Justice Department Asks Judge To Allow US To Bar WeChat From US App Stores

The U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge in San Francisco early on Friday to allow the government to bar Apple Inc <AAPL.O> and Alphabet Inc’s Google <GOOGL.O> from offering WeChat for download in U.S. app stores pending an appeal.

The filing asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler to put on hold her preliminary injunction issued Saturday. That injunction blocked the U.S. Commerce Department order which was set to take effect late on Sept. 20 and that would also bar other U.S. transactions with Tencent Holding’s <0700.HK> WeChat, potentially making the app unusable in the United States.

The Justice Department filing said 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.”

Tencent had put forward a “mitigation proposal” that sought to create a new U.S. version of the app, deploy specific security measures to protect the new apps source code, partner with a U.S. cloud provider for user data storage, and manage the new app through a U.S.-based entity, the filing said.

However, its proposal still allowed Tencent to retain ownership of WeChat and did not address U.S. concerns over the company, it added.

Tencent declined to comment.

Lawyers for U.S. WeChat Users Alliance, the group behind the legal challenge to the WeChat ban, questioned the urgency of the government’s request, noting it took the government almost five days to seek a stay.

“The government’s decision to sit tight for five days shows that there is no emergency,” they wrote.

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 U.S. persons, which is accessible to Tencent and stored in data centers in China and Canada,” the memo said.

The Justice Department also separately filed under seal early Friday a classified assessment from U.S. intelligence officials on WeChat.