Team Obama Seeks an Arms Deal with China for Cyberspace

What will we agree to or give up now?

The US and China are negotiating what could become the first arms control deal for cyberspace, embracing a commitment by each country that it will not be the first to use cyber weapons to cripple the other's critical infrastructure during peacetime, a media report said ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping's maiden state visit here.

While such an agreement could address attacks on power stations, banking systems, cellphone networks and hospitals, it would not, at least in its first version, protect against most of the attacks that China has been accused of conducting in the US, including the widespread poaching of intellectual property and the theft of millions of government employees' personal data, The New York Times reported.

Norse's cyber attack map shows China launching 
massive attacks ...

The negotiations have been conducted with urgency in recent weeks, with a goal to announce an agreement when President Xi arrives here on Thursday.

Last week, a high-level Chinese Communist Party envoy, Meng Jianzhu, who is responsible for state security, visited Washington and met with Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice, director of FBI James Comey and others.

President Obama hinted at the ongoing negotiations last Wednesday, when he said that the rising number of cyberattacks would "probably be one of the biggest topics" of the summit meeting, and that his goal was to see "if we and the Chinese are able to coalesce around a process for negotiations" that would ultimately "bring a lot of other countries along."

But a senior US official involved in the discussions cautioned that an initial statement between Obama and Xi may not contain "a specific, detailed mention" of a prohibition on attacking critical infrastructure. Rather, it would be a more "generic embrace" of a code of conduct adopted recently by a working group at the United Nations.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.