By Sameer Patil
Are the U.S. and China working to create norms in cyberspace?
On September 25, the United States and China agreed to contain their industrial or economic cyber espionage activities against each other. This is the first instance of two major cyber powers reaching common ground on norms of state behavior in cyberspace.
The agreement, reminiscent of the United States-Soviet Union arms control accords of the Cold War era, is important because industrial or economic cyber espionage has been a thorny issue in the U.S.-China relationship since the early 2000s.
Although traditional espionage—the collection of state secrets—is an accepted part of statecraft worldwide, the U.S. government has repeatedly tried to distinguish between such spying and economic cyber espionage. And it has repeatedly accused China of engaging in economic espionage through cyber attacks against American companies to steal intellectual property and commercially valuable data such as corporate strategies, product designs, business negotiations, and dual-use technology-related data.
The U.S. has often cited China’s alleged theft in the mid-2000s of data related to F-35, the stealth fighter aircraft, as a prime example of China’s economic and military cyber espionage. According to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), China repeatedly breached the computer networks of American government and private defense companies to steal data about design and radar modules for the F-35, and incorporated it into its own stealth fighter aircraft, the J20.
Attacks like these have cost the U.S. Department of Defense $100 million, mainly in costs for rebuilding networks. The repeated attacks have also potentially increased the cost of the $98 million-plus F-35—an escalation that affects the export potential of the fighter aircraft, since it is being jointly developed with the U.K., Israel, Italy, Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
Read the full story at The Diplomat