-access-was-built-into-windows/

[9] http://techrights.org/2013/06/15/nsa-and-microsoft/

[10] http://electricalstrategies.com/about/in-the-news/spies-in-the-xerox-machine/

[11] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/state-sponsored-commercial-espionage-the-global-theft-of-ideas/

[12] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/173721-the-nsa-regularly-intercepts-laptop-shipments-to-implant-malware-report-says

[13] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-nsa-intercepts-computer-deliveries/

[14] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2487222/the-nsa-intercepts-computer-deliveries-to-plant-spyware.html

[15] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden–the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.html

[16] https://americanfreepress.net/five-eyes-network-sees-all/

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Bo Chen

It is all about the petrodollar hegemony…. Trumps EO to ban WeChat/TikTok etc and Pompeo’s Deep State “Clean Network” is in part designed to slow the internationalization of the digital Yuan. This is the biggest threat to US. If China rolls out DCEP and foreign merchants can use Chinese fintech platforms, I.e., alipay and wechat pay, to conduct cross-border exchanges then the USD and by extension the US empire is doomed. The timing of these announcements are partly due to trump’s reelection and partly because the US is starting to feel the heat, given the recent announcement regarding ant financial IPO and DCEP testings… Recently Trump hinted that AliPay could be next on the list. This has nothing to do with spying/backdoors/IP theft but ironically everything to do with “National Security”….

American’s greatest fear is the world using Huawei (Chinese ) 5G for the network, Chinese mobile phones (be it Huawei or Oppo or Xiaomi etc) for the device endpoints, and Chinese apps like WeChat/TikTok/Alipay for the payments, coupled with Chinese BRI and the fact that US is printing like there is no tomorrow with QE Infinity, the writing is on the wall… If the likes of Huawei, TikTok, WeChat are allowed to proliferate worldwide and help the digital blockchain Yuan gain mass adoption, and if BRI were to succeed and invalidate America’s naval blockade plans hatched up for China, then China already being the world’s largest trading partner, it would be able to easily offer the rest of the world a viable solution to counterbalance the US regime’s increasingly wanton and reckless abuse of weaponizing the US dollar global reserve status in strangling other nations and essentially taxing and enslaving the world… If the day comes that America can then no longer lie, cheat and steal, then it collapses upon itself….

Bo Chen

The US actions actually make perfect sense when you look at it from the perspective of US attacking China in a full stack manner and making sure that America retains dominance in the entire stack… Think of the OSI model in networking, in order for applications to communicate across distances each layer has to be working. The more layers American can dominate in then the more chokepoints it can use against percieved enemies such as what its doing with the Google Play ban against Huawei…

At the network level its all about the raw transport of communication, and here its 5G as the future. If American can convinence its allies and vassals in the world to use non-Chinese vendors then in the future America can leverage Western dominance of the networks to ban Chinese apps, commerce, communication directly at the lowest network layer. This is what the fight for 5G is mostly about…

Then there is the end-point layer of the stack… IoT devices, smartphones, smartwatches, etc… here the US is using its sanctions power when it comes to semiconductor supply chain to deprive Huawei and other Chinese telcos and mobile makers the ability to compete internationally… if the only phones allowed are iPhones and Samsung (also US controlled) then America can cut China off and isolate China at the endpoint levels as well…

Then there is the firmware/software/storefront level… In this context Google is operating as an intelligence and sanctions arm of the US government at both the firmware (Android OS) and store front (Google Play) level… Apple the same. Even if the device is a Chinese one, if US can sanction at the store front level then it can still strike at applications at will by simply getting them delisted…

And finally at the application level they can force the likes of TikTok to directly sell to American companies… If it cannot buy, it bans… likely the fate of WeChat (which China won’t sell) and AliPay…

Bottom line its all about controlling the coming 4th industrial revolution, the IoT smart devices, AI of the future and also about preserving the petrodollar hegemony… WeChat is already a payment system but not yet widely used by the West. Why was TikTok banned first? Because it has been adopted in mass by the West and the US citizens, so it wou’ldnt be hard for TikTok to incorporate a payment system and tie in with the digital Yuan and that overnight would be a direct challenge to the US dollar…. so even if American couldn’t target it at the app level it would target it at the firmware/storefront level, the endpoint level, and the network level…

Ohio Guy

Yes, it all seems quite obvious. Just as MM has described in previous posts where things in America used to be free 30 years ago now cost money. Like free air at a “service station” for a low tire, a cup of ice water, matches, etc. Everything is about money here in the unUnited States. Meanwhile, China is 20 years ahead in tech and standard of living for the average individual. Sad, and the crumbling of this country accelerates exponentially.