Second, we call Clean Store. We want to see untrusted Chinese apps removed from U.S. app stores. President Trump has mentioned impending action on TikTok, and for good reason. With parent companies based in China, apps like TikTok, WeChat, and others are significant threats to the personal data of American citizens, not to mention tools for CCP content censorship.
Third, Clean Apps. We’re working to prevent Huawei and other untrusted vendors from pre-installing or making available for download the most popular U.S. apps. We don’t want companies to be complicit in Huawei’s human rights abuses or the CCP’s surveillance apparatus.
Fourth, Clean Cloud. We’re protecting Americans’ most sensitive personal information and our businesses’ most valuable intellectual property – including COVID vaccine research – from being accessed on cloud-based systems run by companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, and Tencent.
The State Department will work closely with Commerce and other agencies to limit the ability of Chinese cloud service providers to collect, to store, and to process vast amounts of data and sensitive information here in the United States.
Fifth and finally, Clean Cable. We’re working to ensure that the CCP can’t compromise information carried by the undersea cables that connect our country and others to the global internet.
Huawei Marine significantly underbids other companies on multiple procurements to connect Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and Europe using Chinese state-backed underseas technology.
We can’t allow that to continue. We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network.
The Trump administration’s work to secure our democracy continues in other ways as well:
The Department of State’s Global Engagement Center is releasing a special report today on Russian disinformation and propaganda, focusing especially on proxy sites.
Speaking of Russia and other malign actors:
The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of any person who, acting at the direction or under the control of a foreign government, interferes with U.S. elections by engaging in certain criminal cyber activities.
A few comments on the Middle East:
We welcome the agreement between the Republic of Yemen Government and the Southern Transitional Council to advance the terms of the Riyadh Agreement, which will pave the way for a unified government that can counter Houthi aggression.
We urge all the parties to implement the agreement’s terms, and support the UN special envoy’s efforts to broker a country-wide political settlement.
Of course, the conflict in Yemen has raged in large part because of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s illegal arms transfers to the Houthis.
And so next week the United States will put forward a resolution in the Security Council to extend the arms embargo on Iran.
The Security Council’s mission is to maintain “international peace and security.”
The Council would make an absolute mockery of that mission if it allowed the number-one state sponsor of terrorism to buy and sell weapons freely.
The United States has conducted now a years-long diplomacy on this matter. We have a bipartisan consensus in Congress. We have a 13-year consensus on the Council. And the proposal we put forward is eminently reasonable.
One way or another – one way or another, we will do the right thing. We will ensure that the arms embargo is extended.
And staying on United Nations matters for just a moment, it’s outrageous that the Human Rights Council would offer to seat Cuba, a brutal dictatorship that traffic its own doctors under the guise of humanitarian missions. No country should vote Cuba onto the Council.
Two quick items on religious freedom:
First, on behalf of President Trump and the American people, I want to express our solidarity with the Yezidi people as we commemorate the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the ISIS genocide. Much has been done by our administration to help Iraqis recover, but much more work remains.
And on a brighter note, I commend the progress that Sudan is making to protect religious freedom in its country as the country transitions away from radical Islamist rule.
Last month, the civilian-led transitional government abolished apostasy as a crime – a solid step forward.
Our global efforts to – as I close – to fight the pandemic continue.
This week the State Department and USAID are releasing an incremental $53 million in new humanitarian and economic assistance to help vulnerable people and partners continue to fight this deadly virus, bringing our total to more than $1.6 billion.
We will also be launching a $10 million COVID-19 Private Sector Engagement and Partnership Fund to invest that $10 million in promising new products, markets, and ideas for mitigating the economic impacts of the pandemic.