UPDATED 02:20 EDT / SEPTEMBER 21 2015

NEWS

Digital detente: China-U.S. said to be negotiating a cyber treaty to cut down on both hacking each other

Peace for our time may have been the fateful words of Neville Chamberlain in 1938 after returning from the Munich Conference, but the Governments of the U.S. and China think they may be smarter with news over the weekend that they are working on a new cyber treaty.

The dalliance in digital detente would see both countries sign an “arms control accord for cyberspace,” with both parties committing that they will not be the first to use cyberweapons to cripple the other’s critical infrastructure during peacetime.

The treaty, at least in it first form, is said to be limited to addressing attacks on power stations, banking systems, cellphone networks and hospitals, but would not protect against most of the attacks that China has been accused of conducting in the United States, The New York Times claims; China has been blamed repeatedly over the uses of State Sponsored cyber espionage, in particular targeting large American corporations for trade secrets that can be used to the advance the cause of Chinese industry.

Negotiations are said to have accelerated in recent weeks given Chinese President Xi Jinping is due to make a state visit to Washington, D.C. this coming Thursday, although other officials quoted in the report hosed down the possibility of a formal treaty, say it could be instead an embrace of what is described as a “generic framework” instead.

Chinese are solely bad uga-buga rubbish

If you read the rest of the coverage in the United States press around this dalliance with cyber-diplomacy, you’d get the feeling that it was all about cracking down on those heathen, bad yellow folks from China who are one-sidedly the bad guys in this play, a Cold War 2 if you like, but with the Soviet Union replaced as the bad guy.

Nothing could be further from the truth, although you’d never know it reading slabs of the American press.

No one is claiming that China is not without fault here and that China hasn’t been state-sponsoring hacking attempts against all sorts of entities in the United States; clearly it has, but you’d be delusional to not believe that America gives as much back in the cyber hacking and cyber-espionage game, with the only difference being is that we only hear about parts of it through likes like those through Edward Snowden and Wikileaks.

There would be no need for a mutual treaty or agreement or whatever these talks will end up agreeing to if only one party had been playing these cybergames.

We’ll know if there’s more to it if an announcement is made by the Administration during Xi Jinping visit later this week.

Image credit: usembassythehague/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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