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United States China Security The Internet

The US and China Agree Not To Conduct Economic Espionage In Cyberspace 108

Posted by samzenpus from the play-nice dept.
blottsie writes: The leaders of China and the United States agreed on Friday to take new steps to address cyberspying, vowing that neither country would conduct or knowingly support the theft of intellectual property. Senior law-enforcement and intelligence officials from both nations will evaluate how the two major powers respond to each other's requests for assistance fighting "malicious cyber activity," the White House said in a statement. The group will hold its first meeting before the end of the year, with subsequent meetings occurring twice per year.
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The US and China Agree Not To Conduct Economic Espionage In Cyberspace More

The US and China Agree Not To Conduct Economic Espionage In Cyberspace

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  • what a pushover (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So, we're going to trust China not to hack?! Great plan Obama!

    • Re:what a pushover (Score:5, Insightful)

      by imidan ( 559239 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @03:37PM (#50600079)

      No. And your trite oversimplification is utterly worthless. We make the agreement so that when China *does* break it, we have a protocol in place for responding. We contact the Chinese government, we point at the malicious behavior, and we expect them to correct it. If they do not, then we have put in a good-faith effort, and we can enact our own consequences.

      It's a first step. It's not the entire solution. But we have to start somewhere.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        My money is on that US broke the agreement before China did.

        Yes, I assume that it happened before this news hit Slashdot.

        • Re:what a pushover (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25, 2015 @04:28PM (#50600567)

          Think about all of the technology that the US has and has had compared to China. Do you honestly believe that the US gov hacked Chinese businesses to try to get past them? Intellectual property theft is moving in almost completely one direction and that is from the US to China, not the other way around, so I'd be very happy to take that bet.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            The data that the United States is looking for, is which firms are manufacturing which items, for which client. The tech is more or less irrelevant.

            The data that PRC is looking for, is the tech that makes their manufacturing companies more efficient at doing so. What the product is, and who the customer is, is more or less irrelevant.

            What this treaty means, is that both countries will openly exchange the requested data, albeit through back channels, rather than clandestinely.

            • Can you explain the value of that information to the US government?

              • No, he can't. It's just anything to continue the narrative that the US is no better than anyone else, and usually worse. Any frikkin subject can lend itself to piling it on.

      • Re:what a pushover (Score:4, Insightful)

        by amiga3D ( 567632 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @03:59PM (#50600313)

        In all reality I'd bet neither side intends to abide by it. It's yet another treaty not worth the paper it's written on.

        • See, I was thinking; if it was that easy, why didn't Obama make that call 7 years ago? Or hell; fly over there even. They do give him use of a plane. A nice one.

        • Actually, it is not even a treaty. It is merely a verbal agreement between two heads of state. It doesn't mean anything. It is just a nice soundbite that no one actually believes.

      • Re:what a pushover (Score:4, Insightful)

        by sshir ( 623215 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @04:53PM (#50600763)
        My guess is that both sides will start to do it Russian style - outsource the "data acquisition" step to 3rd parties. In Russian case those are outright criminal organizations, mixing business with pleasure, so to speak.

      • If they do not, then we have put in a good-faith effort, and we can enact our own consequences.

        Yes, like sending them harshly worded messages while doing nothing.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by imidan ( 559239 )

          Yes, like sending them harshly worded messages while doing nothing.

          Not the approach that I would endorse, but to each his own.

          I mean, this deal may be completely meaningless. Maybe both sides will break it over and over, and we'll eventually just throw it away. But, again, it's a first step in a conversation. Some conversations in international diplomacy have to be started more than once. Some take a long time to get anywhere. But we'll never accomplish anything at all if we never start the conversatio

        • While doing the same thing, more like.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Salgak1 ( 20136 )
      And of course, any treaty the Chinese GOVERNMENT signs prohibiting the Chinese Government from hacking the US, is not binding on all the private and even corporate hacking outfits there. Much less the Russian, Iranians, or the other members of the cast of thousand any SOC guy is familiar with. Or, they just go deniable, and hack via bots and previously pwned systems. Either way, a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing . . .

    • Re:what a pushover (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @04:15PM (#50600449)

      So, we're going to trust China not to hack?!

      Every bit as much as they're going to trust the U.S. not to hack them.

    • We plan on trusting Iran. Why not China too? And maybe North Korea, ISIS ....

      • We already trusted North Korea. We gave them food, fuel, and a nuclear reactor in exchange for not developing a bomb.

        Am I the only one that remembers that?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tsotha ( 720379 )

      Nah. They're going to pretend to stop and we're going to pretend not to notice they haven't.

      This is all for domestic consumption.

  • Hmmmm. (Score:5, Funny)

    by minkowski76 ( 2611417 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @03:31PM (#50600013)
    Translation: China has pretty much stolen everything it wants.

    • Re:Hmmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @03:54PM (#50600255)

      Translation: both sides will work harder at hiding it.

    • I'm pretty sure if the USA comes across something useful that they don't already have they will take it and make it their own too, in fact I am sure they do it. It is just that China started so far behind that they are working much harder to play catch-up. You could never trust either party and I can't see why you should now, just because they said they would behave themselves, because when has that been a guarantee of anything?

  • Great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by pr0nbot ( 313417 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @03:31PM (#50600015)

    Phew! Crisis averted. I'll switch off my firewall.

  • The US promises to just put the head in.

