But an important distinction is made between state and private targets.
First, the People’s Liberation Army is linked to massive cyber-espionage attacks against American targets both public and private.
Then, Chinese President Xi Jinping shows up for some good ol’ fashioned diplomacy in Washington and reaches an agreement with President Obama that neither country would knowingly support cyber theft of business info.
"Confrontation and friction are not the right choice for both sides," he says.
Then someone asks the U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if he thinks the agreement will stem the tide of Chinese cyberattacks. He says, “no.”
Clapper said he was skeptical because Chinese cyber espionage aimed at extracting U.S. intellectual property was so pervasive, and there were questions about the extent to which it was orchestrated by the Chinese government.
It’s all very blurry, and there’s a lot of skepticism that China will actually live up to its end of the bargain. But, as one cybersecurity expert said, “This is the first time the Chinese have made a distinction between espionage for national security purposes and economic gain.”
That’s an important difference. In China, or at least in the Chinese media, American complaints about cyberhacking are met with cries of hypocrisy because as the Edward Snowden affair revealed, the United States does a fair amount of covert intelligence gathering online on its own. But the American government doesn’t hack foreign companies and pass the secrets uncovered along to the American competition.
China does that. The director of the National Security Agency during the Bush administration put it this way:
"The Chinese have penetrated every major corporation of any consequence in the United States and taken information. We've never, ever not found Chinese malware."
There’s a difference between governments hacking governments and governments hacking companies. U.S. cybersecurity chiefs are right to be skeptical, but at least the leader of the Chinese state acknowledged this important distinction.