After U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a news conference ON Wednesday, Aug. 5, announcing a program aimed at “containing potential national security risks.” The Clean Network initiative will focus on five areas, including measures to prevent various Chinese apps and Chinese telecommunications companies from accessing sensitive information on U.S. citizens and businesses.
It is understood that the U.S. State Department launched the 5G Clean Path program on April 29. All network information exchanges with U.S. diplomatic institutions must pass through reliable 5G telecommunications equipment, and the unreliable suppliers are Huawei and ZTE. This notice is an upgrade of “Netnet”.
Pompeo said the State Department will work with other government agencies to protect U.S. citizens’ data and the U.S. by preventing access from cloud-based systems operated by companies including Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom and Tencent, Pompeo said, according to The New York Times. Intellectual property, including COVID-19 vaccine research.
Pompeo said he was working with Attorney General William Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to urge the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. telecoms Regulator, to end its sanctions against China Telecom and three other companies. Authorization to provide service in and out of the United States.
In an interview with state news agency Xinhua on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the United States “has no right” to set up a “net cleanup program” and called Washington’s actions a “textbook-style case of bullying.” “Everyone can see that the intention of the United States is to protect its own technology monopoly and deprive other countries of the right to development,” Wang Yi said.
The five specific measures of the plan released on the official website of the US State Department involve operators and their equipment, application stores, apps, cloud infrastructure, and submarine cables.
On August 5, the official website of the US State Department released the news of “Announcing the Expansion of the Clean Network to Safeguard America’s Assets” (announcing the expansion of the Clean Network to protect US assets), and introduced the “clean network” measures in detail.
Specifically, the “Clean Network” includes five measures:
Clean Carrier: Ensures that untrusted Chinese telecommunications companies are not associated with U.S. telecommunications networks and should not provide international telecommunications services to the United States.
Clean Store: Remove untrusted Chinese apps from the US app store to protect privacy and business information.
Clean Apps: Prevents untrusted Chinese smartphone manufacturers from pre-installing or otherwise downloading US-trusted apps in their app stores. Companies in the US and other countries should remove their apps from the Huawei mobile app store.
Clean Cloud: Prevents U.S. citizens’ most sensitive personal information and companies’ most valuable intellectual property (including COVID-19 vaccine research) from being accessed by cloud-based systems run by companies including Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.
Clean Cable: Ensuring that undersea cables connecting the U.S. to the global Internet are not compromised and used for large-scale intelligence gathering. The United States will also work with foreign partners to ensure that submarine cables around the world are not compromised by similar situations.
Although officials say it is to protect citizens’ privacy, American netizens don’t think so. Negative comments make up the majority of HackerNews related posts.
Some netizens believe that this limits the freedom of thought, “I hate this name, literally, it sounds like a kind of ideological purge.”
Some netizens believe that this kind of closed behavior will hinder the development of science, “I am afraid that with EARN-IT, H1-B ban, clean network, etc., we are worried that generations will thwart our scientific and intellectual advantages.”
Others smelled some abnormal political wind. “Of course I’m starting to feel the wind blowing in a certain direction. Only the paranoid can survive.”
Although the ban is aimed at China everywhere, there are also many people who believe that this kind of behavior also has a negative effect on the United States, including affecting free trade and so on.
“Restricting communication with China is not just a restriction on China, it’s a restriction on Americans, and these laws prevent Americans from free trade and free association.”