  • HA - HA - HA!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sshir ( 623215 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @03:38PM (#50600099)
    I almost peed myself laughing... Were they able to keep their faces straight when they were "agreeing"?

  • The US and China Agree Not To Conduct Economic Espionage In Cyberspace

    And what's more, they both agreed that they never had done anything like that before, not ever in history!

    Isn't that swell?

  • What is this "intellectual property" thing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    that you keep talking about? Can ideas be kept as property?

  • Yea, right.... (roll eyes)... will be business as usual.......

  • The US and China Agree Not To Conduct blatant Economic Espionage In Cyberspace...

    And will be sure to use more plausible stories (or at least ones that are not under copyright) when they get caught.

  • Too late, China has a reputation (Score:4)

    by sideslash ( 1865434 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @03:48PM (#50600205)
    Everybody in the USA knows China has been grabbing everything it can by digital espionage for a long time now.

    And ha ha, guess what -- thanks to Snowden, everybody in China, not to mention the world, knows that the USA indiscriminately grabs whatever it can from foreign sources.

    Only a fool would believe that either side has any intentions of stopping.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Everybody in the USA knows China has been grabbing everything it can by digital espionage for a long time now.

      And ha ha, guess what -- thanks to Snowden, everybody in China, not to mention the world, knows that the USA indiscriminately grabs whatever it can from foreign sources.

      Only a fool would believe that either side has any intentions of stopping.

      Sane people realize that both sides have had what some term greedy individuals or organizations that have done questionable things that cost their side or the

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Both nations are pretty battered and bruised. China's economy took some black eyes, and the US has been having a death by a thousand cuts, either by people selling classified documents, intrusions, or just many, many people asleep at the switch when it comes to cybersecurity.

      China has one cybersecurity advantage. Their Great Firewall. Not only does it protect against foreign propaganda, it keeps out the brunt of offshore attacks. This something the US should do, because it would reduce a lot of the atta

      • This something the US should do, because it would reduce a lot of the attacks before they touch infrastructure.

        What the heck? Are you posting on behalf of the PRC?

    • We dragnet the whole planet in an attempt to keep the world safe from terrorists. The only effect they might feel from that is an attack that didn't happen. Right or wrong, that's what we're doing.

      They target us specifically, stealing what amounts to money. The effect from that is that they are enriched at our expense. That's what they are doing.

      Totally the same thing.

  • Meaningless scribbles on scraps of paper are useless for national defense.. Just ask hitler and stalin. As long as china does the bulk of our technology manufacturing, this will never fly. Even if china wanted to, it could never enforce such policy, and neither country will roll back its surveillance programs on the other.

  • Instead of spying in cyber space, they will return to using outer space to get the same result.

  • neither country would conduct or knowingly support the theft of intellectual property.

    So both countries have developed networks of patsies and the necessary levels of plausible deniability.

    No-one actually thinks they will stop, do they?

  • We were busy hacking them and they were busy hacking us.
  • For what it's worth, http://longtail.it.marist.edu/... [marist.edu] shows a significant drop off of attacks from China yesterday (Thursday) and today (Friday). FYI: Longtail is an ssh brute force analysis program with 11 ssh honeypots live today. I've been getting almost 300,000 attempts per day, but only got about 75,000 yesterday, and 88,000 (so far) today.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NoKaOi ( 1415755 )

      So I assume this means that as part of the treaty, the US government disclosed to China the honeypots it knows about. China is in the process of disclosing it to their pet script kiddies, but only 75% of the script kiddies have so far stopped hitting those known honeypots.

  • Call me when a REAL, ENFORCEABLE policy is in place.

    This is just a public patty-cake party. Nobody who's out of the public eye will follow this for a second.

    • They have to find something to pretend to agree on, and it isn't going to be the Spratly Islands, human rights, or reserve currency standards. Might as well play patty-cake over something with secret details.

  • This is just to pretend that China isn't going to steal our corporate data, and government data, and that the NSA and CIA won't do the same.

    But both will.

  • Wait... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does this mean the US have also agreed to stop economic espionage in Europe?

  • The whole point of intellectual property (whether it be patents, trademarks or copyrights) is to make the subject matter available to the public where it can be seen. Agreeing not to conduct the theft of IP is like agreeing not to pee on the plains of Mars. Meaningless.

    What I don't see here is anything about military espionage. Someone has been lifting the personal identities of government employees, which could be used to extort them into revealing secrets. Where's the hotline for that?

    This is just another

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re "Someone has been lifting the personal identities of government employees"
      The US and its helper nations had secured, all its projects and accounts safe from the Soviet Union and other nations well into the 1990's on vast digital databases.
      Every department, agency, mil and gov digital site seemed have been kept secure or was a honeypot as bait, junk busywork projects to be tracked when found or traps.
      ie at some point and for some reason the US gov selected to place its databases in an easy to read pl
  • We won't spy on your country.....

    the check is in the mail......

    we won't cum in your mouth

  • Peace in our time (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Friday September 25, 2015 @07:29PM (#50601671) Journal

    Peace in our time. Sponsored by Huawei. Hey, I didn't type that last part. WTF?

  • It looks like the USA is taking its defense plans from the pre-WWII French.

    1st it was the Joke Strike Fighter and now its a gentleman's agreement to stop doing what everyone knows is going on all the time.

    Can they build another wall?

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